Know the Limits of Organizational Priority

Organizational priority has its limits, however. In the 1970s, a jury found Ford Motor Company liable for hundreds of millions of dollars because it had decided not to make improvements on the Pinto automobile—improvements that allegedly could have saved hundreds of lives. Ford had allegedly performed a cost-benefit analysis and determined that the company would do better financially paying off the families of those who were killed than it would if it simply fixed the problem. The country was outraged at the decision to put profits above lives. In not less than twenty publicized cases since then, companies were found to have performed cost-benefit analyses where they put a value on human life and made a decision to allow an unsafe product to stay on the market. In each case, the careers of those who made these decisions ended—some with jail time.

You could argue that these executives were looking out for the greater financial good of their companies when they made these unfortunate decisions. There are, however, outer limits to the concept of greater good. The principal limits are the health and safety of others—the safety of your customers and the safety of your employees. Top executives never scrimp, cut corners, or compromise safety. Cost-benefit analyses go out the window when human health is weighing in on one side of the scale.

This rule applies at all levels of organizational decision making—from taking whatever steps are necessary to remedy a product defect, to ensuring that female employees who work late do not have to walk to a parking garage alone, to monitoring the air quality in the work spaces of employees who work in warehouses. The thumb goes down on the scale heavily in favor of safety-related costs and decisions.