Clerk Fired For Saving Lost Dog. Compassion in business, compassion in marriage.
On Thursday, January 5, 1989, there was an article in the San Francisco Chronicle, "Checker Fired For Saving Lost Dog." I still remember the public outcry. The clerk felt a moral duty to the dog that was higher than the ten or so minutes of her employer's time she took to save the dog. Her manager fired her for her act of mercy. The manager felt he had a moral problem with the clerk not performing her job as he interpreted it.
Morality and social responsibility are unavoidably a matter of degree and interpretation. In this case, the forces outside the grocery store, the owners as well as the author of the article, and the resulting public uproar, interpreted the manager's actions to be socially unacceptable.
In Business and Society, Joseph McGuire argues that an organization must "act justly" as a proper citizen should. Certainly, it was astonishing to me that the manager fired the clerk for the 5 - 10 minutes. But then, I have been too often astonished at and hurt myself by lack of kindness - the cruel and coarse level gone to in many situations that did not even remotely justify it - if anything ever does. The owners wisely decided against their manager; apologized, tossing in a $500 donation to the Humane Society for good measure.
Peter Drucker alluded that a useful way to distinguish behaviors in organizations is first to see what an organization does to society, and second what an organization does for society. In this newspaper article, the grocery store is providing needed groceries, employment and paying and collecting taxes, which is good for society, yet found out it was in error to society when its manager's bottom line overruled human compassion.
Oliver Sheldon, in his writing, A Professional Creed for Management, wrote that business is determined by an interplay of internal and external forces, both of which represent a potential change to a business. With internal forces being labor and science; and external forces being state actions, public attitudes, education, financing, and foreign/domestic competition and trade conditions. Sheldon felt this relationship resulted in a triangle of interactions between management, the political environment and the social world. The grocery store manager in this article felt he was responsible for the direction of his organization's mission. That probably went something along the lines of providing the groceries to his area and making a profit for his owners too.
This manager missed that his store provided more than groceries. The author, public and owners recognized Sheldon's concept of management should work to give practical life to those ideals of social justice that would generally be accepted by the most unbiased portion of communal opinion.
Sheldon also believed management is the one stable element in the process of organizational evolution and should provide an assurance of stability. The manager in the article felt this same way when he exercised classical management approaches in his attempts to keep order in his workplace. Sheldon felt it was a managerial function to link itself with the well being of society, to look beyond the bottom line, as management serves at the discretion of society. The manager in this article seemed to disagree with this point of Sheldon's, rather; the manager felt it was more important to look after what he thought was his bottom line. Turns out, he did not really understand what his bottom line was.
I believe that living has a moral choice involving forgiveness. From the article, I never knew beyond that manager's action what his moral compass really was, only his lack of leniency. I feel the purpose of my life is to matter, to count for something good, to stand up knowing I made a positive difference that I lived at all. I strive to leave more than I take, to love more than I am loved and to always give the benefit of the doubt. I am constantly testing the well of my tolerance. Every time it goes ever deeper.
In some way, usually small and secret, I believe each of us is alone and cries out to be understood. As did that manager, that checker, our spouse, our neighbors, etc. Yet, we can never entirely understand another. Each of us remains part stranger, even to those who love us. Therefore, we learn to accept the stranger.
There is no such thing as a perfect stranger though. Gentleness is expected from the strong. It is from the weak come cruelties. One is not really brave if one is not experiencing fear and overcoming it. Courage is the capacity to confront the imagined.
I've decided the best way to really look at people, no matter how old or impressive they are, as if they were children. This is because I believe most people don't grow up, they just grow taller. That helps me to understand and forgive their cruelty.