A Lack of Good Will at Goodwill

Redefining words to suit a business’s financial interest is misleading, even if the herd animals who serve as customers look the other way, or, even worse, do not notice the fact that the words have been redefined! At a Goodwill store in Phoenix, Arizona,  I bought a black suit for singing in a choir. Before I paid, I asked a manager whether I could return the suit as long as I do so within a week. “Yes, you can get a refund,” he replied. Three days later, I returned to the store to return the suit. I approached an available cashier, but she told me that I had to go to the other cashier if I had a return. That cashier was not even at his register, and even when he returned I had to wait at least five minutes for one customer. Only the head cashier can process refunds, whereas any cashier can accept money—an interesting, meaning convenient, asymmetry. Money comes in easier than it goes out.

When the head cashier processed my refund, he handed me an in-store credit card. I asked the assistant store manager why a return was instead being treated as an exchange. “In the Goodwill network,” he replied, “returns are exchanges.” I was stunned. “But the two are not the same thing; returns result in refunds, which are not store credits,” I retorted. “Not at Goodwill,” the manager said in a definitive tone.

Having essentially redefined a return for a refund contrary to the word’s meaning and common usage, the ploy can be said to be misleading. Given customers’ legitimate assumption that a return results in a refund, which is not a store credit, the redefinition effectively involves false pretenses. No good will comes with such a nefarious, deliberate misuse of language. Indeed, the very name of the organization, Goodwill, connotes a lie if the good will under the roofs is lacking. 

See "It's Only Fair."

Steve Jobs: A Unique Societal and Organizational Visionary

Typically as a company transitions from an enterprising, creative new venture to a large organization to be managed, a staid CEO replaces a visionary founder. In the case of Steve Jobs at Apple, the very nature of the man’s vision was not only inherently at odds with the status-quo underpinning of a large organization with a budget, but also essential to the company’s business model. Hence, the company, including its shareholders, paid a price for years for jettisoning Jobs. The film, Jobs (2013), is centered on the distinctiveness of Jobs’ vision. Although the film also hints at why this distinctiveness is such that the company would (and did) lose as a large organization after making the typical founder-to-CEO transition.

The full essay is at "Jobs."

Facebook: A Distrustful Company Projecting Distrust

Cambridge Analytica, political data firm founded by Stephen Bannon and Robert Mercer, and with ties to U.S. President Trump’s 2016 campaign, “was able to harvest private information from more than 50 million Facebook profiles without the social network’s alerting users.”[1] The firm had purchased the data from a developer (a psychology professor at Cambridge University in the E.U.) who had developed a personality test that Facebook users could take, and whose purpose was supposedly academic. The developer violated Facebook’s policy on how user data could be used by third parties. The data firm “used the Facebook data to develop methods that [the firm] claimed could identify the personalities of individual American voters and influence their behavior.”[2] In other words, Cambridge Analytica used the purchased data to manipulate users to vote for Donald Trump for U.S. president in 2016 by sending pro-Trump messages. Although Facebook had not known of the sale of the data to Cambridge Analytica at the time, the social network, upon learning Cambridge Analytica’s political use of the data in 2015, failed to notify its users whose data had been compromised. Although 270,000 Facebook users took the developer’s personality test, “the data of some 50 million  users . . . was harvested without their explicit consent via their friend networks.”[3] It bears noting here that those of the 50 million users who had not taken the personality test should definitely have been informed. At the very least, Facebook’s management could not be trusted to not only  keep users informed, but also protect users in the first place by adequately enforcing the third-party-use policy. So it is ironic that Facebook’s untrustworthy management could be unduly distrustful of ordinary users.

The psychological-political mixture in Cambridge Analytica’s use of the data is downright creepy. Tapping into a psychology professor’s methodology for inferring personality from data on a social network platform so to be able to send politically manipulative advertising to certain Facebook users  is highly invasive, even for the users who voluntarily took the professor’s personality test online. Regardless of party affiliation, a reaction of disapprobation to such an over-reach could be expected; hence the operation was stealth—which is why Facebook’s management erred so in failing to inform the 50 million users. Facebook’s stock deserved to fall when the story finally did break in March, 2018.

It is odd that Facebook’s management even permitted the developer, the psychology professor who went on to sell the data to Cambridge Analytica, to obtain the data in the first place to develop personality constructs for academic purposes. It is also odd that Facebook’s management had been so naïve concerning a political data firm, and yet so demanding of individual users who displayed no cause for suspicion. Facebook suspended an account I set up because I had sent a link to one of my academic articles to some scholars I knew. I deleted the account. A few years later, I tried again. That time, Facebook demanded that I upload a clear facial picture of myself so I could be identified. Apparently my phone number and email address were not sufficient, even though I had not yet even used the account and thus could not have violated any of the company’s use-policies. I deleted that account rather than supply a picture of myself because I was concerned how the facial recognition software would be used, especially when combined with other basic information I had included in the profile. It turns out I had reason to be concerned, for even if my personality had not been construed and I had not been subject to political manipulation psychologically, the fact that Facebook let a political firm in the door means that other harvesting could have been going on. Furthermore, even if Facebook discovered other extractions, I could not trust that the company would have informed me.

It is telling, in short, that a company so distrustful demanded that I upload a picture of my face so I could be identified—as if I were distrustful. I suspect that the managers and their employees were projecting their own distrustfulness onto innocent users, while giving firms like Cambridge Analytica a free hand. In other words, the folks at Facebook were very bad at determining who is trustworthy. The lesson here is that Facebook was not worthy of its users’ trust, and yet strangely the users did not bolt en mass. It could be that people in modern society had become so used to being distrusted by people working in organizations and to interacting with distrustful companies that the Facebook revelation was a mere blimp on the radar screen.

The philosopher Kant reasoned that promise-making is only valid in a context in which promises tend to be kept; otherwise, promises would simply be dismissed as worthless dribble. If large companies only keep their promises when doing so is convenient to them, such a context could recalibrate just how much worth promise-making justifiably deserves. If so, the business world itself could contribute to a society in which distrust rather than trust is the norm. When I lived in Tucson, Arizona, I experienced such a society. I could feel not only the angst in the air, but also the passive aggression in the distrust itself. Besides the police-state being “beyond the pale” even on the local university’s campus, the guarded watchfulness that was (and surely is still) practiced between strangers on the city streets (as well as between bus drivers and riders) included an inherent aggressiveness. Likewise, Facebook’s refusal to notify users of the “harvesting” and Facebook’s demand that I furnish a photo of my face involved passive aggression—which is inherent in unjustified disrespect. Are companies like Facebook unwittingly turning modern society into Tucsons? If so, the link between distrust and aggression should be made transparent so people can at least be aware of the change.

For a business ethics critique of Facebook, see Taking the Face off Facebook

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1. Matthew Rosenberg and Sheera Frenkel, “Facebook Role In Data Misuse Sets Off Storm,” The New York Times, March 19, 2018.

2. Ibid.

3. “Cambridge Analytica: Facebook ‘being investigated by FTC,’” BBC News ( accessed March 20, 2018).

Mass Shootings in the U.S.: Why Are Americans So Angry?

Even though the United States account for less than 5% of the world’s population, 31% of the total number of mass killings worldwide between 1966 and 2012 occurred there.[1] I contend that a rise in passive aggression and the related intolerance accounts for much of the difference. In other words, it could be that Americans generally are getting nastier and more angry at each other.

Although not a mass-shooting, Vester Flanagan shot two former co-workers in August 2015. While it is easy to relegate the story by simply concluding that the guy was nuts, a closer examination reveals the situation to be more complicated. The nuances may help us understand what lies behind the mass-killing violence that goes beyond the killers themselves and is disproportionately an American phenomenon. In analyzing the Flanagan case, I want to stress that even if his coworkers had been at fault, the double-murder was completely unjustified. My analysis is oriented to uncovering a hidden trend in American society rather than answering whether the shooting is justified.

In a lawsuit against another network in 2000, Flanagan had claimed that a producer had called him a "monkey" and that he had been "made aware that other black employees ... had been called monkeys by officials affiliated with defendant." He also claimed that a Caucasian "official" had told him that "it busted her butt that blacks did not take advantage of the free money," referring to scholarship funds. Additionally, he insisted that a supervisor at the station had said that "blacks are lazy,” and that that another employee had told a black tape-operator to "stop talking ebonics." WTWC-TV acknowledged that an employee "may have made similar comments to another employee," but denied that such comments are "indicative of unlawful employment practices." The case ended in a non-disclosed settlement.[2] The admission of race-oriented comments to another employee lends some credibility to Flanagan’s assertions.

Even so, Flanagan may have made his own contribution to the workplace tension. The news station denied that his termination was the result of discrimination. It instead cited "poor performance," budgetary reasons and "misbehavior with regards to co-workers."[3] The latter in particular resonates with what he wrote regarding the cameraman (Adam) and reporter (Alison) from his next station. After announcing that he filmed the shooting, he wrote, “Adam went to hr on me after working with me one time!!!”[4] Either Adam had overreacted or Flanagan’s treatment of co-workers was incredibly bad. Flanagan also wrote, “Alison made racist comments” to him, and that he had filed an EEOC report.[5] It could be a case of “white privilege,” or simply that Alison was racist (or that she took sides with Adam).

In any case, the shooting stemmed from anger in the workplace—people not getting along and not having the social skills to work things out rather than make things worse. Adam’s quick trip to the station’s human resources department may indicate a lack of tolerance, as well as a tendency to escalate matters rather than patiently work them out. If Alison made demeaning racial statements to Flanagan, then perhaps her attitude may have been condescending and thus inherently conflictual. Of course, both Adam and Alison may have simply been reacting to extraordinarily bad treatment from Flanagan—his report to the EEOC being an effort to go on the offensive rather than admit that he had treated his coworkers very badly.

I suspect that at least part of the problem is societal—Americans may be been becoming more passive aggressive, and this anger in turn might be kicking the outright aggression up a notch in some people. The lack of tolerance for disagreements shows up in the ideological fragmentation of the American news networks, for example, with Fox News and MSNBC employees on the air brazenly displaying utter disdain for progressives and conservatives, respectively. Dismissiveness toward others, or in other words being “too cool to talk,” stemming from an abject lack of respect for others, may have been increasing at least in the Millennial Generation. As the sordid attitude becomes more socially acceptable as a social more in America, then increasing anger and ensuing aggression can be expected. “Road rage” is a case in point: an extreme hostility toward other people ruffling feathers. Why are so many Americans angry? This may be part of the reason why the U.S. has a disproportionate number of mass killings, and I suspect that the same holds for workplace (and former workplace) violence.

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[1] Stan Ziv, “Study: Mass Shootings ‘Exceptionally American Problem’,” Newsweek, August 23, 2015.

[2] Dana Liebelson and Jessica Schulberg, “Shooting Suspect Sued Another Newsroom for Racism, Claimed He Was Called a Monkey,” The Huffington Post, August 26, 2015.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.