On January 4 , Elizabeth Holmes, the founder and CEO of the blood testing company Theranos, was found guilty of defrauding her investors. Listen to Tyler Shultz—one of the principle whistleblowers—reflect on the trial and verdict, sharing a perspective that only he can.
About Our Guest
Tyler Shultz graduated from Stanford with a Biology degree and entered the national scene when he blew the whistle at Theranos. He was also a source for a series of Wall Street Journal articles exposing Theranos’ dubious blood-testing practices. Information Tyler provided was used in the recent trial finding Elizabeth Holmes guilty of defrauding investors.
Thicker than Water is Tyler’s Audible Original where he tells his story, first-hand. There’s no better way to get his unique perspective on all that happened.
Bad Blood, this book features Tyler Schultz and the Theranos scandal. Penned by John Carreyrou, the original author of the Wall Street Journal articles.
Pleasant Pictures Music
Join the Pleasant Pictures Music Club to get unlimited access to high-quality, royalty-free music for all of your projects. Use the discount code HOWTOHELP15 for 15% off your first year.
Sponsor
To get help developing ethical skills in your organization, visit meritleadership.com.
Less than 20 years ago, state governments were allowed to execute someone who was mentally disabled. It was only 16 years ago that states could legally execute someone who committed a crime as a child. And just 11 years ago, children as young as 13 or 14 could be sentenced to life in prison—or in other words, death in prison—even if their crime didn't involve killing someone. All of these sentences today are illegal under the Eighth Amendment to the US Constitution because they are considered cruel and unusual.
Cruel and Unusual. Consider how remarkable it is that these practices were so recently acceptable, most likely during your lifetime, and are now considered so beyond the pale that they violate the sacred Constitution of the United States. How does something like this happen?
Certainly, the moral character of executing a child hasn't changed, just by virtue of the US Supreme Court's order. These judgments were always cruel, if sadly not unusual. It is that our understanding of them has changed. In the case of executing children, a mountain of science has revealed that a person's brain isn't fully developed until well into legal adulthood. The Court relied on these insights to make its decision, acknowledging the deep injustice of imposing the ultimate penalty on someone without full mental capacity. For hundreds, this realization came too late.
In a recent episode of the podcast, Revisionist History, the host Malcom Gladwell used a phrase that stood out to me: "The path to conscience." He expressed it this way:
What my younger self did not understand is that there is no perfect and easy path to conscience. Sometimes it's circuitous and full of unfortunate detours. And maybe what we owe each other is faith and patience, because some of us will take longer than others to figure out where our conscience lies.
None of us—not one—is a perfect moral judge. Our research into the typical ethical dilemmas that people face revealed over and over again that good people make bad choices. It was evident in the hundreds of examples we reviewed that everyone is at different points on their path to conscience.
This isn't to say that there should be no consequences for bad choices. But when we impose consequences as a society, we have a responsibility to make our judgments just—and we face the constant risk of moral error in our zeal for justice. We, as a people, are on a path to conscience, too.
Whatever we do, we need more humility to recognize that our particular journey on the path to conscience is always, at best, incomplete with many miles to go. We have so much to learn about what is truly good. And such humility coaxes out of us more patience and grace for others as they walk their own paths. It's not that they, or we, deserve grace; it's that we all desperately need it.
The notorious billionaires behind the OxyContin crisis have been banned by a legal settlement from getting naming rights in exchange for their donations.
Impact Highlight
There are currently around 4,500 children being held in adult prisons in the US. Compared to those in juvenile detention, these underage prisoners are nine times as likely to commit suicide. In every case, states have the capacity to hold these child prisoners in better conditions, but their sentences demand they be treated as though they were adults.
Made famous by the book Just Mercyand its author, Bryan Stevenson, the Equal Justice Initiative works to reform the criminal justice system by challenging unjust, cruel, and inequitable treatment. Their work has led directly to legal changes in how children are treated by courts, including the sentencing reform I described above. A donation to EJIsupports their staff and creates more capacity for them to meet the overwhelming needs referred to them every day.
Promotional Stuff
Would you be willing to share a story about a time that someone helped you or a time that you helped someone else?
I'm testing a survey instrument as part of a study on helping experiences, and could use your help. If you have a few moments, complete our survey. Thank you!
Last week, a friend and neighbor told me about her experience trying to help a stranger at her door, a woman who showed all the symptoms of drug addiction. She was hard to understand, seemed unsure of what kind of help she wanted, and clearly needed more help than my friend was capable of giving. Another neighbor got involved, but in the end this woman just wandered off alone.
None of that prevented my friend from feeling like she’d somehow fallen short. It never feels good to be asked for help that we can’t really give. This is a common mismatch, between the help needed and the abilities of the helper. But asking is the predominant way for help to happen, in everything from daily needs to rescuing Holocaust victims.
Most of us give or help in a way that I describe as opportunistic. That doesn’t mean we help to benefit ourselves, but rather that we wait to help until we’re asked. It’s how most donations to charity happen, for example. The majority of people don’t give after doing research into the best organizations for their dollars. Instead, they give to the charities that ask, whether it’s at work, home, school, or church. It’s opportunistic giving.
This is obviously inefficient because the charities that are best at asking often have less or little impact. (This is true for many causes, like human trafficking, for example.) Ideally, we’d all do our research and pick the best causes. That’s a newsletter topic I’d be happy to cover if I hear from you that I should write it.
But waiting to be asked also means that your talentsgo wasted. It’s odd, when you think about it, that we so often wait to be asked for help. We don’t do that with our careers; we go search for the best fit to our skills. Yet for some reason we don’t make the most of our unique abilities to help.
How do you best share your skilled help? Here are some ideas:
If you know someone who sees a lot of requests for help, like a minister or a social worker, let them know how your talents can be put to use.
Volunteer for an organization that needs what you’re good at doing.
Look for a common need and develop new skills that can be useful.
It will always be true that there’s good help and bad help in the world. And we’ll always need asking to make sure that help is found. There will always be opportunistic giving. But cultivating better help takes deliberate effort on our part. We can’t wait around to be asked.
This article makes the best case that I think can be made for billionaires spending their wealth on space flight. I’m still not persuaded that the opportunity cost is worth it.
In the spirit of today’s article about deliberate instead of opportunistic giving, here’s a really cool exercise for making the most of your gifts and interests. I look forward to giving this a try.
“Participants in the anger condition tended to be more confident in the accuracy of their memories. But among those participants, increased confidence was associated with decreased accuracy.”
Impact Highlight
Human trafficking in North America happens frequently in places like truck stops, restaurants, motels, rest stops, and other places where most visitors are there just temporarily. Hotlines see tens of thousands of cases each year, but many more cases go unreported.
One group uniquely positioned to spot and report trafficking are truck drivers. Truckers Against Trafficking trains truckers on how to spot, report, and prevent trafficking using best practices. Their efforts increased the number of hotline calls by truckers from 3 to almost 3,000. Over 1 million truckers, bus drivers, and other transportation workers have now been trained.
Promotional Stuff
If you want to improve yourself and could choose only one trait to begin, you should start with humility. It's called the "mother of all virtues" because it opens the door to all kinds of personal development. But humility is also sorely misunderstood. It isn't just an internal attitude about ourselves, but an outward set of behaviors that people can observe. It's also essential to effective leadership.
This is the last episode of the How to Help Podcast—Season 1, and it’s excellent (if I may say so myself). My good friend, Prof. Brad Owens, is an expert in humility. He's done award-winning research on humility in leaders and has shown that leadership humility is key to getting better engagement, more creativity, and higher functioning teams. Prof. Owens talks about the specific ingredients of humility that you can practice and encourage in others.
If you want to improve yourself and could choose only one trait to begin, you should start with humility. It’s called the “mother of all virtues” because it opens the door to all kinds of personal development. But humility is also sorely misunderstood. It isn’t just an internal attitude about ourselves, but an outward set of behaviors that people can observe. It’s also essential to effective leadership.
This episode, we’ll be taught by humility expert, Prof. Brad Owens. He’s done award-winning research on humility in leaders and has shown that leadership humility is key to getting better engagement, more creativity, and higher functioning teams. Prof. Owens will teach us about the specific ingredients of humility that you can practice and encourage in others.
About Our Guest
Brad Owens (PhD, University of Washington) is a Professor of Business Ethics in the Marriott School of Management at Brigham Young University. His research has been published in the Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Applied Psychology, Organization Science, Personnel Psychology, Leadership Quarterly, Journal of Management, Journal of Business Ethics, and Public Administration Review. Under the general umbrella of Positive Organizational Scholarship, his research focuses on the impact of leader humility on individuals and teams, ethical leadership, and relational energy. Brad’s teaching interests include business ethics, organizational behavior, and leadership.
“Motivation to Lead: A Meta-Analysis and Distal-Proximal Model of Motivation and Leadership.”, Journal of Applied Psychology, Volume 105, Pages 331-354, 2020
Kant and the Ethics of Humility Jeanine Greenberg argues that we can indeed speak of Aristotelian-style, but still deeply Kantian, virtuous character traits. She proposes moving from focus on action to focus on a person, not leaving the former behind but instead taking it up within a larger, more satisfying Kantian moral theory.
Self-Renewal: The Individual and the Innovative Society is a book based on why learning is important to creativity and leading.
Humility: An Unlikely Biography of America’s Greatest Virtue
In the Heart of the World Mother Teresa shares principles of selflessness, forgiveness, compassion, and spiritual Strength.
About Merit Leadership
To learn more about how you can develop ethical skills that turn peril into opportunity, visit http://meritleadership.com
Pleasant Pictures Music
Join the Pleasant Pictures Music Club to get unlimited access to high-quality, royalty-free music for all of your projects. Use the discount code HOWTOHELP15 for 15% off your first year.
