brought against top executives at Tyco International, ImClone
Systems, and Adelphia Communications. WorldCom, Global
Crossing, and other former stars of the New Economy tum-
bled into bankruptcy amidst allegations of fiscal improprieties.
A cry immediately went up for the wholesale reform of corpo-
rate boards, accounting practices, executive recruitment, and
employee retirement plans, a call for sweeping change in how
America does business unlike any since the Great Depression.
These scandals were especially troubling to all of us who
have been engaged for decades now in training future leaders.
Business schools responded quickly to the debacle by adding
cautionary case studies of Enron and ImClone to their curric-
ula and beefing up ethics courses. But, clearly, not everyone
learned the lessons on transparency, accountability, and fair
play contained in these case studies and reform-minded
courses. If they had, there would have been no subprime mort-
gage crisis of 2008, which shook world markets and left the
American public with a $700-billion tab.
And American business was not the only institution that
showed itself to be gravely flawed. The Roman Catholic
Church in the United States experienced an unprecedented
series of scandals involving the molestation of children and
young adults by priests. The revelation that some priests be-
trayed and abused children was shocking in its own right. But
almost as disturbing was the revelation that members of the
Catholic hierarchy had known of the abuse and covered it up,
often by reassigning dangerous priests to new parishes where
they molested anew. No major American institution seemed
unblemished, including the prestigious Ivy League. In 2002,
Princeton University staff hacked into admissions records at
On Becoming a Leader