It's painless

Is doing the honorable thing always the right thing to do? What does it mean to have honor anyway? Was Cheung Shu-hung honorable when he hanged himself in his Chinese toy factory because his company lost a lot of money after Mattel did a major recall? Would he have been more honorable had he done it because of guilt over endangering the lives of thousands of U.S. children — or perhaps because he may have been betrayed by a friend who slipped in the lead paint? Not every culture accepts suicide as an honorable response to failure. Here in the U.S., for example, we just sign into rehab for a few weeks, make some public apologies and get back on the pulpit, in the chairman's chair or on the stage and go our merry way.

A Shanghai manufacturing consultant was reported to have said the suicide was a good sign for China. They do it in Japan; they do it in Korea. This consultant said it showed progress — that Chinese executives were taking pride in their work. Tough market.

In the world of American business, we don't generally see executives committing suicide because their businesses failed. The 1929 stock market crash was an exception, as some people — although not as many as folklore has it and not by jumping out of windows — chose that route, but those people weren't doing so honorably (and we have not yet established that there is such a thing); they were doing so because they thought life without riches was not worth living — and that's not honorable.

No, today's failed execs don't take their own lives. They may take other people's livelihoods, but they hold the sanctity of life too dear. Typically, they just get their cronies on the board of some other company to give them a new slot. Failure in America is acceptable and forgettable as long as you dust yourself off and try again. That's pretty honorable, too. But there is a difference between honest failure and corruption, greed and thievery. We may never know which of those three Cheung Shu-hung was most ashamed of, but we know in his mind he was making amends.

I wonder, as I think about ex-WorldCom CEO Bernie Ebbers' slumped shoulders and dangling head during his perp walk and about ex-Qwest CEO Joe Nacchio's crocodile tears as the judge read him his six-year sentence, if they feel they are making amends. Judge Edward Nottingham accused Nacchio of being guilty of “overarching greed.” I wonder how Cheung Shu-hung would have responded to that.

It's no wonder that even as the economy goes global, you don't see many executives from the U.S. vying for the top spot in Asian corporations.