Unlearning What Lance Armstrong Taught Us

This is a good article, PRE-Confession. It shows how some people are blinded by hero worship, especially in the comments section. Let it be good medicine for those who follow the same path,

Dear Mr. Srinvasan and Anirudh, Thanks for your posts. I am not judging Lance Armstrong at all. I am merely calling to attention our tendancy to not critically question too good to be true kind of achievements by anyone - Corporates, Business leaders, Politicians, Sports person etc. If you see my posts I have qualified my article by stating that it is neither useful to hero worship or villianise Lance. What is of value to us is what will I do if I find myself in a similar position. Will I choose to be part of a murky set up like TdF and dope to win, since that is possibly the only way to win or will I elect to choose some other cleaner option to pursue my quest for excellence. We are unduly harsh on politicians. There may be more from this tribe who are brazenly corrupt and even venal, but there are equally greedy people who preside over some of our other social and Business institutions. The God cannot be wrong or even if he is wrong he has a reason for the same which is beyond human comprehension, kind of blindness is what foces us to condone the unfair, unjust or corrupt acts of god like personalities. These are the 2 central themes of my article. Ofcourse I am also questioning the winning obsession which makes otherwise perfectly honourable people to get sucked into questionable means. Any amount of charity or social do good stuff will not wash brazen acts of cheating. Very often these are acts of atonements or smoke screens which cheaters create. In conclusion this is not about Lance, it is about our choices and decisions when on the knife edge.

He might be wrong. Still too harsh article. I guess if we all write like this on every politician everywhere and every time we can see the difference.

Thanks for handling this very important topic and drawing key lessons for all of us who are not in sports but facing very similar pressures in our day-to-day career choices. Lance Armstrong is just the latest example of a very crowded Rogues' Gallery of people who were once celebrated as high performers and life models for all of us only to be exposed as cheats later. The financial world is full of such casualties -- from Nick Leeson to Rajat Gupta. On the one hand, you will always have people with less than perfect ethics, but on the other, you have good people gone bad. What pushes those normal people to adopt fraudulent methods to be on top? That's the issue we must all grapple with. Dan Ariely has made another valid point in his various research reports: That destruction happens not because of one big fraud cheating big time, but because of several small cheats -- read the non-criminal common people like us -- cheating one small measure at a time. It could be as 'innocent' as rounding off an expense claim on the higher side or overselling a product by promising the client what it can't deliver. But cheating it is indeed. So, there is this tendency among people to focus on big crimes like Lance Armstrong's and say 'oh, this is the end of Kaliyuga. How bad some people are' and go back to their little-cheating ways. Because their own frauds are small -- and below the danger line that sends out ethical alerts in their own minds -- they have made peace with such immoral action. Now, why people cheat in corporate careers? There may be several factors, but I think I know one of them: the pressure from managements to 'perform or perish.' What many of us proudly think of 'high-performance culture' in corporates is nothing but a cynical assembly line of overworked, exhausted and over-prodded individuals. Our companies are mental sweat shops, if you know what I mean. They push you intellectually as hard as bonded labourers are pushed physically. 12-hour workdays, unreasonable year-end targets, pitting colleagues as competitors through a zero-sum performance appraisal system and glorifying an out-of-proportion attention to office work (at the cost of family life) with employee-of-the-month awards and such. All this adds up to a single message for the young and ambitious. That you run on this very fast treadmill to stay still or you will be thrown behind in the career race. The premium is not on finesse, not on doing an honest day's job, but going beyond what was achieved last year ignoring everything else. In my mind, women are affected more by this than even men. Because of the skewed way in which our society is organised, while men can get away being high performers in one place (work), there is more pressure on women to be high performers in two places: work and family. An increasing number of women are not able to handle both pressures (and men are not helping) and they are making an either-or choice. Many women are deciding not to get married to pursue a career. Other women become stay-at-home moms, giving up the chance to realize their potential. The fact that the society is forcing them to make such a choice (despite the beauty pageant ads that say women can have it all) is another facet of this performance-driven corporate culture that has led people to cheat their way to the top. It is this corporate culture that pervades our society everywhere including in sports.

Lance Armstrong\'s indictment was a personal setback as I thought of him as the ultimate example of what human beings can achieve. Actually it was Armstrong who got me interested in cycling and watching Tour de France. To me this has been very similar to what we are seeing with Indian politicians or some senior corporate professionals; i.e. 1. Fear of never getting caught 2. Feeling that even if caught - nothing will happen as I am a \"performer\" and system will protect me I believe that each individual has an inherent sense of right and wrong but the mindset built around the above mentioned beliefs makes the person indulge in unethical practices. And somewhere the failure of the system to punish the guilty or make a God out of ordinary mortals perhaps makes one believe that I can get away with anything. In the Armstrong context, I would think the doctors, book publishers, sponsors, media ... have contributed to reinforcing the belief in him as being infallible.

Dear friends, The issue here is not whetheter Lance Armstrong is a good man or not. He had chosen to live his life in a particular manner and has paid the price for it. He is neither a hero nor a villain. His bad will not erase his good even if it was atonement. Don't we rever Rama as a god despite his killing of Vaali in a dubious manner? The story of Lance is one to read and learn. To introspect on the choices we make. The choices business leaders make and rationalise what is ethical and what is not? It is about all of asking am I also a Hincape or Leipiemer who willingly agreed to dope and now indict Lance but glowed in his presence. Do many of us or some of of the CEOs take winning to extreme extent and are blind to the dubious means it forces them to adopt to keep winning and staying on the dover page? Why did the admin of TdF who I am sure knew what was happening with Lance and other teams and yet plays ignorant and innocent. This what global regulators did between 2000 and 2008 in the financial services industry. So the prudent and useful approach will be to focus on us and those with whom we work and examine whether we are already in the Lance trap or whether we are unwittingly getting into it. Did Lance peddle hard and pushed himself on the Alps and Pyrenees doping not withstanding and spill his guts out every TdF? Obviously yes. Is it possible his fellow competitors were also dope assisted? May be yes. But if we find ourselves in a similar situation what will we do is the question to reflect? No need to rush with a yes or a no or do moral grandstanding. We all have a part of Lance - the good and the bad - in us. It will help us if we get in touch with it. A strong dose of Skepticism is the only antidote against hero worship or villain bashing.

Lance Armstrong has raised 470 million dollars for cancer research. Who cares that he may have cheated in a bicycle race?