Business Ethics
From the first time I wore a police uniform in France, my colleagues treated leadership as a matter of physical presence. You were a leader if you had good posture and a strong voice, as well as the ability to make quick decisions.
Over time, however, I learned that being a good leader is not about appearances or acting quickly, but rather, it is about clarity. In other words, what really matters is how clearly goals are explained to and understood by others. This means, among other things, understanding how well the cultural context in which this orientation will take place is understood and what measures will allow it to be realized and improved upon as time goes on.
This essay elaborates on these idea by looking at three case studies. First, The case of Microsoft's entrance in the mobile phone market exemplifies the consequences of a lack of open communication. Second, Uber's expansion into Germany shows the importance of understanding local laws and culture. Third, Toyota's production system demonstrates how explicit models enable better process inspection.
The argument is simple. Ethical leadership is not about presence and influence. In fact, it is about making reasons public. Let's explore why together.
Microsoft and Clear Communication
In the research literature, ethical leadership is not simply defined as "having a vision." Rather, it is the demonstration of normatively appropriate conduct and the promotion of such conduct through communication, reinforcement, and decision-making. For example, it involves transforming goals into commitments that can be verified by others, In other words, vision must be expressed as testable claims.
Microsoft's mobile pivot illustrates this well. The company entered the cell phone market late with the February 15, 2010 launch of Windows Phone 7 at the Mobile World Congress. On September 3, 2013, Microsoft announced an agreement to acquire Nokia's Devices & Services unit. Shares fell as much as 6% intraday on the news. In the end, support for Windows 10 Mobile ended on December 10, 2019.
Microsoft's attempt is an example of what the research warns: a vision is ethically inert until it is institutionalized as observable and auditable commitments, such as clear targets, constraints, and monitoring that outsiders can track. Without such testable claims, stakeholders cannot evaluate ability or integrity. As a result, coordination relies on personality, and trust erodes.
From an ethical standpoint, individuals who are asked to take on risk should be given reasons that they can understand without insider knowledge. When directives are not verifiable, organizations tend to rely on personalities and informal channels. In practice this means that when things go wrong, the nearest / weakest teams tend to take the blame because the conditions for success were never made public.
Clear direction, testable statement, binding constraints, and potential disconfirmations creates common knowledge and supports translation across jurisdictions. This does not replace vision, but rather gives it a form that engineers, customers, and critics can evaluate against the same world.
Uber and Institutional Translation
If a direction must be a testable claim, crossing borders requires an additional step to ensure that is possible. We must also express the claim in the other country's legal terms. In other words in its own language. By "language," I mean the locally recognized categories, such as who is considered the employer, what licenses are required, and which duties allocate risk.
Consider The case of Uber's bumpy enterence into Germany. According to the German Passenger Transport Act, taxis are different from private-hire vehicles (Mietwagen). Private-hire vehicles have to go back to their home base after each trip ("return-to-base" rule) while taxis do not.
When Uber first arrived in Germany, the courts treated its UberPop private driver service as unlicensed passenger transportation and banned it. Uber then began collaborating with licensed private-hire operators and, later, taxi partners. In essence, it was the same service. The only difference was now it was framed in terms that the German system could understand and authorize.
This is not a case of "innovation versus regulation." Rather, it is about whether actions can be expressed in terms that workers, regulators, and competitors already understand. If they cannot, the entire business is jeopardized and constitutes a threat to the local culture.
A practical rule is then to formulate claims in a way that allows a critical outsider in the host system to reconstruct them without insider knowledge. If the existing forms are unjust, publicly argue to change them. This kind of translation makes claims legible and more durable.
Toyota and the Ethics of Inspectability
Once the claims have been clarified and translated, the next step is to make them workable. Operational models accomplish this.
In Toyota's system, kanban, takt time, and standardized work provide concise, testable descriptions of flow, capacity, and method. They specify how the system should behave, what constitutes normal variation, and even when intervention is necessary.
Under the Toyota Production System pillar of automation with a human touch, abnormalities trigger a stop so that the causes can be found and corrected before defects spread. These artifacts are quantitative and visual, so they can be understood across languages with comparatively little loss.
The ethical point is then inspectability, which involves shifting judgment from people to shared objects. Without explicit models, interpretation relies on status and rhetoric. With models, however, a supervisor can identify a problem without assigning blame, a worker can document an exceeded capacity, and an external reviewer can reconstruct events without insider knowledge. This ties into Toyota's emphasis on visual management and built-in quality, which makes "normal vs. abnormal" visible to everyone.
This pattern is generalizable. In software operations, for instance, reliability becomes an auditable target. These targets are represented by service-level objectives and thresholds. Control charts are used in statistical process control to distinguish between common and special causes and define intervention rules.
In each case, models link public claims (e.g., safety, reliability, and sustainability) to everyday work and generate testable, revisable hypotheses — something slogans cannot do.
Conclusion
In practice, leadership is the work of making reasons accessible. The three cases above point to a simple method do this. First, transform your vision into public, testable claims (Microsoft). Second, translate those claims into the host system's legal and institutional terms so that outsiders can audit them (Uber). Third, translate the claims into operational models that distinguish normal from abnormal for non-insiders (Toyota).
I learned this the hard way. When I was in uniform, merely being present could quiet a room. This was not because I looked intimidating. In fact, the more I tried to be imposing, the worse things could get. My presence was powerful was because of the clear message it sent to everyone who saw my uniform. People cooperated with the police because there were clear rules, responsibilities, and consequences.
Although international management is different in content, it is the same in structure. If you are a leader, write your plan in a way that an outsider could understand. Include the intended outcome, the constraints, and what would count as disconfirmation. Translate these points into the local language of roles and duties. Link them to models, such as Kanban boards, service-level objectives, and control charts, so people can see when and why to intervene.
These are modest requirements — clarity, translation, and inspectability. They do not replace vision, but rather give it a form that engineers, customers, regulators, and critics can evaluate across borders and over time.