[Specific identifying details and names were removed at the request of the client.]

Thank you. Thank you everyone for the fantastic retrospective of my life. I can’t tell you how thrilling it is to watch this film about my life and career. I love all the photos and interviews you included.

Jennifer and Alexander, thank you.

Now as I prepare for retirement after 42-years as an accountant, and a lawyer, and a professor, I want to give you some parting thoughts on how to look upon this beautiful, and sometimes crazy, struggle we call global financial reform.

And yes, I did use the word beautiful on purpose, because at the end of the day we are dealing with people and that can be a beautiful thing.

We do forget that, getting lost in what I call the “moral technology” of what we do. These are the rules, the accounting standards, the protocols, the internal control systems, the reform proposals, the laws, the regulations and the enforcement procedures. And so on.

It’s as if we’re trying to turn ourselves into ethical engineers who design new circuits, or programmers trying to develop new software to block off all paths to corruption, fraud and wrong-doing. We’re trying to out-hack bad behavior. Outwit it.

It’s good that we do these things. We have to. But, perhaps our work goes beyond rooting out bad guys, and designing better mousetraps against malfeasance. Maybe, we need to include in our job descriptions like the role of “empowerment of the good.”

I’m talking, of course, about corporate ethical culture, the idea of creating an ethos for a business, a way of living that is built deep enough into the bones of employees that it discourages fraud, corruption and crime. Such a culture, if one can find concrete strategies to make it work, offer compelling benefits.

For example, just responding to crimes as they emerge dooms you to a whack-a-mole existence. You remember whack-a-mole, where a mechanical mole would raise its head out of a hole. Whack! And you try to hit it. Then another one emerges elsewhere. Whack. And then another one. And another one.

If you could develop such a culture, one in which at least some of the criminal temptations could be re-directed, or eliminated – you’d whack several moles before they became a problem. You’d win several major battles in the war against fraud.

But how would such a corporate culture work? What must it do to protect the ethical health of employees?

To help answer that, I am going to tell you about a strategy my father swore by when hiring people for his garage. He called it the Secret Empty Coffee Pot Surprise test.

I’m very proud of my father, and all that he taught me. He taught me how to ride that ’58 Harley Davidson you saw in the retrospective. He gave me that motorcycle too. I still ride it every chance I get. My father also taught me to respect something he called quiet character.

He himself was a man of deep integrity, but he was quiet about that as well. For example, he rarely told people about the fact that he fought with the Marines in the Pacific during World War II. He rarely mentioned that he was wounded twice out there. He said the most important, and the most interesting, moral decisions were the ones people made when they thought no one was watching.

So whenever he sought to hire someone for his garage in Tempe, Arizona, he’d leave the person alone for a bit in the garage’s little lunchroom, where there was a coffee machine. The machine was set with just enough coffee for a cup, no more.

The idea was to see what the person did after finishing the coffee in the pot.

Did the person start a fresh new pot?

OR.

Did the person ignore that the pot was empty? Why? Was it not on their radar, or was it because they didn’t care?

Did the person alert my Dad to the empty pot so he could handle it? And did they do so because they were lazy, or because they didn’t know how to operate the machine?

Was the person timid about setting a new pot because they didn’t know whether there were allowed or uncertain over any unknown garage rules governing the brewing of the coffee?

Dad was careful to learn as much as possible from how that person responded to the empty coffee pot. He believed it gave him clues on how the person handled a moral decision alone.

He swore by this test.

This story is a favorite of mine. I’ve told it to perhaps thousands of clients, colleagues and students over the years. I know several of you in the audience have heard it, probably more than once.

I tell it because it gives a great picture of one of the major problems faced by ethics professionals. Here is a person, alone, facing some kind of moral situation. It doesn’t have to be an empty coffee pot. It could be witnessing a fraud committed by a colleague, or an opportunity to commit fraud oneself. An unattended cash register. A copy of a secret formula that could be placed on a thumb-drive. A stock trade based on insider information.

So this person is alone. How do you stack the odds in favor of him or her making the right decision? Well, you give the employee enough solid guidance throughout the rest of the working experience that they develop a workplace conscience of sorts. A company Jiminy Cricket, like Pinocchio had. So in a sense, the employee isn’t truly alone when faced with these secret temptations. They’ll have this Pinocchio in their corner, so to speak.

There are a variety of ways to do this. Training which would include workshops, seminars and lectures. Company or team meetings. Frequent dialogues between supervisors and employees. Projects. Team traditions or games. Films or online content. You can even do your own version of the Secret Empty Coffee Pot Surprise Test. I wouldn’t mind.

The goal is to make ethics and responsibility a cornerstone of the employee’s workplace experience, part of the definition of a good job.

It’s more than just sitting the employee down and telling him or her that this is bad, and that is good. In fact, you want to try avoid doing that too much – it tends to inspire resentment, and rebellion. There is genius on both sides of the law. You don’t need to give the bad guys any more challenges.

Instead, you want to give your employees a sense of gravity; a sense of how things work, and fit and function. And you do that by example, and by involvement. You inundate the employee with examples of doing the right thing, and you get that employee involved in as many of these right actions and decisions as possible.

And you include everyone else in these acts, make responsibility a group activity, an esprit de corps.

Hopefully, responsibility becomes part of the natural order, just the way to get things done, the way of being part of the team. It becomes part of your company’s identity, and hopefully, part of your employee’s identity as well.

So, the next time your employee faces an empty coffee pot, you might have an internal Pinocchio for every situation.

For example, the employee knows to be aware of problems like empty coffee pots because he regularly sees his colleagues address such situations.

He will care about the coffee pot because of the sense of gravity ingrained in him, that proper sense of a job well done and a sense of his own identity as an employee.

He will know how to brew a pot of coffee because it was covered in his training.

And once the pot is brewed, he will bring it to his colleagues because it is part of the experience of being a team member. He will want to share it.

He won’t be alone during this thinking process, because he will have all that you taught him and shared with him. He’ll have his Pinocchio, the culture ingrained within him that he can rely upon.

Of course, this will not prevent every fraud. It will not whack every mole. Some people are determined to do bad things. And you will then have to rely on all the other enforcement weapons and moral technology in our arsenal.

But there are still plenty of people who will benefit from these efforts. Good people facing temptations who will have the help of the Pinocchio you made for them to make the right decision. Pass the coffee pot test.

I think it’s worth it.

Thank you everyone for a wonderful evening.

[At this point, they will start to play the goodbye music in the background. Confirm with Jennifer or Alexander whether you still want to do Tom Waits’ “I’m Still Here” and “Take Me Home.” There will probably be some Q & A and other goings for you on the stage. You’ll be doing improvisation for at least five more minutes. Remember to mention, in a funny way, the point that Jiminy Cricket is property of the Walt Disney Company.]