Life at the Sharp End

As is argued elsewhere in this collection, among the many consequences of the recent financial crisis is a growing mistrust of corporate leaders and the public regulatory agencies charged with watching them. In many discussions, the crisis has been linked to a general failure of leadership and, more specifically, to the absence of appropriate ethics. Indeed Zakaria (2009) labels the near collapse of the financial system a ‘moral crisis’. A perceived failure of self-regulation is central to the call for more ethics and greater formal accountability. But not everything can be written down, and not everything that is legally permissible is ethical. Instead, in this chapter we suggest that it may be more productive to look below the surface of dramatic and seemingly unethical action to ask why leaders make the decisions they make. This chapter argues that there are particular tensions when the rhetoric of policy meets the reality of organisational leadership. These contextual tensions are inherent in most activity, but are most evident at the operational end of leadership, the ‘sharp end’ where policies are implemented, values enacted, and practices evidenced. The sharp end leaves little room for intellectual introspection or the detailed post-hoc analysis favoured by the critics.