Life in Balance: Amit D. Chaudhary’s Blog
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We all have morals and values (or standards, if you prefer) that tend to operate in certain band, fluctuating up and down a little, but overall staying in a certain range. Whether we are aware of it or not, we tend to apply or skip them when it comes to our work life (our employment or the startups we create.)

The reality:You can succeed with higher personal morals at work, whether it is working for your employer or your own startup. It happens in many fields including technology companies (Google: make money without doing evil) and Movies (Forest Gump made U$320M, My Big Fat Greek Wedding made U$240M neither of which are your typical violence prompting movies.)
If you stay with your morals, the satisfaction will be higher, you will sustain or increase your personal values. It might be tougher journey, the percentage of success might be lower. Finally your impact\contribution on\for others  will be much more and you would have lived an authentic life.

The choice is your to make, knowingly or it will just happen over time.

A few thoughts:

• Think about your need for success:

The more desperate you are, the more likely you are bound to comprise everything including the original idea, the values and so on.

• Decide your level of handling difficulties.

Yes, it is easier to sell the concept of a movie like “Die Hard” than “Good Will Hunting”, but it is possible. Be ready to handle more difficulties.

• Decide your personal resistance level

There are multiple ways to resist a direction. Since all of us have someone we are answerable to at work atleast upto a certain extent, decide your personal resistance level. It could be, you will refuse to follow a company with a conflict, you will follow(stay employed), but resist publicly and vigorously, you will resist in a subtle and diplomatic way with moderate intensity, you will not support it publicly but not oppose it either.

• Do not equate loyalty with blind support

Note, loyalty should not mean blind support. You can still care about a company, but criticize it from time to time. Scoble in his older role at Microsoft was an example of this.

• Your choice of employer or partners will have an impact on this.

If your partner in a startup or your employer do not share your values, lot of energy will be misdirected on convincing them instead of doing the right thing.

Your personal values:

If you want to evaluate or work on your personal values, I would recommend

• Levels of Consciousness by Steve Pavlina

• Gunas test: A self-evaluation method from ancient Indian texts & Ayurveda: This test is from the book Yoga and Ayurveda by David Frawley,

• Consider adding more of Yamas and Niyamas: The Yoga guidelines for conduct to your life.

Background:

It was surprising to me that what a person would never do himself, he or she is fine letting it happen (slowly) at their work. Hence this post.

I first realized this inherent conflicting behavior during the Mid-2006 US Govt request for user search data which MSN & Yahoo provided quietly, but Google did not. Speaking on this with a friend in MSN, his personal opinion was it is not a big deal because. 1. The data did not identify users. 2. Google was not doing it to protect it’s users and 3. It was for a good cause, avoiding child pornography. Nothing from official MSN channel had anything on the topic.

Personally, I believe the data was handed over to avoid expenses associated with lawyers, etc and to stay on the favored (often ironically called good books) of the US govt, age old “money and favor over values” decision.

The second time I ran into it was when was reading the post by Gred Linden, Ruthless enough for a startup? and his probable conclusion

It appears the ideal startup will give away something that used to cost money for free (preferably copyright material and porn), use other people’s content and resources, appeal to the baser human instincts (especially vanity and sex), and spam massive e-mail lists at launch.

Update:

Marc Andreessen puts Ethics in the top 3 Qualities to look for when hiring.

Also see, the Steve Pavlina article, Living your values: Part 1, Part 2.