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Case 3-1: The Parable of the Sadhu
Bowen H. McCoy
Reprinted with permission from “The Parable of the Sadhu,” by Bowen H. McCoy, Harvard
Business Review. Copyright © Harvard Business Publishing.
Last year, as the first participant in the new six-month sabbatical program that Morgan Stanley
has adopted, I enjoyed a rare opportunity to collect my thoughts as well as do some traveling. I
spent the first three months in Nepal, walking 600 miles through 200 villages in the Himalayas
and climbing some 120,000 vertical feet. My sole Western companion on the trip was an
anthropologist who shed light on the cultural patterns of the villages that we passed through.
The Sadhu
The Nepal experience was more rugged than I had anticipated. Most commercial treks last two or
three weeks and cover a quarter of the distance we traveled.
My friend Stephen, the anthropologist, and I were halfway through the 60-day Himalayan part of
the trip when we reached the high point, an 18,000-foot pass over a crest that we’d have to
traverse to reach the village of Muklinath, an ancient holy place for pilgrims.
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Sherpas, and then the Swiss. The Japanese lingered in their camp. The sky was clear, and we
were confident that no spring storm would erupt that day to close the pass.
At 15,500 feet, it looked to me as if Stephen was shuffling and staggering a bit, which are
symptoms of altitude sickness. (The initial stage of altitude sickness brings a headache and
nausea. As the condition worsens, a climber may encounter difficult breathing, disorientation,
aphasia, and paralysis.) I felt strong—my adrenaline was flowing—but I was very concerned
about my ultimate ability to get across. A couple of our porters were also suffering from the
height, and Pasang, our Sherpa sirdar (leader), was worried.
Stephen and the four Swiss began stripping off their outer clothing and opening their packs. The
sadhu was soon clothed from head to foot. He was not able to walk, but he was very much alive.
I looked down the mountain and spotted the Japanese climbers, marching up with a horse.
Without a great deal of thought, I told Stephen and Pasang that I was concerned about
withstanding the heights to come and wanted to get over the pass. I took off after several of our
porters who had gone ahead.
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“No,” replied Stephen, “but he surely will be!”
After I had gone, followed not long after by the Swiss, Stephen had remained with the sadhu.
When the Japanese had arrived, Stephen had asked to use their horse to transport the sadhu down
to the hut. They had refused. He had then asked Pasang to have a group of our porters carry the
sadhu. Pasang had resisted the idea, saying that the porters would have to exert all their energy to
get themselves over the pass. He believed they could not carry a man down 1,000 feet to the hut,
reclimb the slope, and get across safely before the snow melted. Pasang had pressed Stephen not
to delay any longer.
I defended the larger group, saying, “Look, we all cared. We all gave aid and comfort. Everyone
did his bit. The New Zealander carried him down below the snow line. I took his pulse and
suggested we treat him for hypothermia. You and the Swiss gave him clothing and got him
warmed up. The Japanese gave him food and water. The Sherpas carried him down to the sun
and pointed out the easy trail toward the hut. He was well enough to throw rocks at a dog. What
more could we do?”
“You have just described the typical affluent Westerner’s response to a problem. Throwing
money—in this case, food and sweaters—at it, but not solving the fundamentals!” Stephen
retorted.
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“Where, in your opinion,” I asked, “is the limit of our responsibility in a situation like this? We
had our own well-being to worry about. Our Sherpa guides were unwilling to jeopardize us or
the porters for the sadhu. No one else on the mountain was willing to commit himself beyond
certain self-imposed limits.”
The Individual versus the Group Ethic
Despite my arguments, I felt and continue to feel guilt about the sadhu. I had literally walked
through a classic moral dilemma without fully thinking through the consequences. My excuses
for my actions include a high adrenaline flow, a superordinate goal, and a once-in-a-lifetime
opportunity—common factors in corporate situations, especially stressful ones.
Real moral dilemmas are ambiguous, and many of us hike right through them, unaware that they
exist. When, usually after the fact, someone makes an issue of one, we tend to resent his or her
bringing it up. Often, when the full import of what we have done (or not done) hits us, we dig
into a defensive position from which it is very difficult to emerge. In rare circumstances, we may
contemplate what we have done from inside a prison.
Had we mountaineers been free of stress caused by the effort and the high altitude, we might
have treated the sadhu differently. Yet isn’t stress the real test of personal and corporate values?
The instant decisions that executives make under pressure reveal the most about personal and
corporate character.
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not resign and submit our résumés to a headhunter. In contrast to philosophy, business involves
action and implementation—getting things done. Managers must come up with answers based on
what they see and what they allow to influence their decision-making processes. On the
mountain, none of us but Stephen realized the true dimensions of the situation we were facing.
One of our problems was that as a group, we had no process for developing a consensus. We had
no sense of purpose or plan. The difficulties of dealing with the sadhu were so complex that no
one person could handle them. Because the group did not have a set of preconditions that could
Because corporations and their members are interdependent, for the corporation to be strong, the
members need to share a preconceived notion of correct behavior, a “business ethic,” and think
of it as a positive force, not a constraint.
As an investment banker, I am continually warned by well-meaning lawyers, clients, and
associates to be wary of conflicts of interest. Yet if I were to run away from every difficult
situation, I wouldn’t be an effective investment banker. I have to feel my way through conflicts.
An effective manager can’t run from risk either; he or she has to confront risk. To feel “safe” in
doing that, managers need the guidelines of an agreed-upon process and set of values within the
organization.
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organizations, including the church. They perceived all large organizations as impersonal and
opposed to individual values and needs. Yet we all know of organizations in which people’s
values and beliefs are respected and their expressions encouraged. What makes the difference?
Can we identify the difference and, as a result, manage more effectively?
The word ethics turns off many and confuses more. Yet the notions of shared values and an
agreed-upon process for dealing with adversity and change—what many people mean when they
talk about corporate culture—seem to be at the heart of the ethical issue. People who are in touch
with their own core beliefs and the beliefs of others and who are sustained by them can be more
comfortable living on the cutting edge. At times, taking a tough line or a decisive stand in a
muddle of ambiguity is the only ethical thing to do. If a manager is indecisive about a problem
and spends time trying to figure out the “good” thing to do, the enterprise may be lost.
If all this is true, I wonder about the role of the professional manager who moves from company
to company. How can he or she quickly absorb the values and culture of different organizations?
Or is there, indeed, an art of management that is totally transportable? Assuming that such
fungible managers do exist, is it proper for them to manipulate the values of others?
What would have happened had Stephen and I carried the sadhu for two days back to the village
and become involved with the villagers in his care? In four trips to Nepal, my most interesting
experience occurred in 1975, when I lived in a Sherpa home in the Khumbu for five days while
Questions
1. Throughout The Parable of the Sadhu, Bowen McCoy refers to the breakdown
between the individual and corporate ethic. Explain what he meant by that and
how, if we view the hikers on the trek up the mountain in Nepal as an organization,
the ethical person-organization fit applied to the decisions made on the climb.
The corporate ethic of Nepal and the mountain climbing group would have to be
classified low organizational ethics; the body is trying to go along to get along and
achieve the goal of reaching the peak. Many of the group (possibly the New Zealander)
2. Using the various ethical discussions in the first three chapters as your guide,
evaluate the actions of McCoy, Stephen, and the rest of the group from an ethical
perspective.
McCoy and many others displayed moral blindness and did not recognize the situation as
moral or thought someone else could take care of the problem. The group was laser
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rationalize that he had helped and that later climbers would also help so that the sadhu
would be okay. Utilitarian thinking looks for the greatest good for the greatest number.
The climbers, Pasang and porters wanted the greatest number of climbers to scale the
summit and hoped that the fewest number of climbers or group members would be hurt
or ill with altitude sickness.
3. What role did leadership and culture play in this case?
Sherpas are an ethnic group from the most mountainous region of Nepal, high in the
Himalayas. They have traditionally acted as guides for climbers on Mount Everest.
Today, the term is often used by foreigners to refer to almost any guide, climbing
supporter or porter hired for mountaineering expeditions in the Himalayas, regardless of
their ethnicity. Because of this usage, the term has become a slang byword for a guide or
mentor in other situations. Sherpas are renowned in the international climbing and
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4. What is the moral of the story of the sadhu from your perspective?
McCoy summarized the moral as “When do we take a stand?”
When Do We Take a Stand?
By Bowen McCoy
I wrote about my experiences purposely to present an ambiguous situation. I never found
out if the sadhu lived or died. I can attest, though, that the sadhu lives on in his story. He
lives in ethics classes I teach each year at business schools and churches. He lives in the
classrooms of numerous business schools, where professors have taught the case to tens
of thousands of students. He lives in several casebooks on ethics and on an educational
video. And he lives in organizations such as the American Red Cross and AT&T, which
use his story in their ethics training.
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I’ve learned that each year along the pass, a few Nepali porters are left to freeze to death
outside the tents of the unthinking tourists who hired them. A few years ago, a French
group even left one of their own, a young French woman, to die there. The difficult pass
seems to demonstrate a perverse version of Gresham’s law of currency: The bad practices
of previous travelers have driven out the values that new travelers might have followed if
they were at home. Perhaps that helps to explain why it was so difficult for Stephen or
anyone else to establish a different approach on the spot.
Any class’s response depends on its setting, whether it’s a business school, a church, or a
corporation. I’ve found that younger students are more likely to see the issue as black–
and-white, whereas older ones tend to see shade of gray. Some have seen a conflict
between the different ethical approaches that we followed at the time. Stephen felt he had
to do everything he could to save the sadhu’s life, in accordance with his Christian ethic
of compassion. I had a utilitarian response: do the greatest good for the greatest number.
Give a burst of aid to minimize the sadhu’s exposure, then continue on our way.
