Daniel Terris first became interested in Lockheed Martin when a colleague entered his office carrying a board game called “The Ethics Challenge,” which involved characters from the popular Dilbert comic strip inserted into various ethical scenarios specific to the defense giant. Terris, who is the director of the International Center for Ethics, Justice and Public Life at Brandeis University, investigated and learned that Lockheed had actually gone out and purchased the right to use the Dilbert characters as a way of making ethics more accessible to employees at the company, which had endured a number of ethics scandals in the 1970s and 1980s.
He spent two years researching Lockheed Martin materials and interviewing ethics officers, management and on-the-line employees for his case study, “Ethics at Work: Creating Virtue at an American Corporation,” which was published this year by University Press of New England. Compliance Week recently spoke to Terris about his impressions of Lockheed’s ethics program, and ethics in general in corporate America.
