Changing lanes with Sydney Pollack

I am going to confess that I had no idea who Sydney Pollack was. When I heard yesterday that he died, I initially had him confused with Sidney Poitier. Even after I saw his picture and recognized him from several movies, I still had no idea he was the director responsible for some of the most memorable films in the past thirty years.

 

My ignorance is surprising given that Pollack played a major character in a movie that very accurately illustrates the moral compromises we often make in the business world. In Changing Lanes he played a partner in a law firm where Ben Affleck’s character was an associate. The plot involves him trying to convince Affleck’s character (who was also his son in law) to forge a signature on a court document. He enlisted the help of his daughter who told Affleck’s character (paraphrasing) the following:

 

“At the level of the law that you’re dealing with, your goal is not the pursuit of truth or justice but to manipulate the system to get the desired outcome.”

 

This makes me think about all the times I have been in a conversation where the primary goal of what I was saying was not to convey the truth but to either positively portray myself and/or to get my listener to do something I wanted. And I am not alone in having done this. In business school, I found the culture to be such that people were constantly “selling themselves” by talking about themselves in the best way possible. While I realize the needs to “sell yourself”, I sometimes wonder if we lose a part of ourselves in the process. Once a friend told me that her friend was at a Duke MBA happy hour and later described the Fuqua students as “emotionally shallow.” There was another time when I was at He’s Not Here talking to some grad students and when I mentioned I was in business school, one girl sarcastically said(paraphrasing) “oh we know about all you MBA types.” She needed no further explanation as to what she meant by “MBA types.”

 

The most memorable point in the movie came toward the end when Ben Affleck’s character confronted his boss and asked him “how can you live like that?” Pollack’s character masterfully replied:

 

“I can live with myself because at the end of the day I think I do more good than harm. What other standards have I got to judge by?” 

 

Unfortunately the moral logic of the above statement is not limited in today’s world to lawyers and us “MBA types.”