Posted on 04/28/2008 7:03:45 AM PDT by ExSoldier
I learned a key lesson about ethics by watching my all-time favorite movie over and over: "The Magnificent Seven," the 1960 flick with Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen and Eli Wallach.
Yul Brynner plays Chris Adams, a gunfighter who is offered a pittance by a group of poor Mexican farmers to drive away the bandit Calvera (Eli Wallach), who has been plundering their village. The farmers explain that the tiny payment is everything of value in the village. Chris accepts, saying, "I've been offered a lot for my work, but never everything."
He assembles a powerful gang of seven outlaws, and they ride into Mexico. They hide in the village and come out shooting when Calvera shows up. Calvera and his plunderers ride off, and the Magnificent Seven think he's gone to plunder somewhere else and that they've done their job.
In today's column, Bob Stone—internationally known author and speaker on ethical leadership, leading change and reinventing government—takes us from difficult situations in the Wild West to everyday dilemmas in public service. Public officials would do well to circulate his guidelines on good conduct, which appear at the end of the column.
Since the vast majority of public officials are honest and well-intentioned, perhaps in a future column we should address how to identify ethical issues in advance, not after the press brings them to our attention. After all, honest individuals will make the right decisions as long as they recognize the implications of their actions.—Stephen Goldsmith
Management Insights moderator Stephen Goldsmith, director of the Innovations in American Government Program at the Harvard Kennedy School, is the author of a new series of columns on America's innovative mayors being published on Governing.com.
But Calvera comes back. There's a famine in the area, and there's no place else to plunder. The Seven have gotten more than they bargained for.
The cowardly Harry (Brad Dexter) wants to bail out: "There comes a time to turn mother's picture to the wall and get out. The village will be no worse off than it was before we came."
Chris admonishes him: "You forget one thing — we took a contract."
Chris's sidekick, Vin (Steve McQueen), tries to mediate: "It's not the kind any court would enforce."
Chris is resolute: "That's just the kind you've got to keep."
What I learned from Chris is the distinction between law and ethics, laid out in 1924 by the British jurist Lord Moulton. Law requires obedience to the enforceable, while ethics requires obedience to the "unenforceable." William Roberts, who wrote the screenplay for "The Magnificent Seven," put flesh onto Moulton's theory.
What is the "unenforceable" to which ethics demands obedience? For Chris Adams, it's his commitment. He had to keep his word, even though — or perhaps, in Chris' case, because — no court would require him to.
While Chris Adams was his own master, public servants serve two masters where ethics is concerned. They serve their city or state or county, which has its own code of ethics. The code is enforceable:
Obey it or risk being fired, suspended or even prosecuted. But, at the same time they serve another, often more demanding, master: their inner selves with their own sets of unenforceables.
The Golden Rule, unenforceable as it is, is much more demanding than any code of ethics, public or private, that I've ever seen. In fact, most of us expect more of ourselves and of the people we lead than mere compliance with regulations.
So, what do we expect? If you're like me, you were never explicit — you just knew it when you saw it. But, in the course of writing a book on ethics, I had to write down my own personal set of unenforceables, and the act of making the list itself helped me to better identify my beliefs and sharpened my sense of what ethical behavior means. This is a basic truth about learning: When either we try to actively express something, orally or in writing, our brains are stressed to figure out logic and connections that we hadn't discovered yet. As William Faulkner said, "I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it."
Here's my list of unenforceables:
· Treat people the way I'd like to be treated (the Golden Rule).
· Play by the rules: Winners never cheat and cheaters never win.
· What's not mine is not mine.
· Keep my commitments.
· Do what's expected of me, even if I haven't said I would.
· Don't hurt people's feelings even if they deserve it.
· Expect more from myself than from others.
· Speak truth to power.
· Give fair value.
· The most important thing in life is a clear conscience.
You'll have a different set from mine — but only if you write it down.
If you don't, you'll continue to manage your behavior instinctively, and I'll bet you'll miss some things — I sure did. But if you write down your list of unenforceables, you'll be able to share them with the people you lead and you'll be on the way to spreading them through your organization.
And watch the "The Magnificent Seven.
I wonder what our current crop of mainstream candidates would do with this?
The original Samurai enjoyed a suicidal fanaticism to their assigned task. Samurai would never have bonded with the villagers as people nor would they have thought at all about teaching the villagers to defend themselves as was done in the movie. Indeed, real Samurai would have simply sought out the Caldera bandits and killed them to the last man. Mission complete. Next?
... just be aware, you may have to deal with whoever succeeds him.
You can learn a lot about American character from good Westerns.
Reminds me of the conversation between Pike and Dutch from “The Wild Bunch” about which was more important, the fact that you gave your word or who you gave it to.
The Magnificent Seven is one of the better "chick flicks" although it is not obvious it is a chick flick until the ending.
Let’s ask an expert, shall we? Pinging FReeper Puroresu
BTW, I think the Seven Samurai is a better movie.
I love both Seven Samurai and The Magnificent Seven. But I do think Seven Samurai is the best film overall, actually one of the greatest films of all time. The one area where Magnificent Seven exceeds it is, of course, in the portrayal of the bandit leader. In Kurosawa's film, the idea was to portray the bandits as a malevolent hidden force, evil thugs with no particular character. Just animals who terrorize the innocent for their own profit and gratification. So we don't get a good character portrayal of the bandit leader. He's just the guy giving orders with the fancy helmet.
But Eli Wallach's bandit leader character was awesome. He was the best Mexican bandit ever, which is why he was recruited to play Tuco (another awesome performance) in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly six years later.
Regarding the samurai teaching the farmers to fight, remember that this is a movie, so we often see exceptional behavior. Remember also that these were impoverished samurai. Recall that when the villagers ask their elder if any samurai would be willing to help them, he told them to find hungry ones. And, of course, when they went to the city in search of them, it took a long time to find seven who would actually take the job. And even then one of them wasn't really a samurai.
One of themes of Seven Samurai was that the introduction of firearms to Japan had changed things dramatically regarding samurai tactics. The bandits had guns, which meant the samurai couldn't simply charge into their hideout and kill them all with swords. They did devise a plot to smoke them out and pick a few of them off to even the odds a little, but in doing this they lost a man to gunfire. One of the great tragic scenes in the film occurs near the end when Kyuzo, the samurai who had dedicated his life to becoming the best swordsman in Japan, gets gunned down by a nameless, faceless bandit who shoots him from a distance. This is a theme built upon by the more recent samurai films of Yoji Yamada and even by the American film The Last Samurai. Technology forced the samurai to change tactics, and even made them obsolete.
And finally, Kurosawa was himself a fan of the westerns of John Ford and other American directors. So he no doubt carried some of Ford's imagery with him when he began drawing up plans for Seven Samurai, and later for Yojimbo. As with towns in the old west, you could clean things up for a time, but eventually trouble would erupt again. Those villagers would eventually face another threat, so they needed to learn to defend themselves.
Wow, I'd not heard that before. Are you basing that observation on the scene where the survivors are riding out of the village and the young character known as Chico has a change of heart and rides back to be with the senorita and raise a family while sharing in the duties of the house? Sorry, I don't think that one scene qualifies the whole movie as a chick flick.
One of the greatest movie lines ever: If you're going to shoot, SHOOT! Don't talk!
Also, the director of “The Seven Samurai” was heavily influenced by John Ford’s westerns, probably a big reason it seemed like a natural movie to rewrite as a western. [Yes, I have the “Magnificent Seven” DVD, and watched the behind-the-scenes thing; my favorite part of the movie is “Shotgun on a Hearse” opening gambit, and the scene where Steve McQueen’s character holds up two fingers and joins up; IMHO the soundtrack is the magnificent part. :’) ]
Eli Wallach’s last line, regarding his incredulity that the Seven had come back “for this place”, makes a nice summation of the story as you’ve no doubt noticed.
"l admire your notion of fair odds, mister."(couldn't find the chopping wood pic)
Another great line that draws a parallel to "politics:"
Q: You get elected?
A: No, but I got nominated real good!
bump for later
:’D
Especially the Ranown films -- starred Randolph Scott and directed by Budd Boetticher...
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