Theranos Didn’t Approach The Ethics
As an ethics keynote speaker and ethics consultant, I tend to travel a great deal. I am pleased that I am again “on the road” more frequently than last year. I sometimes play a head game with myself as I return home from a far-away time zone.
I imagine the clock from where I’ve been, slowly matching up with the kitchen clock in my home. Then, on landing, I am comforted in knowing that I have matched the safety and comfort of what is familiar.
Ethics is much like that. No matter how far afield an organization, association, executive or athlete has strayed from ethical behavior, life has a way of guiding us back to the truth. “We” can throw up all kinds of excuses, roadblocks or irrelevant side trips, but whether in a court of law, an executive suite, a virtual accounting office or the manufacturing floor of a medical device company, “we” eventually approach our ethical behavior.
As Time has Played Out
For nearly three months, we have observed a (now) bankrupt company named Theranos, take to a witness stand and try to explain itself. In the end, just as my longer trips go from a distant time zone to the time zone that matches or kitchen clock, so too does ethical behavior guide us to where we must be, or should have been.
Theranos, the brainchild of former CEO Elizabeth Holmes and her COO Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, raised more than $900 million from investors. They attracted big-name organizations such as Walgreens and Safeway to put in kiosks, they filled their board with impressive names and touted their MiniLab technology. At one point the company reached a valuation of $4.5 billion. Now, the facility is a dust-filled space.
For a while, Elizabeth Holmes was the toast of the town, a Silicon Valley darling, the future face of working women everywhere. Now, she is on a witness stand fighting for her life. She is fighting to avoid eating toast in a jail cell for the next 20-years.
She has maintained that (according to the AP, December 7, 2021):
“Theranos was on the verge of perfecting a blood-testing technology that she began working on in 2003 after dropping out of Stanford University to start the company.”
Said Holmes under cross examination:
“When I testified, we could do it, I fully believe we could do it,” said Holmes. “There was still work to be done.”
That’s the Point
There was still work to be done is a different (and ethical) mindset from purporting to having a workable technology in place that could run as many as 300 blood tests from a drop or two of blood. The technology never worked; never remotely worked.
In pitching her flawed company, she was not averse to stealing Big Pharma logos and putting them on faked reports, hiding the touted technology, intimating an endorsement from the U.S. Army, or reporting results taken on conventional lab equipment as having been analyzed on Theranos equipment.
All of it, was fraudulent.
In defending herself, Holmes resorted to accusing her former COO (and secret lover Balwani) of emotional and sexual abuse. She was passionate about that defense, and then it somewhat faded away into the standard, stock line of “I believed we could do it.” In addition to Balwani, she has thrown former subordinates under the bus and denied she had any knowledge of problems.
On the stand, Holmes has repeatedly struggled to recall details, especially the part where she touted the technology while it kept failing. She was in too deep to stop. She was ethically straying further from the honest, cold-hearted truth.
Courtroom observers have described that her early, emotional, passionate defense has given way to robotic, dry responses. It is, in my opinion, the ethical plane approaching the time zone she left a long time ago when she dropped out of Stanford University.
What will the jury decide? It is, of course, an unknown. She could face 20 years, or she could walk away with a new book deal, television appearances and another movie. What is impossible to resurrect is a reputation, much like the airline that loses your suitcases and serves stale peanuts in first class.
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