Professionals take ethics lessons into classrooms

There are lots of ways to define ethical behavior.

Pat Farrell, the CEO of Henrico Doctors' Hospital, asked students in Jackie Herrmann's sports marketing class at Deep Run High School yesterday to define ethics. The answers were varied: doing what your grandmother would approve of; doing the right thing even when no one is watching.

"It is important to keep it simple," Farrell said. He cited the honor code that he and other cadets at Virginia Military Institute were expected to live by. "Don't lie, cheat or steal, or tolerate those that do," he said. "It was simple. For four years, we lived that way."

Farrell visited the western Henrico County school as part of Junior Achievement of Central Virginia's Empowered Through Ethics program. Now in its fifth year, the program brings local business leaders into classrooms to talk with students about the importance of ethics in business and life.

Yesterday and Wednesday, about 150 professionals and executives visited 150 classrooms in 25 local high schools. Twenty more will visit classrooms at later times.

"It was a huge success," said Anne Marie McHugh, president of Junior Achievement of Central Virginia.

"Junior Achievement's mission is to teach children how to succeed in a global economy," McHugh said.

"We do that by teaching personal finance, work-force development and entrepreneurship skills. Embedded in all those is that to be successful, you have to be ethical."

Farrell said the answers to tough ethical questions often come down to remembering simple, common-sense rules, and not forgetting that actions have consequences.

"What made [the honor code] real for us was not those words, but the consequences," he said. "At our school, there was a single sanction: If you did it, you were kicked out. The reason why that was important was because it brought consequences and actions together."

When people forget about consequences, "it is kind of a cumulative effect," he said. "You get used to lying and cheating, and all of a sudden you find yourself in a very bad place."

Contact John Reid Blackwell at (804) 775-8123 or .