How to Make Values Count in Everyday Decisions

Values-based decision making, a popular term these days in both industry and academia, is commonly exemplified by Johnson & Johnson's 1982 decision to pull Tylenol off retailers shelves, at a cost of $100 million to the company, after tainted capsules had been found. The company's courageous action illustrated how decision making is a trade-off between values - in this case, choosing customer safety over short-term financial performance. Values-based decision making has in fact come to take on the exclusive meaning of socially responsible decision making. But while a greater emphasis on ethics is certainly praiseworthy, an important reality is being missed. All decisions - whether judged highly ethical, grossly unethical or anywhere in between - are values-based. That is, a decision necessarily involves an implicit or explicit trade-off of values. Because the values that underlie our decision making are often buried in the shortcuts we take, we need a means for revealing those values and expressly thinking through the trade-offs between them. The framework we present in this article helps a decision maker to understand that everyday decisions all have some basis in values, to sort out the specific values involved in a given decision-making event, and to make the decision with full awareness of its ethical implications.