At the weekend I finished reading The Secret Race by Tyler Hamilton – the coruscating inside story of the doping scandal that rocked the cycling world and eventually led to the downfall of its golden child, Lance Armstrong. Hamilton was telling the story from the point of view of a cheat, a liar and a fraud, but he asked the killer question: if you had fought to the very top of your field and then found that the only way to compete was to cheat, what would YOU do?

As I’m sure most people would reply, I’d like to think I’d blow the whistle. But would I?

Back in my early twenties, I was given a work placement in a small electronics company working in a very competitive field, with the axe always hanging over the workforce. As well as the QA work I was there to do, I was asked by one of the salesmen to help him out. He’d had a query from a potential client about the specs of their product compared to competitors. He asked me to put together the figures.

When I proudly presented them to him, he said “Right, go back and anywhere where our spec is below the others, bump ours up until it is even.” I stared at him, gobsmacked. He gave me an avuncular look, “Look son, this is how you play the game, everybody does it, we wouldn’t be able to compete if we didn’t.” I looked around at the other guys in the room. No-one spoke, but my boss nodded.

Of course I should have said “Do your own dirty work.” but I didn’t. I felt the peer pressure and caved. I went and changed the figures and passed them back to him.

It turned out that the dodgy figures were never used, so I never became an accessory to an actual deception. But that was just luck. Peer pressure from the prevailing culture had made me compromise my values. OK, it was a long, long way from cheating your way to 7 Tour de France yellow jerseys, but the underlying principle was the same, just (radically) different circumstances.

In banking, politics and the media, to name just a few, the culture has been so corrupted that cheating has become the norm. And the question is, are those people morally weaker than average, or are they just being human? Hamilton argues the latter.

Of course, the same cultural pressures can be used for good. In the same way that ‘dopers’ are now ostracised in pro-cycling, a positive ethical culture makes ‘doing the right thing’ seen as a virtue rather than as priggishness. If you want to have an ethical culture, you’ve got to show ethical leadership. When someone stands up and says “this isn’t right” they need to be embraced, not ostracised.

And if you are interested in ethics, Hamilton’s book’s definitely worth a read!