Workplace Calisthenics: It's time to treat our economic schizophrenia

We cannot have it both ways.

A day does not end without most of us engaged in some serious, industrial-strength whining about the price of gasoline. As we tip toward and over the $2 per gallon price point, our descriptions of a SUV-challenged world become even more dire.

How will we get our boats to Table Rock? How will we transport an entire soccer team to Joplin? And how will we look talking on a cell phone in traffic if other drivers have to look over or down at us?

The future is getting really scary as we watch the electronic digits on the Git n' Go gasoline pumps continue their meteoric rise past $75 just to fill the family M-1 tank.

After the muttering and sputtering, it is blame time. The only way to psychologically cope with this pregnant gasoline receipt is to find a target. Let's start with big oil.

We are fully convinced that there are oil barons who are out shopping for a new Gulfstream VI jet today because of our contribution to their "let's-have-lunch-in-Paris-and-be-back-in-Houston-for-dinner-at-the-club" penchant.

Our conversations turn vitriolic when we read, on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, that Exxon et al. turned in profits last quarter in excess of 70 percent. Further proof. Thank you, the prosecution rests.

Regardless of our income, we have developed the "little guy" mentality. We are convinced that capitalism is a huge, government-driven concrete truck which regularly backs up and dumps of load of financial victimization on our heads. We are the powerless peons.

We cannot have it both ways.

What we are not talking about when reviewing our monthly credit card bills is that we are responsible for the unabashed greed of big business.

Whoa! You may have been salivating with every delicious diatribe against demonic energy companies in this column until that last paragraph. The truth is, we not only are gas-guzzlers, we also are demanding shareholders.

With almost 100 million households actively contributing to some stock fund, the pressure is on to provide us with "a higher return" and it better be a huge return. We are used to double-digit numbers.

Look at us: at one moment we are cashing in our Midwest manners with locker room language over the gouging we are getting at the pumps and the next minute we are crowing over the profits we made last month in our energy index fund.

We cannot have it both ways.

And our economic schizophrenia is spreading. With impassioned disgust about the news that El Paso Energy and Reliant Energy have been raping the California electrical power plants with double-digit increases in the price of natural gas, we also are positively euphoric about the rates of return we are getting on Wall Street from these two energy giants.

Our mutual funds are studded with the likes of Microsoft, Gateway and Juno, who are either under indictment or have confessed to unethical business practices in marketing.

We tsk-tsk while listening to CNN's Lou Dobbs recite the litany of charges against these gigabyte giants who are also nestled comfortably in the list of our investments.

Tobacco-related diseases cost the U.S. consumer a minimum of $9 billion a year in health care expenses (anyone notice your health care premiums going up and your copay going down lately?) but tobacco companies are still the darlings of our stock funds.

We cannot have it both ways.

I am suggesting three options to this ethical dilemma.

First, we, the shareholders, can actively comb our investments and divest ourselves of any company which overtly victimizes people or the planet. Granted, there will be smaller stock portfolios with smaller returns. And the smaller returns will test our ethical resolve.

Second, we, the shareholders, can communicate to the companies we support with our regular, monthly contributions that doing business is about making money, but never at the expense of suspending accepted values.

Third, cease the self-righteous whining. Smile broadly, breathe deeply and click your heels when you grab that $100 receipt from the "pay-at-the-pump" fuel stop for your SUV, because you have just contributed to your securities-rich retirement account.

You know what, we cannot have it both ways.

(Dr. Cal LeMon solves organizational problems with customized training and consulting. His company, The Executive Edge, can be contacted via the Business Journal at sbj@sbj.net.)