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For years, I’ve heard people say that you can’t teach judgment. Admittedly, I’ve said it myself a few times.

However, I have recently realized that it’s just not true.

There are two basic areas where judgment in legal, ethical and values-based workplace behavior can be taught.

The first area involves instances of leader misbehavior, as we saw with HP CEO Mark Hurd or even more blatant instances where leaders fraudulently violate rules for their own personal interest or financial gain.

I saw the red light go off – it blinked rapidly, insistently. The vibration began a few seconds later. I looked down: “You need to call the office immediately. We have to talk.” I called in. You have to make a decision – now. I didn’t have time to think. But I made the decision and made a big mistake. It cost me $10,000.

After that, I got rid of my pager as soon as I could.  That was 15 years ago. 

Now, I’m more closely bound to my BlackBerry than I ever was to that primitive pager.  The red blinking light goes off all the time –not just when a call comes in, but also when anyone has a random thought and pushes the email send button. My BlackBerry lights up 100 times a work day, 12 times an hour, every five minutes or so. The red light means danger – there’s a crisis that threatens you and needs your attention now, not later, but right now. Stop what you are doing, pay attention, act, respond!

Some time ago, I had lunch with a colleague, a compliance officer for a widely known and respected organization who told me he’d spent several months reading almost one million emails as part of discovery in an employment case. Now he had only about 72,000 more emails to go.

During the discovery process, he reviewed executive correspondence, middle-manager emails, and exchanges between entry-level personnel. He discovered what certain people really thought about their team members, their jobs, roles and the company strategy. He read jokes, some proper and some not, and saw lots of exchanges that had no work purpose whatsoever.

A week ago, I listened to the best guitar music on Earth with my good friend and colleague, Ray Amelio, and 80,000 other fans at Eric Clapton’s “Crossroads Guitar Festival” in Chicago.

For 12 hours, the hot Chicago sun blistered us, despite lots of suntan lotion, as we listened to performances by ZZ Top, Robert Randolph, Vince Gill, Sheryl Crow, Eric Clapton, Steve Winwood, Buddy Guy, Robert Cray, BB  King, Derek Trucks, Susan Tedeschi and Jonny Lang, to name just a few of my favorites.

Miners used to carry a caged canary into new coal mines. As long as the canary kept singing, miners knew their air supply was safe. A dead canary signaled the need for an immediate evacuation.

The last canary disappeared from English coal mines in the late 1980s. Since then, miners have relied on inspections, instrumentation, regulation, administrative processes, complaint investigations, and their gut instincts to safeguard their lives.

Unlike human whistleblowers who often are ignored, called troublemakers, demoted, ostracized or fired, canaries send a clear and unmistakable signal of danger. With the recent tragedies at the Massey coal mine in West Virginia and the oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, it may be time to bring back the canaries or listen to employees or others whose voices deliver the same message, as I suggest in this brief  video.

We’ve made ethics, compliance, and daily behavioral standards too complex. By trying to convey too much, we accomplish too little. We need to simplify messages, repeat them to make them memorable, and cut through the clutter of information that confuses rather than clarifies our objectives. That’s my simple message; the rest of what follows is “proof.”

I recently facilitated a session for senior leaders of a public utility. In all ways, they were confident that they successfully lived by their values, with one exception: accountability.

This past May, I traveled with an ELI team to Glasgow, Scotland, to conduct a pilot session for a new client with offices in the U.S., Asia, and Europe.

A few months ago, I was in Belgium helping a U.S.-based client with a global mission...

Actions may speak louder than words, but few things speak louder than words that are documented.

I have had several back-to-back trips this past month, flying from one city to another.

We piloted a Professional Global Management^® session in Brussels, Belgium last week, and I could not have asked for better results.

Beyond the political significance of Barack Obama’s epic speech this week, whatever its effect  on this year’s election, I hope and believe his remarks will kindle continued, thoughtful discussions about what race and color mean in our daily lives.

I’ve thought a lot about leadership over the past few years – it’s what every firm says it needs to build better, more efficient, inclusive ethical and lawful workplaces. Go to any bookstore and the shelves will be lined with first-person or biographical accounts of epic leaders –Washington, Lincoln, King, Patton, Schwarzkopf, Welch, Jobs, Gates. Those leaders are few and far between, and most of us read about them hoping to find nuggets of wisdom we can apply.

Our training sessions with Memphis, our German Shepherd pup, have continued.

On Sunday, my wife and I attended a rally protesting the genocide in Darfur. 400,000 people have been killed, 2.5 million are homeless, there is untold violence, and the genocide continues.

Memphis Rae, our newest family member, is an 8-month-old German Shepherd puppy who we found through the Georgia Shepherd Rescue. She’s a great looking dog, very bright and mostly friendly, and gets along with our whole family, including Monroe, a gentle, regal Shepherd also from Georgia Rescue, who is about 2 1/2.

On a recent morning, our company visited the Martin Luther King Center and toured the MLK birthplace here in Atlanta.

We’ve been hearing stories of bloggers who’ve lost their jobs for writing entries that their employers decided were inappropriate.

So many conversations go nowhere because they’re monologues and the wrong person is talking.