The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions...

... and especially with many little mis-steps.

As C. S. Lewis wrote in this Screwtape Letters,

Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one -- the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts...

Until suddenly, you turn around, see your surroundings, and wonder, How on earth did I get here?!?

Lewis may have been an Oxford don, but he was on to something big. Of all his works of Christian apologia, The Screwtape Letters is by far my favorite. An epistolary novel, the book is a manual on How to Be a Better Devil, full of "wise" advice from the senior Screwtape to his just-starting-out-in-the-family-business nephew, Wormwood.

In the Preface, Lewis noted,

I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of "Admin." The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern.

Lewis could have been a professor of business administration. (How he would have disliked that!)

The truth of the "slippery slope" is explored in a 4 September Harvard Business Review blog piece by an HBS professor, a fellow at the University of Arizona, and an assistant professor at the University of Washington. (Yes, I'm a little behind in my reading.)

The authors' research has shown that, given the incentive and the opportunity to cheat a little, people will. No surprise there. The next time? They'll cheat a little more. And then a little more, and a little more. The next thing you know, you're Bernie Madoff. Or at least Ken Lay.

And it's not just about one or two "bad apples":

Unfortunately, the assumption that unethical workplace behavior is the product of a few bad apples has blinded many organizations to the fact that we all can be negatively influenced by situational forces, even when we care a great deal about honesty.

In other words, being around a few bad apples can make us complacent about the bad choices we may be tempted to make. (I've written about this before, here; the point I wanted to make then, and will reiterate now, is that the old saw about a few "bad apples" reminds us that they spoil the whole barrel: you have to take all the apples out, and turn them over, looking for the blemishes that have spread from the rotted ones.)

It doesn't take draconian methods to keep people on that straight-and-narrow:

Environments that nudge employees in the right direction, and managers who immediately identify and address problems, can stop ethical breaches before they spiral out of control.