Bleak choices

Sicario paints a picture of Juarez in Mexico that reminded me of the hell depicted in Dusk Till Dawn. This is a deeply depressing and bleak film which purports to show a world in which the police have lost control and the drug cartels are in charge. In a word: chilling (to your core).

This is an uncompromising film that suggests the only way to tackle the brutal crime regimes depicted in the movie is to deploy 'righteous' brutality against them. The 'good guys' just kill a few less people in slightly less horrific ways. There are images in this film that will stay with you for a long time: do not see it if this concerns you. But do see it if you want to see a tight and crisply acted, well edited and filmed movie. A raw and uncompromising film.

This film poses that timeless moral question: do the ends justify the means. Of course, there are no simple or glib answers. This film should make most people feel very uncomfortable when they observe the ethical compromises being made in pursuit of a more (??) just result.

As this series of blogs has raised on more than one occasion: leadership is all about making (often difficult) ethical choices. And having made them, being prepared to stand by those choices. For example if a large business is hacked (yielding many lost personal details of customers) but then it emerges that a previous decision was made not to invest in better security for just commercial reasons... what then? All leaders need to be aware of the ethical dimensions of each and every decision they make.

What were the ethics in your last decision?

_____________________

This is Blog 120 in my 2014/2015 series of blogs about leadership ideas to be found in the movies of our time. You can read here as why I began doing this (with an update at the end of 2014). Please subscribe to this blog if you want to read more. Thanks. Click the label 'film' to see all the others.