THE EASIEST WAY TO WIN... IS BY CHEATING

A leader I once worked for used to say: winning isn’t everything — it’s the only thing.

In private, we debated that philosophy more than once. Long conversations, always pleasant, sometimes confronting. In the end, quietly, he came around. But we never spoke of it publicly.

The real question buried inside that famous phrase has nothing to do with winning at all. It has everything to do with this: what are we willing to compromise in pursuit of success? How will we behave? Will we fight the good fight?

THE UNCOMFORTABLE TRUTH ABOUT CHEATING

The main reason people cheat, lie and break the rules is brutally simple. It works. At least in the short term.

Not always. Not forever. But often enough, and for long enough, that the incentive rewards the behaviour. The cheater gets ahead. The rule-follower watches on, confused and sometimes resentful. We comfort ourselves that wrongdoers eventually get caught, that karma corrects, that guilt catches up with people in the end. Sometimes it does. But often the correction arrives too late, the penalty is too mild, and the gains have already been banked.

This is not cynicism. It is observation.

On your drive home tonight, notice the people who follow the rules — who indicate before they merge, who hold the correct speed, who wait their turn at the roundabout. Then notice the ones who don’t. The drivers who break the limit, who cut queues, who slide into gaps that were never offered, who behave as though the rules didn’t apply to them.

What separates these two groups?

Now look at the cars they are driving. Are expensive, luxury vehicles over-represented among the rule-breakers? Our experience says yes — and so does the research. We have a theory for why. And it has very little to do with the car.

THE FIRST ETHICAL CROSSROAD

In the two-part ESPN 30 for 30 documentary *LANCE*, we are shown something revealing. Before the performance-enhancing drugs, before the Tour de France titles, before the cover-ups and the public unravelling, there was a first ethical crossroad — a quiet moment most people would walk straight past.

Lance and his mother, Linda, needed to register him for his first major bike race. The problem: Lance was fifteen; the minimum age was sixteen.

So what did they do? They lied.

At the very first fork in the road, they chose deception — and, tellingly, they did not experience it as a moral failure. They experienced it as doing whatever it took to win. Lance described the mindset plainly: “We’d forge my birth certificate, compete illegally, then beat everybody.”

Linda was just as candid. She didn’t want to hold him back, she explained, so she simply changed the date on the form. And then the line that deserves to sit with us: “he just wanted it so bad.”

He just wanted it so bad!

The wanting is not the problem. The question is what we decide is permissible in pursuit of the thing we want — and Lance and Linda answered that question at the first opportunity. Their answer set the template for everything that followed. Winning at all costs, applied from day one.

What is most instructive is not the scandal itself, but the architecture of rationalisation underneath it — the way each compromise made the next one easier. A forged birth certificate becomes a tolerated edge. A tolerated edge becomes an expectation. An expectation becomes a culture. And a culture becomes, eventually, a sophisticated, coordinated, institutional deception spanning years, continents and millions of dollars.

Cheating scales.

WHEN THE MORAL MAP DISAPPEARS

For most of human history, the bulk of the world’s population subscribed to some form of religious belief — in the Western tradition, particularly Judaeo-Christian frameworks. Whatever one’s relationship with faith, those frameworks delivered something enormously practical: a shared moral map. A common vocabulary for right and wrong. Rules that sat outside the self and did not bend to desire, convenience or narrative.

Then, across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, something shifted. Moral relativism — the idea that right and wrong are not universal but subjective, contextual, a matter of culture or circumstance — took hold. And in cultures where the religious scaffolding had already weakened, the result was a vacuum.

We are now making the rules up as we go.

What was once treated as fundamental is now an option. Honesty and integrity become strategic choices rather than foundational behaviours — and subjective ones at that. My truth, your truth, whichever narrative best serves the moment. And into that gap — between the appearance of ethics and ethics itself — dishonesty thrives in plain sight.

Not at the hands of criminals in the traditional sense, but people with good suits, confident handshakes and impressive networks. People who speak the language of values fluently while quietly negotiating their own private version of them.

Hence the widespread misconduct in the Australian banking, superannuation and financial services industry. Hence PwC — and most recently, KPMG. Sophisticated, credentialed institutions, trusted explicitly to uphold the standards, found to have compromised the very thing they were paid to protect. In each case the question is not how it happened, but how long it ran before anyone said anything.

And the harder question: what would have happened if the whistleblower had simply stayed quiet? The honest answer: when people stay silent — or worse, complicit — cheating compounds.

THE PREDATORY CLIMB

Moral predators — and that is precisely what they are — tend to climb. They are skilled at managing perceptions, at calibrating their behaviour to whatever an environment rewards. They read power structures with precision: which signals to send, which alliances to form.

In environments without a clear and enforced moral framework, they thrive. They rise through corporate hierarchies, educational institutions, political systems, sporting organisations and influencer ecosystems alike — because the environment, absent a strong ethical scaffold, selects for exactly the traits that make cheating effective. Charisma. Charm. Boldness. A high tolerance for cognitive dissonance. The ability to hold a compelling story about oneself.

You have almost certainly met this person. Perhaps you worked for them. Perhaps you admired them, before you understood what you were looking at.

And here is what makes them so effective: the immoral predator does not see a predator in the mirror. Like Lance, like Linda, they carry a story about why what they are doing is justified — why the rules don’t quite apply in their case, why wanting it badly enough is its own kind of permission.

So they win. They even keep winning. Right up until the moment they don’t.

THE BYSTANDERS ARE NOT INNOCENT

But the predator never climbs alone — and this is the part we are least comfortable telling, because it implicates the rest of us.

No sophisticated deception survives on the strength of one liar. Lance did not forge a culture by himself. Teammates knew. Doctors knew. Officials suspected and looked away. Sponsors had every commercial reason not to ask the question whose answer they could not afford. The machine ran for the better part of two decades for one reason above all: the people positioned to stop it chose silence. Its single greatest protection was not the sophistication of the science. It was the willingness of everyone around it to say nothing.

We like to imagine the bystander as neutral. Uninvolved. Innocent by virtue of inaction. This is a comforting fiction, and it is wrong. To witness dishonesty and do nothing is not neutrality. It is compliance. The person who sees the rule broken and stays quiet has not stayed out of it — they have joined it.

The board member who tells himself he wasn’t active in the undermining of the CEO is as guilty as those who were. The athlete who collects the fairest-and-best award while ignoring bad behaviour on his team has some explaining to do. They are complicit in their silence. To watch the wrong thing happen and choose not to act is, in a real and unsentimental sense, to be part of the crime.

This is most true where it is hardest: on teams. Sport, the military, the workplace, the boardroom, the staff room — anywhere a group is bound by a shared mission and fierce internal bonds. The same loyalty that makes a team strong is the one that can be weaponised to protect the rot inside it. What happens in the team stays in the team. Protect your own. We dress these instincts up as values — and sometimes they are — but they are also how a culture learns to keep its worst secrets.

And here is the inversion we have to confront. The person who finally speaks up is not honoured. They are despised. We have words for them, and they are not kind: snitch. Rat. Dog. We reserve our deepest contempt not for the one who did the wrong thing, but for the one who refused to stay quiet about it. The whistleblower — who risks their career, their relationships, sometimes their safety to tell the truth — is far from protected. They are frequently destroyed for it. Those who told the truth about Lance were, for years, cast as bitter liars. The cheat was the hero. The truth-tellers were the villains.

This has to change. We have the moral arithmetic backwards. The teammate who stays silent to protect a cheat is not loyal — they are complicit. The one who speaks up is not betraying the team; they are the only one trying to save it. Loyalty to a person doing the wrong thing is cowardice wearing loyalty’s jersey. Until we see courage there rather than treachery, we will keep producing the exact conditions in which the Lance Armstrongs thrive — surrounded, always, by good people who knew, and said nothing.

WHAT’S ACTUALLY AT STAKE: H3 AND MARVIN SCOUT

This is where marvinScout and the H3 come in — because the antidote is not surveillance, and it is not a thicker rulebook. It is internal architecture.

HONESTY, HUMILITY and HARD WORK are not soft virtues to be admired on a wall. They are load-bearing. And honesty sits first for a reason: it is the foundation the other two stand on. Honesty is the refusal to negotiate with the truth — and notice that the first lie is almost always told inward. Lance did not experience the forged certificate as a lie. That is the tell. We cannot deceive others for long without first deceiving ourselves, which means honesty is not, in the first instance, a relationship with other people. It is a relationship with reality.

Humility is the antidote to the belief that drives every moral predator — the conviction that the rules are for other people. And hard work removes the very temptation cheating exists to satisfy: the desire to skip the cost and bank the reward. The person who has genuinely earned the result has no need to forge the date on the form.

The compass does not make a leader immune to the crossroad — temptation still arrives — but it makes the leader steady when they reach it. And steadiness is contagious: the leader with a stable compass is the one who makes it safe for everyone else to stop being a bystander.

This is exactly what marvinScout is built to surface. We measure character before competence because competence can be performed and credentials borrowed, but the H3 shows up in the room, in the moment when something is offered and the exit is right there and nobody is looking. A CV tells you what someone has done. The Scout is designed to tell you who they are likely to be when it counts — because that is the only variable that does not bend under pressure.

THE SCIENCE OF MORAL COMPROMISE

The research is consistent: moral compromise is rarely a single dramatic decision. It is a sequence of small ones.

The psychologist Albert Bandura called the mechanism moral disengagement — the gradual deactivation of the internal regulator that keeps our behaviour aligned with our values. We don’t usually abandon our standards. We quietly convince ourselves, one justification at a time, that this particular act doesn’t really violate them. Each small step makes the next one easier, and none of them feels, in the moment, like the act of a bad person.

The luxury-car observation has evidence behind it too. In a 2012 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Paul Piff and colleagues ran seven experiments on social class and unethical behaviour. Observers stood at a busy intersection and watched who broke the road rules. Drivers of higher-status vehicles were roughly four times more likely to cut off other cars before waiting their turn, and more likely to drive through a crosswalk without yielding to a pedestrian. In the lab studies, higher-class participants were more likely to lie in a negotiation, take valued goods, and cheat to win a prize. The researchers traced much of it to one thing: more favourable attitudes toward greed.

It is not about the money. It is about what the money can do to the belief system of the person holding it — and the conclusion it whispers, if the internal compass is weak: that the rules exist for other people.

The single most effective prevention is not regulation and not consequences, though both matter. It is identity. The people least susceptible to ethical erosion are those who have done the internal work to know — clearly, before the moment arrives — exactly what they stand for.

WHAT ARE WE REMEMBERED FOR?

So let us return to where we began: winning isn’t everything — it’s the only thing. Are we willing to gain the whole world, yet lose our soul?

We spend our lives in pursuit. Of success. Of wealth. Of power and influence and the next rung on a ladder we are not always sure we chose to climb. And much of what we chase, if we are honest, is not success at all — it is the appearance of it. The title that impresses strangers. The number in an account we will never spend. The applause of people whose names we will not remember. We mistake the scoreboard for the game, then are surprised, late in life, to find the scoreboard was never the thing that mattered.

Because here is what is actually remembered — albeit very briefly.

Not the championships. Not the revenue. Not the trophies in the cabinet or the figure on the balance sheet. Stand at any funeral and listen to what is said. No one recites a KPI. No one reads out a sales target or a personal best. What people remember — what they carry, what they weep over — is how a person lived. Whether they were honest. Whether they were kind. Whether they could be trusted when it cost them something. Whether, when the wrong thing was happening in the room, they were the one who spoke.

We are not, in the end, remembered for our success. We are remembered for how we pursued it.

How do we remember Lance Armstrong?

The question was never whether you win. The destination is not the point, and never was. The question is the journey — who you became to get there, who you took with you, and who you were willing to be when the lie would still have worked and no one was watching.

So who were you along the way? That is the only scoreboard that matters

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