This article reminded me of when I was asked to do almost the exact same thing a few years ago: conduct industry and competitor research while emphasizing my status as a university student. My manager at the time told me not to mention that I was working for a startup, but also not to “stretch the truth too much.” I didn’t quite know how to navigate it. In the end, I took the safest route I could think of: I spoke mainly with public officials and avoided contacting employees at competitor firms altogether. My manager was perfectly satisfied with the results. Looking back, I sometimes wonder whether I should have pushed back more. But I also remember being told that this was “normal business practice.”
And in subsequent internships (especially in advising industries such as consulting), I’ve come to notice something unsettling: moral responsibility tends to diffuse as it moves through an organization. No single person holds all the context or sees the full downstream impact of their work. By the time a task reaches the person executing it, the ethical stakes can feel almost invisible. Even managers can struggle to recognize how their instructions, when aggregated across teams, might shape outcomes that affect real people.
