Welcome to March, long-time National Ethics Awareness Month for the insurance industry. And by "long-time," we are talking before Enron, Wall Street (the original, not the sequel) and well before any regulator dreamed up the idea of how great it would be to require ethics training.

Forgive my sarcasm, but in my experience the vast majority of agents are honest folks. And by this time of life, it may just be baying at the wind to think any of the criminal minority will go to a 3-hour class and emerge with a head-slapping revelation.

I am a true believer in the power of ethics—not as "right versus wrong" but "right versus right." Too often it is thought that if one just eliminates the wrong answers, the right one will be obvious. If that were true, good and honest folks would never find themselves a deer in the headlights, paralyzed or struggling when facing a "right versus right" ethical conundrum. Their mistake was buying into the practice "We'll cross that bridge when we come to it." Or "When the time comes, I'll know the right thing to do." Thus they get totally blindsided by what they never saw coming.