Business books tend to promise frameworks. The novel Peter Kazan names as his favorite offers something far less comfortable: a 19th-century portrait of a man who reasons his way into catastrophe. Kazan, the founder and CEO of Atlantic Tech, is careful about how much credit he gives Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. What he takes from it is a lasting suspicion of his own justifications.
A Crime Built One Reasonable Step at a Time
Published in 1866, the novel follows Rodion Raskolnikov, an impoverished former student in St. Petersburg who convinces himself that certain extraordinary people are entitled to cross moral lines in service of a larger purpose. He tests the theory by killing a pawnbroker he regards as worthless to society. The crime itself occupies only a few pages, and the rest of the book traces the argument that led him there and the long unraveling that follows.
What unsettles readers is how coherent Raskolnikov’s reasoning sounds from the inside. Each step follows from the last. By the time he acts, the conclusion feels less like a choice than an inevitability he argued himself into.
Self-Justification Shows Up in Ordinary Business Decisions
Kazan sees the same structure in everyday commercial life, on a much smaller scale and with much lower stakes. “I can’t claim it changed how I work,” Kazan said of the novel. “What it did do is stick a permanent warning label in my head about self-justification. Raskolnikov talks himself into something terrible one reasonable-sounding step at a time. In business you meet that logic constantly.”
The pattern he describes rarely involves anything dramatic. A deadline justifies a shortcut, and the shortcut becomes precedent. A figure gets rounded in a favorable direction because the quarter was difficult, and the next quarter’s rounding starts from there. Each individual step can be defended on its own terms, which is exactly why the sequence is so hard to see from the inside.
Researchers Have Given the Drift a Name
Organizational scholars have studied this phenomenon for decades. Sociologist Diane Vaughan, in her study of the 1986 Challenger disaster, described the “normalization of deviance,” the process by which small departures from standards gradually come to feel routine until they stop registering as departures at all. Business ethicists Ann Tenbrunsel and David Messick later described “ethical fading,” in which the moral dimension of a decision drops out of view as people frame their choices in purely practical terms.
Both ideas echo what Dostoevsky dramatized more than a century earlier. The greatest danger often comes from good-sounding reasons applied incrementally, with nobody stepping back to see where the sequence leads.
A Founder’s Best Arguments Deserve the Most Scrutiny
For founders, the risk runs higher because so few people are positioned to challenge them. A founder who sets a company’s direction also shapes much of the conversation about it, and a persuasive leader can talk a room, and himself, into nearly anything. Kazan has consistently described his operating philosophy as restraint and precision over scale for its own sake, a stance that partly checks this kind of momentum.
The lesson he draws from the novel centers on auditing his own reasoning more than suspecting others’ motives. When the case for a decision feels unusually smooth, especially one that happens to serve his interests, the smoothness itself becomes a reason to slow down. That habit fits a broader view of authority earned through judgment, in which a leader’s credibility rests as much on how decisions get made as on the outcomes they produce.
Fiction Trains the Instinct That Compliance Checklists Miss
Management literature usually addresses ethics through checklists, codes of conduct, and compliance training. Those tools have their place, yet they assume a person will recognize an ethical question when one appears. Dostoevsky’s insight is that the most consequential lapses often arrive without ever presenting themselves as questions.
Fiction offers a different kind of preparation. A reader spends hundreds of pages inside a mind that is rationalizing and learns to recognize the texture of that reasoning. Years later, in a boardroom or on a late-night call about a difficult deal, the pattern can surface as recognition well before it surfaces as an argument.
Slowing Down Before Momentum Makes the Decision
The practical takeaway from Kazan’s account is modest. It means noticing when a line of reasoning is carrying him somewhere he would have hesitated to go at the start, and pausing long enough to examine each step along the way. It fits an approach built around listening before acting, where the full picture comes together before momentum settles the matter.
Asked whether any book had reframed how he thinks about work, Kazan came back to the same novel. “So maybe it did reframe work,” he said, “just not the way people usually mean.”
The reframing he describes is quieter than a productivity system or a leadership formula. It leaves him with a question worth asking before any significant decision: would the reasoning in front of him still hold up if he followed it all the way to the end? Raskolnikov never asked that question in time. For a founder responsible for a company, its clients, and the people who build it alongside him, asking it early is part of the job.
