Those lines sound familiar? If you work in business, they probably do — it’s how people talk about whistleblowers. Whistleblowers may have a noble reputation in the media, but when they surface within a company, management almost always brushes them off with a discrediting back story or a little piece of history that explains away all their annoying accusations. And here’s why that happens: In the vast majority of cases whistleblowers are, to some degree, crazy or vengeful or both. Until one terrible, awful day when, speaking out of vengefulness or ethical earnestness, the whistleblower also happens to be telling the truth. And then, well, you get a crisis like the one Wal-Mart finds itself tangled in today.