People often say they want a strong leader more than an ethical leader. David Brooks has a lovely essay in The New York Times demonstrating why this thinking is wrong for political leaders. But the quotes from the article below shows that the argument works just as well for business leaders as it does for politicians.
Below is the text of a speech given by Mark Goyder, Founder and Director of Tomorrow’s Company, at the Caux Initiatives for Business Conference, Panchgani India, on 12 November 2013. Goyder sent me (Jon Haidt) the text of this speech when we were first introduced. I loved it. I thought Goyder expressed a vision of business that automatically inspires […]
When I tell people I teach business ethics, they often ask: “isn’t that an oxymoron?” Their response is not unwarranted. Much of my course is about the clever ways businesses have found to exploit their workers, sidestep regulations, and foist external costs onto others. Businesspeople are brilliant at finding opportunities and some of those opportunities […]
Collaborator Jeff Kaplan and I just published a 3 page guide in Ethisphere Magazine outlining how companies can begin using EthicalSystems.org to create a workplace with higher levels of trust among colleagues and leadership. Ethisphere has kindly allowed us to post a PDF of the article. You’ll see very little mention of training in our article. Training is important, […]
EthicalSystems.org is almost one year old, and like all one-year-olds, it has grown a lot in its first year. When we launched the site in January, we had 18 collaborators, 14 research pages, and no real budget. But we were bound together by the belief that the massive body of research on ethics in organizations […]
[Editor’s note: We at EthicalSystems.org have been so pleased to learn about the activities of the Omaha Business Ethics Alliance that we invited its executive director, Beverly Kracher, to write a guest blog post introducing the Alliance. Cities are indeed an important and usually overlooked level in the nested systems that one should look at […]
I recently received an email from Bill Budinger, the founder of Rodel Inc. Bill expressed a core idea of about great leadership: that if you put people and mission before profits, then the profits will flow. Bill went on to explain how putting profits first makes it very difficult to run an ethical company. Bill’s formulation was so […]
[Cross posted from RighteousMind.com. Ethical Systems design is a way to make the 3rd story about capitalism come true] Since moving to the NYU-Stern School of Business in 2011, I’ve been interested in the many ways that moral psychology influences economic thinking. I was surrounded by professors and MBA students who see business as a […]
There’s a lot of momentum in the corporate world for creating real and effective ethics and compliance programs (spurred on by the incentives in laws such as the Federal Sentencing Guidelines). There’s a lot of wisdom on how to create effective programs at the Deloitte Risk and Compliance Journal, where Keith Darcy and George Hanley just […]
THIS IS A GUEST POST, BY CHRISTOPHER MICHAELSON, Associate Professor of ethics and business law at Opus college of Business, University of St. Thomas What books have shaped your personal and professional values? At a World Economic Forum session in Davos a few years ago, a panel of leaders identified four “classics of business literature”: […]