Customer Reviews

The Ethical Challenge: How to Lead with Unyielding Integrity

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This is a book of essays on business ethics that suffers badly from the limitations of the genre - 'you write about this aspect, he'll write about that, she'll write about the other'. The result, inevitably, is a set of parts that fail to make a whole, even though some of the parts are good. It is mostly written in a folksy style with a lot of personal anecdote, which will appeal to some.
In general, it is long on how you ought to behave and what you ought to do, and short on serious examination of the system conditions that will encourage and reward ethical behaviour. It is also, unlike Paine's Value shift, short on recognition of ethics and economics as separate, sometimes complementary and equally important domains. 

"We need smart, gutsy leaders with vision and integrity to get us through the minefields - leaders who can teach others to follow in their footsteps, hold firm to their values, and proliferate those norms across the organization." That is what Noel M Tichy and Andrew R McGill say in the introduction to this book. The book arose out of a Michigan Business School MBA course and conference, and it features chapters by a number of prominent business leaders responding particularly to the ethical issues arising from the Enron collapse.

I normally find books with multiple authors to be difficult to read, so this one has been on my "unread" pile for several months. However, I was pleasantly surprised by how interesting almost every chapter was. Former US Secretary of State James A Baker has an interesting chapter on business ethics in skeptical times, reflecting that some executive compensation schemes are creating perverse incentives, and that esoteric accounting rules are an obstacle to simple honesty. General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt discusses how a CEO needs to be the moral leader of a company.

James Hackett, CEO of Steelcase, provides a chapter which describes some significant ethical challenges which he has faced, and how he has communicated ethical values in his organisation. Eleanor Josaitis, executive director of Focus:HOPE, provides a brief chapter on the extraordinary work done by her organisation in serving the disadvantaged. All up, it is a book worth reading, although not in the "essential" category.

It is Ok in some way, but it is not so good that every leader need to read it as a whole.Personally, this is a so-so book.