Customer Reviews

It's About Excellence: Building Ethically Healthy Organizations

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I first met David when he was a panel member discussing ethics. His contributions stuck in my mind, with comments like "ethics is a team sport" and "most everything we do is driven by love or fear." We had much in common in our approach to education, albeit in different but related fields. I am pleased to include David in the program at the PMI NorCal Symposium 2008 at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California on September 3rd ([...]).

In his book, David Gill provides a compelling and insightful manifesto linking ethics to healthy, excellent organizations. He doesn't just preach at us about what to do but also provides why and how to implement an ethics program-a program that weaves throughout an organization and guides people to achieve more than what they may have thought possible, in ways consistent with innate desires for fairness. It's About Excellence helps us see the power of authenticity and integrity.

I believe David and his blueprint for linking ethics with business excellence deserves a prominent spot on an agenda for a continuing quest to increase maturity, manage risks, and achieve greater results from projects.

Randall L. Englund, [...] Project Sponsorship: Achieving Management Commitment for Project Success (Jossey-Bass Business & Management)

Remarkable and Extraordinary. Well-written and very useful. Do not let the slim look of the volume lead you to believe it is a fluff like a Ken Blanchard book. This is no "pop business" book. This is sage advice from someone who teaches it in an academic setting at a major university AND has a long history of success with the subject, material, and principles outside of the academy. I very much appreciate this book and I could use the information right away in my business.

It's About Excellence provides a sound basis while giving concrete advice for how to start doing ethics excellently immediately. By opening the book with the current ethical landscape, Gill sets the stage for where he wants to take the reader. Namely, he wants to move people from being ethically unaware or averse to being marketplace participants who are proactively engaging from a highly ethical perspective; he calls this `mission control' ethics. This book is not so much about ethical damage control, as it is about building ethically healthy, vibrant, and proactive organizations that seek to not simply `do no harm' but to `do good'. This is the excellence he is referring to in his title.

One of the primary strengths of this book is the clear, practical advice Gill gives throughout the book. It is obvious that this is a person who not only understands ethical philosophy, but who knows how to bring such information to Main Street. This is not unengaged ethics, but it is an ethical framework that gives the reader the tools they need to begin doing the hard ethical lifting in their organization from the very beginning of the book.
This practical advise comes in a very concrete form by the many tools Gill provides. He provides worksheets for doing trouble-shooting audit, developing a clear mission and vision, creating a corporate values document, and hosts of others. These are worksheets the readers can begin using right away.

Another strength is Gill's discussion on mission and vision statements. Although he has tailored the discussion primarily around ethics, it has much added value beyond the immediate discussion. Much of what he says could easily be incorporated into an entire book on how to create a strategic framework for one's business. Many times mission and vision statements are generic platitudes that make somebody feel good, but do not really guide the organization. Instead, Gill argues for a robust mission and vision statement that really encapsulate what the company does and what it will be (99). It guides employees in how they approach and then do their work.

Although the book is directed towards a general business, those who have ears to hear will see the ethical undergirding of Gill's book. Namely, the ethical teachings one finds in the Decalogue and the teachings of Christ. For instance, in Appendix B in a section entitled `Afterthought and Confession', he discusses how his Ten Principles of Highly Ethical Leaders and Organizations were developed based on his understanding of the Ten Commandments. Therefore, although this book has a broad appeal to people of any or no religious persuasion, some will find the book to be especially meaningful as a way of approaching organizational ethics.

A helpful, concise and practical how-to-guide for implementing and sustaining an ethically healthy culture. It includes some helpful forms or questionnaires to aid in guiding and measuring your cultural ethics.

A key concept conveyed in the book is that for ethical behavior to be the standard in an organization it must be first internalized as part of the culture and this starts with the tone at the top. And the book does a good job showing how ethics can be internalized.