8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Powerful principles provide guidance, December 23, 2006
This review is from: The Power of Principles: Ethics for the New Corporate Culture (Paperback)
As business and business schools struggle with the problem of teaching, promoting and practicing ethics, Bill Byron provides a useful guide, not just another ad hominen critique.
The decline in corporate ethics needs less lamentation and more solutions. Byron has a solution and he conveys ten core principles that form a positive, prosocial set of ethics for business today. He identifies and outlines "ten classic ethical principles" (pp. 6-7): integrity, veracity, fairness, human dignity, participation (empowerment), commitment, social responsibility, the common good, subsidiarity (delegation) and love. He devotes chapters three through twelve to explaining and illustrating these principles. He has excellent, current examples, plenty of conversations with a variety of leaders, and a clear, engaging way of tying all of these together. His final chapter asks business leaders to reflecton the ten principles, in the form of an open letter to their chilren or employees. One takes the form of C.S. Lewis' "Screwtape letters," offering the devil's own interpretation of the principles. Of course, the best advice is to do just the opposite of what the devil suggests, but reality shows that Satan himself may have won the hearts and minds of some executives. Enron receives a lot of attention. He concludes each chapter with a nice, italized, summary lesson. He draws on civic, business and academic leaders. Byron has had the opportunity to meet and converse with a wide array of leaders. He has been the president of three universities. Now if he could only explain the ethics of Harvard's greed in accumulating a $29 billion endowment.
Under social responsbility, Byron takes on Milton Friedman's advice to firms, that they should maximize profits to shareholders, period. Byron does endorse that socially responsble firms must be economically viable. I believe that there is a middle ground, and these include the principles that I teach busines students: Organizations must create wealth, customers, and a sustainable comparative advantage. Social justice comes from the distribution of wealth, but only if firms generate enough wealth -- for shareholders, employees, managers, and customers -- to distribute and to re-invest. Being viable is not enough. Firms and employees have a moral, social responsbility to build or create something of value. The error is in the egregious accumulation of wealth by a limited, unethical few. Money is not the root of all evil. It's the love of money that is the root of all evil.
Bill Byron has done it all, from a Normandy paratrooper, to Jesuit priest, to university president, to business ethics professor, to high school principal. As a colleague in his department when he wrote this book, it was a privilege to have him with us, if only for a short time before his next, challenging appointment.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Ethics in the business world, June 11, 2007
This review is from: The Power of Principles: Ethics for the New Corporate Culture (Paperback)
Outstanding book for any person that that works within an organization. Focuses on how one can live a fullfilling life and be still be successful within an organization in terms of being a leader of the team. To lead one must be of high integrity and be willing to serve others. With Enron and other corporate scandals, we seem to have lost track of how to run an organization for the benefit of others (employees, shareholders, customers, etc,)instead of our own personal gain.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Business owners will find this an essential key to maintaining ethics in a blossoming business structure, March 4, 2007
This review is from: The Power of Principles: Ethics for the New Corporate Culture (Paperback)
What are the ethical and spiritual principles businesses should embrace and incorporate to prevent the problems that affected Enron and others? Examples from a range of corporate scenarios narrow the ideas down to ten 'old' principles and review them with an eye to surveying how business decisions may be tempered by ethical and spiritual considerations. Business owners will find this an essential key to maintaining ethics in a blossoming business structure, and business libraries will find students of business will choose this for classroom debate and discussion.
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