An Ethical Systems Book Review BY DAVID NEWMAN Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hardby Chip Heath and Dan HeathCrown Business, 1st Ed. (2010) (public library)Summarized by Jennifer Fang Overview Change is difficult, or so most people believe. Switch identifies the crucial factors in effecting lasting changes for both individuals and organizations. Dan and Chip Heath draw…
BY JEREMY WILLINGER Internal Reporting refers to any time that a member of an organization (or a former member) tells someone else about an illegal or immoral practice, if the telling is done in the hope that someone will do something to change the practice. In the great majority of cases, employees tell someone within the organization…
An Ethical Systems Book Review Summarized by BRYAN TURNER Written by Nicholas Epley Knopf, Borzoi Books (2014) Mindwise: How We Understand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want is a book about our “sixth sense”, or mindreading, but there’s nothing supernatural about it. Epley is an experimental social psychologist, and this is a book about his research…
An Ethical Systems Book Review BY DAVID NEWMAN Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and HappinessRichard H. Thaler, Cass R. SunsteinPenguin Books, Revised & Expanded edition (2009) (public library)Summarized by Erick Rabin Introduction Choice Architecture involves organizing any context in which people make decisions. Urinals, stairwells, alarm clocks, school cafeterias, retirement accounts—all of these can be made…
An Ethical Systems Book Review BY DAVID NEWMAN Sidetracked: Why Our Decisions Get Derailed, and How We Can Stick to the Planby Francesca GinoHarvard Business Review Press (2013) (public library)Summarized by Jennifer Fang Overview The adage “the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry” succinctly summarizes the difficulties of executing even the most…
BY JEREMY WILLINGER Ethics and trust are inextricably linked. We are interested in ethics in large part because we are concerned, even obsessed, with the question of who we can trust is a world where there is risk and uncertainty. In our relationships, we humans are much more concerned about assessing trustworthiness of others than we…
BY ETHICAL SYSTEMS After each major business scandal, a chorus of voices calls for business schools to work harder to instill ethics into their students. But what exactly should they doOn this page we focus on what business schools can do that may lead to stroner ethical systems in the corporate world. Some common changes business schools have made to…
BY ETHICAL SYSTEMS Corporate culture, a rather nebulous psychological construct, is nevertheless part of an organization’s personality. It informs employees—via expectations, standards, prohibitions, and norms, both written and unwritten—how to behave, ultimately driving individual and group-level behavior. This culture is also inherently and deeply linked to ethics, because individual employees tend to act in accordance with…
Q: When can you quit your day job when starting a small business? A:When you are starting a business, your personal finances are inseparable from the business. So you need to factor your living expenses into all your financial calculations. An exercise I use with my students is to have them calculate their “runway.” It…
ETHICAL SYSTEMS Cheating, misconduct, deception and other forms of unethical behavior are widespread today, not just in business but in sports, government, schools, and many other arenas. While the media often focuses on extreme cases of cheating and sensational scams (such as Madoff’s ponzi scheme), less attention is paid to what researchers call “ordinary unethical behavior.” For example:…
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