Chris Bennett

John Zinkin

Being both ethical and successful is challenging. The rewards of unethical behavior are often greater than the price paid for misbehavior. This book explains why leaders, seeking to run ethical and successful organizations, cannot depend only on the law and their organizations to make moral business decisions. The authors explore why making ethical business decisions is harder than is generally understood, and explores the difficulties leaders face as a result of differences in context, circumstances, and other challenges to ethical behavior, such as misleading rhetoric, inappropriate role models, cognitive dissonance and motivated forgetting. They argue that individuals need to establish ethical baselines that they will not cross when making decisions and explain how to do this systematically. The Challenge of Leading an Ethical and Successful Organization offers ways of handling ethical dilemmas successfully. It explores the need to determine in advance the potential areas of ethical conflict, and the potential costs of such conflicts and provides leaders with a practical ethical framework to reconcile ethics with business success. This book is essential reading for professionals, consultants, and academics interested in the ethics of leadership and management.

The Challenge of Leading an Ethical and Successful Organization

Better Governance Across the Board is a practical guide for achieving good corporate governance of organizations regardless of whether they are for profit, listed, state-owned, family owned, or widely held. It delves into the questions boards must ask if they are to fulfill their fiduciary duties, taking account of regulatory issues. Part 1 defines corporate governance, explaining the four reasons why it matters and how it applies to a wide range of organizations. Part 2 explores the "Five P" framework of Purpose, Principles, Power, People, and Processes that helps boards to create sustainable value. Part 3 concludes by showing how the organization’s long-term "license to operate" is achieved by boards focusing on the three most important assets of the organization: its reputation; its people, and its processes. This book explores the dilemmas that currently exist in modern approaches to corporate governance and suggests ways of overcoming them. Based on ten years of teaching more than 1,500 directors of publicly listed companies, it integrates key principles of leadership, ethics, branding, and governance into a unique five-factor framework to help directors make good decisions in strategy, risk management, succession planning, internal controls, and stakeholder engagement.

Creating Value Through Reputation, People, and Processes

Better Governance Across the Board

Christopher Bennett

This thought-provoking and timely book asserts that the dichotomy between leaders and managers described in much business literature fails to recognize how the two roles overlap. The book discusses techniques for senior executives based on history and neuroscience to enhance their "managerial leadership" in different environments. The ethical dilemmas of directors and executives are explored, with lessons from both leadership failures and successes. The Principles and Practice of Effective Leadership redefines "leadership" as a morally neutral activity, reflecting the impact of strategic, cultural and operational contexts on a leader’s effectiveness. The authors suggest there are universal but morally neutral techniques for effective leadership that depend on the context in which they are practiced. In Part 1, the careers and personalities of historical figures including Elizabeth Tudor, Napoleon, and Atatürk are examined. Part 2 deliberates on why leadership cannot be separated from effective management and concludes that leadership is managerial, and best encapsulated in the concept of "wayfinding." In Part 3, the authors discuss the techniques "wayfinders" can learn to be both effective and ethical, using a simple and practical framework. This insightful book is essential reading for professionals, coaches, consultants, and academics interested in techniques and ethics of leadership and executive education.

John Zinkin

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