Good Intentions Aside: A Manager's Guide to Resolving Ethical Problems

Good Intentions Aside addresses the theoretical and practical issues of recognizing and responding to ethical dilemmas. By looking at numerous instances in which individuals face tough moral choices at work, Laura Nash provides managers with real-world problems that make clear the link between good ethics and good business. She shows managers how to get back in touch with their commonsense standards of integrity by providing a set of conceptual tasks and practical questions that help them take a fresh look at their own business thinking. Drawing on extensive interviews with scores of managers, Nash identifies the two primary reasons why well-intentioned people do not always maintain high personal standards in the workplace: traditional management assumptions about the goals of business, and habitual patterns of problem solving that tend to obstruct ethical thinking. The solution, according to Nash, is for managers to adopt a new framework that focuses on providing value to others. By making social relationships the top priority in decision making, managers can act on their good intentions without sacrificing strong economic performance.