Leadership Ethics: Moral Power for Business Leaders

What is moral power? Whether projected through Hillary Clinton, Mother Theresa, the Dalai Lama, or Warren Buffet, humans recognize and respond to moral power. Moral power connects people viscerally with their values. Why is the woman so reviled for her ’stay home and bake cookies’ remark now one of the most trusted and admired people in America? How could a woman who harbored despairing doubt about the existence of God become so widely revered for her saintly love of the poor? How did the world come to embrace an obscure Tibetan spiritual leader? Does Warren Buffet project moral power because he built a huge fortune or is his huge fortune a result of his moral power? While these questions may pique our curiosity, a more compelling concern about moral power is the growing focus on the values driving business, economic, and social decisions that were once relatively uncontested. This is important for several reasons. First, business -- value creation and trade -- are increasingly about values. Furthermore, values are more about people and relationships than about metrics of capital accumulation. Ultimately, business leadership inherently involves the exercise of moral power to resolve value conflicts, manage ethical challenges, motivate workers to act on core values to deliver on a value proposition, and create value that fosters human flourishing. As business stakeholders broaden their scope of interest to consider human and social values in their investment, employment, and managerial calculus, a new approach to wealth creation is transforming business from transactional management of tasks and processes to a dynamic relational model of leading people in strategies to create shared value. This book gives students and business leaders the ability to recognize, exercise, and galvanize moral power at work as a crucial leadership skill requiring a holistic, positive understanding of human moral capabilities.