The Moral Advantage How to Succeed in Business by Doing the Right Thing

by Damon, William

• ISBN13: 9781576752067
• ISBN10: 1576752062
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-08-15
• Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers

Summary

This timely book is the result of a Stanford University study of "good work" in business, under William Damon's direction. During the course of the study, researchers interviewed 48 men and women who have achieved success in business. The interviews revealed the surprisingly strong role that morality can play in successful business careers. Based on this information, Damon has developed a set of principles for using the Moral Advantage in business. These principles include "moral imagination" - creating a business concept that serves a larger purpose without losing profits; forthright communication that inspires trust; cooperative strategies that build teamwork and community; uses of the Golden Rule for managing complex relationships; philanthropic efforts that express compassion; and a public commitment to ethical standards. The book shows how and when business people can most effectively draw on these principles and explains how to develop the personal capacity to do so throughout a career.

Author Biography

William Damon is Professor of Education at Stanford University; Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace; and Director of the Center on Adolescence at Stanford. Prior to coming to California, he was University Professor and Director of the Center for the Study of Human Development at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.
Damon has written widely on moral commitment at all stages of life. For the past seven years, Damon has been working on a collaborative project (with Howard Gardner and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi) aimed at fostering excellence and social responsibility in key domains of contemporary work. The domains include business, journalism, the sciences, the arts, higher education, and philanthropy. As part of this broad “Good Work” project (www.goodworkproject.org), Damon has teamed up with a group of leading journalists (the Washington-based Committee for Concerned Journalists) to create a “traveling curriculum” in journalism studies (see www.journalism .org). This training program has already brought principles of good work to hundreds of print, broadcast, and Internet newsrooms.

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
Introduction: Success and Satisfaction in Business	1	(18)
1 Leading Lights	19	(23)
2 The Moral Advantage	42	(22)
3 Generative Morality: Acts of Creation	64	(24)
4 Empathic Morality and the Golden Rule	88	(19)
5 Business Ethics That Come Naturally	107	(19)
6 Philanthropy in Business: Doing it Right	126	(21)
7 Forging a Moral Identity in Business	147	(14)
Notes	161	(6)
Index	167	(6)
About the Author	173