Books about Ethics

The techniques in this book are immortal. Dale Carnegie's book is very compelling 70 years later. The most important aspect of the book is that first and foremost, it is a book about sincerity and deep human values. Winning friends and influencing people comes first from genuine respect and caring for others. The book's techniques provide additional guidance in identifying blind spots in one's behavior that turn off people and create unnecessary friction.

Tags: leadership business ethics

Every person has encountered demeaning jerks in the workplace and had to face their intimidation and attacks. This excellent book is a survival guide to how you can keep your sanity in such an environment. It also illustrates that we may also at times behave like creeps and provides us ways to recognize and avoid such behavior. The book shows examples of successful jerks, but points out how such success could be delusional because there are high costs with such behavior. Finally, the author explains how an institution can create and implement a policy against such destructive people.

Tags: business management ethics

This is primarily an ethics book discussing the concept of kindness in various situations. It attempts to explain what true kindness is and also explores situations where people create harm by assuming what they do is a kind act. The author tries to look at kindness in different cultures, but it is not given sufficiently good treatment. Overall, a good book.

Tags: ethics

"The Prince" is an all-time reviled book and the term "Machiavellian" is closely associated with evil and cunning. But read it and you will find that it is astonishingly relevant to our times, especially world politics and business competition. Machiavelli became notorious because he put on paper what many people actually think and he put his focus on the ends instead of the means. There is evil in this world and people exhibit selfish, ungrateful and destructive behavior. For someone to succeed as a leader in the real world, it is necessary to expect and prepare for it. Modern issues like the Iraq War and Business Outsourcing can be analyzed through the lens of this book and it is interesting to see what answers they reveal. The only minus of this book is its use of long-forgotten examples from the times of the author. You cannot fault the author for doing that, of course, as he wouldn't have known that centuries later, people would be still be reading him.

Tags: leadership politics ethics

I was searching the local library for a book related to business ethics, when I came across this title in the web search of the library. Since the search result did not show the quotes around the word "business", I was a bit shocked. I thought the author, John C. Maxwell, was probably suggesting that ethics have no role in the business world. On looking up the book at the library, I saw the quotes, but I still didn't get it until I read the sub-text to the title, "There's only one rule for making decisions."

The author's primary point is that there is no separate set of rules that one lives by at the business place. He says that to conduct business ethically, we don't need to create another set of rules. We just need to follow the ethical rules that would apply in any situation, whether it is at home, in the workplace or in the playground.

The book's message resonates with me. I agree with the author that a person who lives by proper ethical decisions in his or her personal life will have no problems conducting an ethical business. Business is just another activity that the person must apply his or her life philosophy or rules to. Thus, the author makes his argument that there is no "business" ethics - there is just "ethics" which one may apply to different circumstances and situations in life.

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Tags: business management ethics