profit with honor
Teppo
Daniel Yankelovich has written a book titled Profit with Honor: The New Stage of Market Capitalism, published by Yale University Press.
Here again is a book that presumes that we live in an unprecedented era of corporate corruption (I am not so sure [though open], neither is Peter Klein at the blog Organizations and Markets). That said, the book seems to make a somewhat different argument than other books, at least recognizing that self-interest can indeed be quite enlightened and a mechanism for creating value (something that many reject outright), but a sense of honor and stewardship has been lost. Perhaps (working on my short sentences).
In terms of solutions – things get a bit fuzzy for me once we start talking about "stewardship ethics," community and stakeholder theory (I at one point read much of this literature), on the whole these theories promise much, but once there is talk of actual decision-making and tough real-life matters related to cost, preferences, choice, and scarcity – the arguments become relatively vacuous.
I think good managers and firms have a decent sense for the critical need to keep stakeholders happy – whether employees, customers, surrounding environment, etc – but again, they also face constraints which often don't figure into stakeholder models. (For a discussion of how this relates to employees as stakeholders, see this article on happy hierarchies.)
Well, I have not read the book, so I am simply reading between the lines. Perhaps something for your summer reading list (the book comes highly recommended by a diverse set of scholars – see here).
Here a bit more from the publisher:
The book asserts that American culture has abandoned its old tradition of enlightened self-interest, of “doing well by doing good.” A narrow legalism has taken over (“I didn’t break the law; therefore I didn’t do anything wrong”). Yankelovich argues that attempts to deal with such flawed ethical norms by means of more laws and regulations cannot succeed. He offers a series of case histories to show how and why stewardship ethics can strengthen individuals, corporations, the nation, and the world economy.
For more, see this short blurb on the book at Yale Press Log.
