Giving Voice to Values
How to Speak Your Mind When You Know What's Right
How can you effectively stand up for your values when pressured by your boss, customers, or shareholders to do the opposite? Babson College business educator and consultant Mary Gentile draws on actual business experiences as well as social science research to challenge the assumptions about business ethics at companies and business schools. She gives business leaders, managers, and students the tools not just to recognize what is right, but also to ensure that the right things happen. The book is inspired by a programme Gentile launched at the Aspen Institute with Yale School of Management, and now housed at Babson College, with pilot programmes in over one hundred schools and organizations, including INSEAD and MIT Sloan School of Management. She explains why past attempts at preparing business leaders to act ethically too often failed, arguing that the issue isn't distinguishing what is right or wrong, but knowing how to act on your values despite opposing pressure. Through research-based advice, practical exercises, and scripts for handling a wide range of ethical dilemmas, Gentile empowers business leaders with the skills to voice and act on their values, and align their professional path with their principles. "Giving Voice to Values" is an engaging, innovative, and useful guide that is essential reading for anyone in business.
About the Author
Mary C. Gentile consults on management education and values-driven leadership. In her ten-year tenure at Harvard Business School, she developed and taught the school's first course on managing diversity, and helped design and taught its first required module on ethical decision-making. Currently she is director of the Giving Voice to Values curriculum and senior research scholar at Babson College. Her articles have appeared in "Harvard Business Review", "strategy+business", "BizEd", "CFO Magazine", and "Risk Managemen"t, and she has written several book on ethics and diversity.
Reviews
"Mary Gentile has responded to the cries of business and business school critics by shifting our attention from debating right vs wrong and right vs right to acting on the questions these dilemmas raise. This is the most significant contribution to business ethics I have experienced in my professional career! It is destined to shape the behavior of future generations in ways that should make us all much prouder of business as an entity and management as a career" – Leonard A. Schlesinger, President – Babson College
"'Giving Voice To Values' heralds a revolution in ethics education. Gentile isn't interested in abstract (and often fruitless) debates about ethical principles – rather, she wants to help you practice 'what to do' when you know something is unethical. It's like a self-defense class for your soul" – Dan and Chip Heath, authors of "Switch" and "Made to Stick"
