Blind Spots: Why We Fail to Do What's Right and What to Do about It
Few would praise the business world for its ethical behaviour over the past decade. Whether it's BP smearing the Gulf of Mexico in crude or financial foul play at Lehman Brothers, ethical missteps have had far-reaching consequences.
For those businessmen in need of a little soul-searching, this book will be of assistance. Just don't expect redemption.
Blind Spots is a bold argument against the decency of human beings, showing how we subvert our ethical principles time and time again.
Noting a human tendency to justify our own actions to ourselves with little thought for their consequences, business professors Max Bazerman and Ann Tenbrunsel explain how employees can give rise to dysfunctional organisations for fear of rocking the boat.
The authors apportion equal blame to subordinates who fail to blow the whistle on the wrongs they see and the Bill Clintons and Rod Blagojeviches of the world who knowingly transgress yet profess innocence.
Not only that, bold gestures towards instilling greater ethics, such as an oath signed by Harvard MBA students in 2009 in the wake of the financial crisis, are dismissed as futile.
At a brisk 170 pages, the book harbours few illusions about the limits of ethical behaviour and largely avoids pontification.
The authors are fully aware of the buzzing sounds, screens and deadlines we live by, and note the ways that our ability to make complex ethical decisions quickly fall apart under pressure - and especially how errors can creep past when we are asked to focus on a specific task.
The authors adopt a lively tone throughout and harness a broad mix of examples, from lab experiments to the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster and the collapse of Enron.
They hope that greater awareness of moral missteps may help readers avoid them. However, we are left with a handbook for how to obfuscate, manipulate and convince oneself of one's own righteousness. By the end, one wonders whether that may be the biggest blind spot of all.