The author emphasizes the need for business ethics due to the recent business scandals and the effect of these incidents on public opinion, and provides suggestions for handling dilemmas by combining good ethics with good business.

Offers managers new tools to deal with the tough problems businesses face today. Reveals how analyzing the ethical dimensions of problems actually offers competitive advantages. Offers illustrative case examples from internally recognized companies showing that high ethics and high profits go hand in hand--and identifies the factors responsible for these companies' success.

Business Ethics: Japan and the Global Economy presents a multicultural perspective of global business ethics with special emphasis on Japanese viewpoints. In contrast to the typical business ethics book written primarily from the viewpoint of Western culture and economy, the majority of the work is by Asian scholars, providing an historical overview of the religious, scientific and cultural phenomena which converged to create modern Japanese business ethics. Perspectives from socioeconomics, sociology, social contract and applied business ethics contribute to the analysis (...) of moral issues. A new Japanese approach to moral science, Moralogy, is introduced and its implications for phenomena such as the Keiretsu system are explored. Concurrently, prominent Western ethicists explore the role of moral language and the implications of Kantian ethics and contractarian approaches for developing universal moral standards. Because Japan is an economic superpower, it is critical to understand the hidden economic culture, work ethic, and way of thinking in business. We must realize these are the results of an integration of historical factors, such as Shintoism, Buddhism, Confuctianism and modern Western science and technology. Business Ethics: Japan and the Global Economy provides philosophical and anthropological analyses of the Japanese economic mind, departing from previous stereotyped approaches. Theoretical discussions based upon social contract theory are presented in order to build ethical norms with cross-cultural activity for multinational economic activities. From such a universal stance, practical proposals are presented to transnationalize the Keiretsu system and other Japanese economic institutions. (shrink)

When business, government, and other professions fail to meet their responsibilities, it is most often not from an inadequacy of tools, techniques, and theory but from an absence of vision and a failure of leadership that saps all sense of individual or organizational purpose and responsibility. To address this concern, management education must be more than the transfer of skills. It should be a moral endeavor, a passing-on from one generation to the next of a kind of wisdom about responsible (...) moral commitment in complex contexts. Faculty at professional schools have an opportunity and a responsibility to help students connect their capacity for high achievement to a sense of purpose and a set of principles. This book is an explanation of how one business school is trying to place leadership, ethics, and corporate responsibility at the center of its mission. It is a call to rebalance the educational trilogy of values, knowledge, and skills. Can Ethics Be Taught? traces the evolution, strategy, and implementation of the pathbreaking Leadership, Ethics, and Corporate Responsibility program at the Harvard Business School. It describes in detail the origins of the initiative for this program, the sophisticated research that went into the approach, timing, and appropriate interventions for working with students and faculty, as well as the design of the program strategy itself. The accomplishments of this program have been substantial; and the lessons drawn from the experience of the Harvard Business School can prove instructive to other professional schools-in such fields as management, public administration, and law-and to corporate leaders as they design and implement their own programs on leadership, ethics, and responsibility. (shrink)