When you reflect on the reasons Greg Smith chose to leave Goldman Sachs and place yourselves in his shoes,would you be inclined to make the same decision?Have you ever found yourself or know of other people who found themselves in similar circumstances?What were they?What decision did they take?What considerations factored into their decision to stay or leave?
Archive for the ‘Decision Making’ Category
Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs
March 20th, 2012 by admin | 2 Comments | Filed in Business Ethics, Decision MakingDeveloping Mindful Leaders
December 31st, 2011 by admin | No Comments | Filed in Decision Making, Ethics training, LeadershipThis article asks and answers the question” what if cultivating a successful inner life was front and center on the leadership agenda?”As they note ““Management education must be designed to create a heightened and enlightened ‘consciousness.Management training has traditionally focused on helping leaders develop a particular portfolio of cognitive skills: left-brain thinking, deductive reasoning, analytical problem solving, and solutions engineering. Tomorrow’s managers will require new skills, among them reflective or double-loop learning, systems-based thinking, creative problem solving, and values-driven thinking. Business schools and companies must redesign training programs to help executives develop such skills and reorient management systems to encourage their application.”
So how would we recognize mindful leaders from an ethics perspective?
Inspiring Loyalty by Asking, “What If?” Counterfactual thinking strengthens commitments to people and organizations
December 5th, 2011 by admin | 1 Comment | Filed in Decision Making“What if” is a powerful and emotional question. People often fantasize about how they would handle a tough situation if they got a second chance. At the other extreme, individuals may undergo a life change when someone they care about survives a near-calamity. They ponder, What if he or she had died?
Such counterfactual reflection, as it is called, can elicit intense feelings. People who imagine an alternative history of their company—a concept known as “counterfactual reflection”—tend to feel a greater commitment to their organization, which previous research has shown can affect job turnover, performance, and satisfaction. But the power of counterfactual thinking goes far beyond that. Research by Adam D. Galinsky, a professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg School of management, Brayden King, an associate professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg School, Hal Ersner-Herschfield, an assistant professor of marketing at New York University, and Laura Kray, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, plumbed the depths of counterfactual thinking to see how it influences commitment to people, organizations, and even one’s country.”
This paper focuses on how trust—a key cultural factor—affects firms’ decision-making
November 23rd, 2011 by admin | No Comments | Filed in Business Ethics, Decision Making, Organizational Ethics, Trust“Economists have been paying increasing attention to the role that culture plays in a firm’s overall performance. This paper focuses on how trust—a key cultural factor—affects firms’ decision-making process, size, and productivity. Research was conducted by Nicholas Bloom of Stanford University, Rafaella Sadun of the Harvard Business School, and John Van Reenen of the London School of Economics. Key concepts include:
If a firm is headquartered in a country where trust is prevalent (such as Sweden), it is much more likely to decentralize its decision making than if it is headquartered in a country in which trust is rarer (such as India). In short, higher trust leads to more decentralization.
Trust also enables a firm to hire a large number of plant managers, because the CEO will feel comfortable delegating decisions to their direct reports without spending too much time on supervision. Thus, higher trust increases firm size.
Higher trust increases the marginal value of information technology’s effect on productivity.”
Ethics and Public Life
June 24th, 2011 by admin | No Comments | Filed in Decision Making, DemocracyPhilosopher Jonathan Wolff explores problems and controversies in public policy and argues for a more ethical approach to decision-making.He can be seen here
Candour and Trust
September 6th, 2010 by admin | No Comments | Filed in Business Ethics, Decision Making, Organizational Ethics, Public Sector/GovernmentTrust is understood as the sin qua non in the relationship between the political and civil service communities in Canada and according to an article appearing in the the Ottawa Citizen there is much work to be done. The current loss of trust is costing Canada billions.
The Christian Science Monitor also considers the issue of candour and corporate behaviour .
I am beginning to think that we have not made much progress on this issue in spite of all our efforts to consider the values and ethics dimensions of our decisions.
How we make choices
July 26th, 2010 by admin | No Comments | Filed in Decision MakingSheena Iyengar studies how we make choices – and how we feel about the choices we make. She talks about both trivial choices (Coke v. Pepsi) and profound ones, and shares her groundbreaking research that has uncovered some surprising attitudes about our decisions
Are our ethics approaches facts based?Should they be?
July 18th, 2010 by admin | No Comments | Filed in Decision MakingIt is axiomatic that most of our ways of thinking would be enhanced if we could operate from a factual foundation.I assume that should be particularly true in the world of ethics.What to make of this article from boston.com which challenges that very notion.
Making Decisions on Values, Not Biases
June 6th, 2010 by admin | No Comments | Filed in Business Ethics, Decision Making, Leadership“The sustainability of a corporation depends upon the decision-making capacity of its workers, both individually and collectively, but research shows that human judgment is generally flawed and continuously pervaded by psychological biases. Managers can address these biases and create more effective processes and teams by relying on personal and organizational values in decision-making. “
Jonathan Doochin
Tags: Decision Making, Leadership
The Upside of Irrationality
June 5th, 2010 by admin | No Comments | Filed in Decision Making, LeadershipEthical decision making models that have been developed invariably assume a conscious and rationale human actor. In my June 3rd post I challenged us to think about ethical approaches to non conscious leadership.In a recent interview on NPR, Dan Ariely , the author of “The Upside of Irrationality ” ,examines how our biases predispose us to make unwise decisions and explores how irrationality may help human beings achieve great things .
Tags: Decision Making, Leadership
The Application of Ethics to Nonconscious Leadership
June 3rd, 2010 by admin | No Comments | Filed in Decision Making, LeadershipConversations about ethical leadership, whether in academia or in applied business ethics,assume leadership to be conscious and purpose driven. Harry Spence*, of Harvard’s Kennedy School wonders how our discourse on leadership has only been marginally influenced by “the deepening realization of the impact of our nonconscious processes on our behaviour and decision making…In the absence of knowledge of our nonconscious internal dynamics, leaders regularly betray the very organizations they presume to lead.”
I believe it is time to review our current ethical approaches to assisting individuals and organizations. We should be considering what an ethical framework for Nonconscious leadership might look like.
*Read his full article at The Harvard Business Review
Tags: Decision Making, Leadership