The Virtuous Barrel

Almost every day, we witness serious unethical breaches in the business world such as corporate corruption, financial frauds, tax evasion, price-fixing, environmental crimes, and violation of human and workers' rights. Why do these serious episodes of corporate mismanagement are still taking place after decades of debates demanding better governance practices as well as increased regulations demanding higher business standards?In view of the obvious failure of the traditional approach to prevent corporate wrongdoings based on the old carrot-and-stick paradigm, this book analyzes recent business scandals based on the emerging field of behavioral ethics. Behavioral ethics is the most promising field to understand what is going on in businesses as well as to find solutions to promote sound management practices. As a result, this book connects recent business cases from both developed and developing countries to state-of-the-art research on sciences such as social psychology, sociology, behavioral economics, and neuroscience.A key concept developed in the text is that the greatest risk for ethical business practices does not come from a few bad apples, but from ordinary people with good values - like me or you - who start to rationalize their behaviors as a result of cognitive biases, day-to-day pressures, and a perverse temporal dynamic.After understanding why certain business contexts may induce good people to become ethically blind, the book offers a set of solutions in order to create a "virtuous barrel": workplaces in which ethical conduct is easy-to-do, automatic, and customary.These solutions, based on the development of conscious leadership, the creation of an effective ethical culture that brings the best out of people, and the pursuit of a greater purpose beyond profits, are going to constitute a new paradigm for good management and corporate governance in the 21st Century.Improving the ethical behavior in the business world - going way beyond the mere focus on compliance with regulations - is one of the main global challenges of our time. If successful, we will manage to create a much better world for us and the next generations.