The Moral Compass presents a model of morality as a guide to values-based leadership. In a free, pluralistsociety, diverse stakeholders with competing moral claims present serious challenges to the strategicmomentum of business, government, NGOs, and community organizations. Leaders need to knowhow to manage these challenges effectively. The Moral Compass is their guide. As recent history hasrepeatedly demonstrated, leaders who avoid, impose, or gloss over the centrality of values in realizing astrategic vision can produce severely flawed outcomes such as loss of confidence, corruption, and marketfailure. The Moral Compass provides leaders with effective tools to manage this complex, strategicenvironment by engaging directly with stakeholders to clarify and articulate normative values withoutprivileging or diminishing specific moral traditions.The Moral Compass is rich blend of scholarship, practical wisdom, and usable tools. It is a readable,accessible book that draws from a range of scholarship in humanities, business, science, and socialsciences to explain the dynamics of human morality. Academically oriented readers will find intellectually challenging resources and references.Pragmatic readers will be able to use this knowledge to cultivate a robust personal moral compass as a leadership tool for building ethical teams,practice groups, and organizational cultures, for framing and managing moral dilemmas, and for conducting an ethical discernment and decisionmakingprocess.Ethics in business and leadership studies is emerging as a rich field for scholarship. As an active business faculty member in the field, Dr Thompsonis familiar with the published literature of colleagues in the Society for Business Ethics, the International Society for Business Ethics and Economics,the Academy of Management, and the American Philosophical Association. As a blend of theory and practice, The Moral Compass is unique amongbusiness ethics books in providing a framework for including and managing the volatility of ethical issues arising from tensions between traditionalreligious and modern secular morality. Rather than avoid these conflicts, the book anchors their source in the inherent complexity of humanneurochemistry, individuation, and socialization as a context for moral meaning and conscience. Thebook includes numerous exercises in reflection, dialogue, and discernment that enable readers to findcommon moral ground with people from divergent wisdom traditions. The book synthesizes a widerange of knowledge in a presenting practical model for moral discernment, dialogue, and decisionmaking.
