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Review of The Mind of a Leader: How to Lead Yourself, Your People, and Your Organization for Extraordinary Results by R. Hougaard and J. Carter

Harvard Business Review Press, 2018, 236 pp., ISBN: 9781633693425, Hardcover

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Notes

  1. “Mindfulness training helps you increase your self-awareness and thereby become more aware of what makes you truly happy” (Hougaard and Carter, p. 42). “Selflessness can be realized and cultivated with training” (Id., p. 76). “Compassion can be trained through a number of time-tested practices” (Id., p. 154).

  2. Moral concepts, including virtue concepts, possess thickness in varying degrees, which differ depending on context. Thinner moral notions tend to be those that express conclusions and “report overall moral judgments, but without offering much, if anything, by way of a case to ground those judgments.” Dworkin (2011) at 182.

  3. The scenario is inspired by Ronald Dworkin’s discussion of moral justification (Dworkin 2011, p. 78; Guest 2011). Ethical issues surrounding abortion are relevant to many executive business decisions, especially matters regarding mutual funds and similar investments. (Netzly 2018). Joseph Badaracco shows how the morality of abortion figured into a corporate leader’s deliberation in the case of Roussel-Uclaf’s introduction of RU486 into the marketplace. (Badaracco 1997, pp. 20–23).

  4. Reudy and Schweitzer (2010).

  5. This leads to deep problems—for philosophy, psychology, religion, and other fields—tied to the paradox found in some self-cultivating philosophies from ancient Greece, China, and India that purport to deny the existence of the self. For instance, Buddhism claims that there is no self, but most modern treatments of wellbeing presuppose that we have a self in the sense denied by Buddhism. See Gowans (2016).

  6. See, e.g., Gillis (2014) and Klein (2016).

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  1. Gabelli School of Business, Fordham University, New York, NY, USA

    Kevin T. Jackson

  2. Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management, Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Brussels, Belgium

    Kevin T. Jackson

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Jackson, K.T. Review of The Mind of a Leader: How to Lead Yourself, Your People, and Your Organization for Extraordinary Results by R. Hougaard and J. Carter. J Bus Ethics 159, 927–934 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-019-04255-z

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