Moral Courage: The Guts of a Tough Decision

With governance under the microscope as never before, the difference between talking ethics and doing ethics is summed up in two words: Moral Courage, the title of Kidder’s latest book. What is moral courage? How does it work? Where do we get it? With a talk rooted in current news, and based on extensive research on leaders, team players, whistleblowers, and ordinary citizens, Kidder explains moral courage as the intersection of three vectors: overarching principles, awareness of risk, and endurance of hardship. Kidder explores some litmus-test questions for our actions, including:

• Is the risk proportional to the benefit?

• Am I motivated by principle, or just by pride in my own personal beliefs?

• Will my actions create collateral damage among those with no stake in the outcome?

Finally, Kidder analyzes and recommends ways ethical organizations can create clear, values-based decision-making cultures where courage gets saved for big issues because it’s less needed for everyday management.

Making Tough Executive Decisions

In an age of break-neck crisis management, incomplete information, and cross-cultural sensitivities, the toughest executive decisions always have an ethical component. Ethics is certainly about right vs. wrong—as the seemingly never-ending trials of corporate wrongdoers remind us—but just as divisive are issues of right vs. right. Fire the much loved, long-term employee because he can’t grasp the new database, or keep him on even though you need to trim your budget? Speak up for your boss when others are criticizing her unfairly, or avoid being wrongly categorized as a suck-up and yes-man?

Drawing on over a decade of work with thousands of workshop participants through the Institute for Global Ethics, and incorporating findings from his book How Good People Make Tough Choices, Kidder uses real-life dilemmas to illustrate a concrete methodology for right-versus-right decision making. First, he helps audience members to define their values. Next, Kidder sets out four paradigms for our most difficult dilemmas—truth vs. loyalty, individual vs. community, short-term vs. long-term, and justice vs. mercy. Then he explores three specific decision-making principles that we can apply to reach resolution. Finally, Kidder suggests ways to create a corporate culture that shifts decision making from “I’m-right-you’re-wrong” to “What’s-the-higher-right?” as a way to come to authentic, accountable closure after exploring different ethical positions.

Our Ethical Future: Seven Global Trends

What ethical issues will we face in the future? As new technology opens new promises—and new ways to scam the unwary—do we just have to wait for ethical issues to hit us? Kidder explains moral futurism—a methodology for anticipating future ethical challenges and risks—in the context of seven major trends:

1. Rights giving way to responsibilities: Are we shifting from a "gimme mine!" to a "lemme help" mentality—and should we?

2. Individual superstar vs. team player: Will buzz words, worship of the latest profit-increasing business methods, and the “army of one” mentality undercut rationality, or will compassion replace competition?

3. Stagnation overcome by mobility: In the light-speed, double-click pace of the modern world, are individuals coping better with change, or are they losing their values-based roots?

4. Compliance yielding to values: Will the post-SOX climate of hyper-regulation dilute our concern for values and make us think we can legislate behavior?

5. Patients vs. customers: As those needing care are separated from those who pay for it, will we see an ethic of equity, or an overbearing bureaucratization?

6. Security outweighing freedom: As terrorism – and our reaction to it - recalibrates the balance between liberty and lockdown, should collective safety trump individual expression?

7. Collapse of trust in expertise: If leaders in finance, politics, and the church can’t sustain an ethical culture, will a suspicion of all professionals lead us to widespread distrust?

In this talk based on trend-analysis work at the Institute for Global Ethics, Kidder draws on the latest events affecting your organization.

Technology Leverages Our Ethics

In recent decades, global technologies have expanded exponentially. The result: A single unethical decision, amplified through new large-scale systems, can now have world-class consequences in ways impossible even thirty years ago. Illicit movie and music downloads, computer viruses and Internet worms, camera phones, Radio Frequency Identification tags (RFIDs), GPS tracking devices —in these and hundreds of other examples, the interplay between technology and ethics has profound consequences. Kidder explains that technology now leverages our ethics so significantly that new questions arise: Will we survive the 21st century with the ethics of the 20th century, and how will we find employees to run tomorrow’s massive systems with solid, old-fashioned integrity? Based on gripping accounts of this technological leveraging, this talk sets forth a well developed methodology for better ethical decision-making in an age where the CIO must not only be “chief information officer” but “chief integrity officer.”

About Rushworth Kidder

In a straightforward, robust style, Rush Kidder furnishes an indispensable framework for making tough ethical decisions.

Beyond Compliance: The topic of moral courage – the difference between “talking” ethics and “doing” ethics -- is front and center in today’s culture. Every day, organizations must decide between competing choices, both seemingly “right” -- Truth vs. Loyalty; Short Term vs. Long Term; Individual vs. Community; Justice vs. Mercy. With exceptional clarity, Dr. Rush Kidder brings compelling examples to audiences seeking to move beyond compliance to create cultures of integrity.

No Easy Answer: While the choice between right and wrong is generally clear-cut, today’s business environment often forces choices between competing “rights.” Kidder serves up a common language and a methodology for analyzing situations where two values conflict. A superb storyteller, he uses current case studies to show his audiences how to choose the “higher right” based on universally shared core values including compassion, fairness, honesty, respect and responsibility.

Prolific Author and Teacher: As founder and head of a non-profit organization committed to enhancing ethical education, Kidder has worked for more than decade to refine his guidelines for ethical decision-making. Now, he lends his wisdom as a former award-winning journalist and author of eight books, including How Good People Make Tough Choices and Moral Courage, to the boards of universities, think tanks and charitable groups.

Ethical Fitness ®: Both society and organizations benefit when individuals are armed with tools for responding decisively to ethical challenges at work, at home and in the community. Kidder gives audiences immediate, usable decision-making frameworks that enable leaders to make clear, confident moral choices in an increasingly complex environment:

• Proffers guidelines to employees for seeing the issues clearly and thinking for themselves;

• Delineates a path to understanding how to “do the right thing”;

• Makes clear connections between values, ethics and the bottom line;

• Changes the cultural mindset from “I’m right – you’re wrong” to “What’s the higher right?”

• Enhances audiences’ ability to distinguish right from wrong in a technology-

driven age where the consequences of ethical abuse are magnified

Business, Business Leadership,