Have a Good Life

Richard Shell is a global thought leader and senior faculty member at one of the world’s leading business schools, the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He serves as Chair of Wharton’s Legal Studies and Business Ethics Department, the largest department of its kind in the world. His forthcoming book, The Conscience Code: Lead with Your Values. Advance Your Career. addresses an increasingly urgent problem in today’s workplace: standing up for core values such as honesty, fairness, personal dignity, and justice when the pressure is on to look the other way.

• You’re not a bad person if you do a bad thing.
• Misconstrued or perverse incentives
• Deadlines, compensation, etc. are rewards for achieving a goal
• Doing it, and covering up from it.
• Rationalizations - People anchor their pride in their role and in moral identity
• We do a lot to avoid admitting making a mistake.
• No Child Left Behind forced people to cut corners.
• Change incentives or strengthen people to resist them?
• Incentives are creating a toxic culture
• If you label it as something wrong, you’ll stand to the side of it.
• You have to think of yourself as a person of conscience first?
• What would a person of conscience do?
• Violate your values or you quit.
• Your values are what you’re willing to pay for them.
• When people get to impasse, they get more creative.
• How to stand and fight instead of quitting.
• The five pressures: peer, authority pressure, incentives, role, systemic PAIRS.
• Easier to implement a conscience
• When people are arguing over their interests they are different than arguing over their beliefs.
• Incentives don’t work when talking about beliefs.
• George Washington story
• 3 sources for values: family, spiritual, education
• Competing aspects of conscience
• Move from person of conscience to process

Check out this episode!