How could a large, well-regarded European company train thousands of managers to use tactics with the clear intent of making life miserable for tens of thousands of people in the organization?

All under the guise of popular management and change management language.

In this informative and helpful episode, Guido Palazzo, a business ethics professor with a passion for examining and understanding unethical decision-making, provides profound observations about the current state of society, and how to embrace uncertainty, fear, and irrationality with a sense of hope. In addition, he shares ways that leaders and HR professionals can create an organizational culture that encourages ethical behavior.

This conversation includes:

01:18 Why cynicism and hopefulness are not mutually exclusive
05:08 The disruption that always follows the introduction of a new information technology, which causes society to both win and lose specific things
07:40 Key signs that indicate when a society is shifting from an old era into a new era
15:32 The paradox of rational decision making and how organizations must factor in the complexity of what it means to be human
18:35 How ethical tunnel vision works using the example of France Telecom’s tragic story from several years ago
32:56 How organizations can protect against ethical blindness

Guido Palazzo is Professor of Business Ethics at HEC Lausanne, University of Lausanne. In his research, he is passionate about the dark side of the force and examines unethical decision-making from various angles. He is mainly known for his studies in globalization, in particular on human rights violations in global value chains, but he also studies the reasons for unethical behavior in organization and the impact of organized crime on business and society. Currently, he is examining the illegal toxic waste business of the Italian Mafia. He studied business administration and has a PhD in philosophy from the University of Marburg in Germany.”