Preface
During my career in business, I personally witnessed the rise and fall of a major company I worked with for 16 years. In fact, I observed this near-collapse close to its very epicentre. As a close colleague and friend of the owner, I experienced how decisions were influenced by light and shade at all levels of management. These can best be described in terms of “virtues” such as integrity, justice and consideration, and “vices” such as greed, envy and unscrupulousness. The potential for exhibiting such types of behavior is embodied in every human being and gets triggered in different ways, depending on the situation. This innate pattern has an effect on corporate culture, and corporate culture has an influence on employees’ conduct. This is why poor decisions get made that cause huge amounts of money to be lost and which may eventually force business owners to sell their company—with unforeseen consequences for the members of its workforce and thus their families.
This course of affairs keeps on happening again and again in a similar way all over the world. It is representative of many other examples of the decline of once very successful large companies. This leads us to some questions of fundamental—indeed, existential—importance. Is running a successful business essentially the same as an egoistic leader exploiting the power in his (or her) hands? Or conversely, could the real basis of successful business management be the ability to tame one’s own negative energy in a responsible manner? What is the level of responsibility necessary to make business decisions properly—and who will benefit from it or suffer as a result?
The question of what behavior is right or morally justified is even more fundamental. What exactly do we mean by ‘good’ and ‘bad’? Why should I behave in a ‘good’ way in the first place? As a young man, one of the things I discussed with my friends was whether being a powerful tyrant or a ruthless CEO who can afford whatever he likes would be preferable to leading a simple but insignificant life. A tyrant would be able to enjoy much more of what life has to offer than someone much further down the ladder, even though they might have a shorter life as a result. I found it easy to answer this question at the time, as I only had to think of the countless people who would suffer as a result of the tyrant’s selfish behavior—I was quick to feel a sense of solidarity with them in their plight.
My academic pursuit of physics and philosophy at the university brought up these old questions once again a few years later. Friedrich Nietzsche’s radical questioning of established morals and his tracing them back to the ‘will to power’ (Wille zur Macht) challenged me to look for new answers this time. In my doctoral thesis, I investigated the philosophical consequences of quantum physics in the works of Carl Friedrich von Weizsaecker, the German physicist and philosopher. One fundamental insight I gained from this was that particles of matter do not exist in isolation, but are actually part of a whole; they all have an effect on each other, and they resonate mutually. Hence, the world in all its diversity is a single entity, the origins of which go back to the Big Bang, according to contemporary theory.
At the same time, however, everything is in the process of evolving and changing. Scholarly opinion today has it that the universe has been expanding and life developing in it ever since the Big Bang occurred. For many people, this oneness is primarily apparent in their ‘will to live’ (Wille zum Leben), to put it in Arthur Schopenhauer’s words. Nietzsche’s ‘will to power’ would be a secondary quality, then, as life is both interaction and a constant, ongoing attempt to fathom the ideal states of energy, which are governed by forces of attraction and repulsion. In human life, which is rather more complex than that, our driving force is the desire for material wealth and happiness and the avoidance of evil and unhappiness. This also means there is a constant struggle for scant resources, each allocation of them automatically provoking a counter-reaction elsewhere.
Is this conflict the only way in which life reveals itself, though? Apparently not, as it can also be seen in sympathy, cooperation, solidarity, and caring. As recent research has shown, not only do humans and highly developed animals behave this way, but even plants do. ‘How should I deal with this contradiction in life as a human being?’, you might ask, ‘Particularly during the parts of my life that I spend at work, employed by an organization?’ This discrepancy is particularly obvious in companies: on one hand, they strive for profit and try to safeguard their own future rather than their competitors’, while on the other, they constantly try to build up and maintain good relationships with their customers, suppliers, financial backers, and even local authorities—with all the stakeholders involved, in fact.
The aim of this textbook is to show how company managers can consciously reflect on their own behavior in terms of whether it is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ and then tailor it accordingly in a responsible, sustainable way. Apart from possessing the ability to interact with others in a perceptive and understanding manner, one of the key qualities responsible leaders should possess is the ability to harness the negative forces that coexist in their own minds and which are capable of destroying people’s lives. A person who is unable to manage his own life and tame his own mind in this respect is certainly not in a position to lead anyone else; he would only ‘mislead’ them, as it were, i.e., deliberately lead them astray, guiding them along paths merely serving his (or her) own egoistic goals.
This book is the result of years of research and teaching on how to promote and justify ethical behavior in business. What counts here is the ‘connection rationality’ (Anschlussrationalität) described by German sociologist Niklas Luhmann. This links new insights with established knowledge. As I have found repeatedly in more than 25 years of teaching managers and students of business administration, these listeners like to hear and see things that relate to their own situation and way of thinking. Understandably, they tend to reject any moral finger-pointing in their own direction. Why? Because most people find that condemning their effort to make a profit is an attack on their own bid for survival—a primeval driving factor in every form of life on our planet. Thus, that is certainly not the best way to draw their attention to ethical issues. This is much more likely to be achieved through sensitization and practical relevance. I will have succeeded in gaining their attention if this book helps them grasp just how important ethical behavior is to the economic success of their own work. By using examples of real-life situations, I aim to demonstrate which risks can arise if they make decisions without due ethical reflection.
Despite having a strong practical focus, this textbook also amply demonstrates the theoretical and philosophical reasoning that underlies ethics. Without theory, the actual cases it outlines would simply be arbitrary, and a work of theory that doesn’t contain any practical applications of it would equally be of limited use.
I have many people to thank for being able to write this book. In particular, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to C...
