Product Description
How should you respond if you are offered an opportunity at work solely because of your race or gender? What should you do if a single parent on your staff is falling behind in his or her work?
How do you lead the launch of a product you know will be extremely controversial?
This is a book about work choices and life choices, and the critical points--or defining moments--at which the two become one. It examines the right-versus-right conflicts that every business manager faces and presents an unorthodox yet practical way for managers to think about and resolve them.
When making hard professional decisions, managers often use personal values as a touchstone. According to Badaracco, however, resolving such dilemmas is not as simple as the inspirational do the right thing school of ethics would have you believe. Defining Moments reveals an alternative approach that helps managers tackle the more complex and troubling question of what to do when doing the right thing requires doing something else wrong, or leaving another right thing undone.
Drawing on philosophy, literature, and three stories that reveal the increasing complexity today's managers face as their careers advance, Defining Moments provides tangible examples, actionable steps, and a flexible framework that managers at all levels can use to make the choices that will shape not only their careers, but their characters.
Compelling, readable, and absent of ethical jargon, Defining Moments gets to the core of what makes being a manager so difficult, as it explores what it means--and whether it's even possible--to be a successful manager and a thoughtful, responsible human being.
Average Customer Review:
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Surprisingly important book for new managers., 2008-02-13
I read this a few years after I had been in senior management and wished deeply that I had discovered it earlier. One of the great challenges facing new managers is decision making where the choices all involve some positive and negative aspects. There are also many organization pressures that force individuals to consider suboptimal paths to "be a team player."
It's a slippery slope and one that is hard to navigate without a great deal of thought and a clarity of personal professional purpose.
This is a small book that easily engages the reader in a fascinating path to understanding these core management issues.
Management, especially senior management, starts to look like politics and turns into a soup of interests and circumstances that make the "right" decision hard to discern and possibly even harder to live with.
Given the impact to size ratio and high quality of the writing I'd make this book a must-read in the category.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Defining Moments: When Manager Must Choose Between Right and Right, 2007-01-04
When managers are making choices, we typically evaluate them by attempting to determine which choice is right and which is not. Many times both choices are "right" choices which makes the decision more difficult and more frustrating for managers.
Badaracco provides excellent examples of real life situations where managers had to choose between "right" and "right" in making a decision. The decision making process used by each manager in the examples was assessed from the philosophical prospectives of three prominant philosophers, Aristotle, Nietzsche, and Machiavelli.
A great read with valuable advice for everyone, not just managers.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Thought Provoking Book, 2005-09-30
The introductory chapters to this book were very good and gave me some good insights. The ending was quite weak and the author didn't have a definite direction in the book. However, I still consider it an interesting read and enjoyed some of his perspectives about ethics.
0 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
Required Reading, 2003-03-12
Great choice for any manager or business administration student.
24 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
Tackling the Dilemmas of Ethical Choices, 2001-06-18
A few weeks ago a customer of mine asked my assistance to help his organisation to write an ethical code. I knew he had been "working" on this topic for the last 2 years and that he had been applying some of the principles I teach in my emotional intelligence classes. Apparently, this hadn't been enough to solve his problem, but it was enough to come back to me to seek my advice. This was one of the books I bought to document myself on the issue.This book was a good resource by providing me different points of views concerning the question, and by pointing out that it's not a simple matter of making a choice (for instance, one lead by intuition and emotions, as is recommended sometimes). The cases presented point to several kinds of dilemmas: the personal ones (choosing between what's right for you and for the organisation), the managerial ones (choosing between the organisation and the people that ore working for it) and the social ones (choosing between the organisation and the larger social system it's a part of). The book also points out different sources we have for basing our decisions on.
The problem remains that values and principles often point into different directions. Ethical choice techniques such as the "sleep-test", the "golden rule" and other sources of inspiration do not solve this.
Learning from that, it becomes clear why one should not expect to find the answers to your ethical problems in this book. Finding "the" answer is "impossible". In a "defining moment", you will have to examine which values you are committed to, these values will be put to test (will you go for their implications) and they will shape your future. I believe (with the author) that there are no easy answers to the *real* issues we are faced with. That's why this book shows in what way you have to search for your answer. Reading this book will at least allow you to ask the right questions and to look at various aspects in order to make a personal choice.
If I would have read this book earlier, my own book would certainly have included a reference to it.
What will I tell my customer? Well, writing the "code" won't be enough, in stead we should focus on teaching people how to make an ethical choice.
Patrick E.C. Merlevede, M.Sc is the main author of "7 Steps to Emotional Intelligence"