The Moral Compass

The Moral Compass presents a model of morality as a guide to values-based leadership. In a free, pluralist
society, diverse stakeholders with competing moral claims present serious challenges to the strategic
momentum of business, government, NGOs, and community organizations. Leaders need to know
how to manage these challenges effectively. The Moral Compass is their guide. As recent history has
repeatedly demonstrated, leaders who avoid, impose, or gloss over the centrality of values in realizing a
strategic vision can produce severely flawed outcomes such as loss of confidence, corruption, and market
failure. The Moral Compass provides leaders with effective tools to manage this complex, strategic
environment by engaging directly with stakeholders to clarify and articulate normative values without
privileging or diminishing specific moral traditions.
The Moral Compass is rich blend of scholarship, practical wisdom, and usable tools. It is a readable,
accessible book that draws from a range of scholarship in humanities, business, science, and social
sciences to explain the dynamics of human morality. Academically oriented readers will find intellectually challenging resources and references.
Pragmatic readers will be able to use this knowledge to cultivate a robust personal moral compass as a leadership tool for building ethical teams,
practice groups, and organizational cultures, for framing and managing moral dilemmas, and for conducting an ethical discernment and decisionmaking
process.
Ethics in business and leadership studies is emerging as a rich field for scholarship. As an active business faculty member in the field, Dr Thompson
is familiar with the published literature of colleagues in the Society for Business Ethics, the International Society for Business Ethics and Economics,
the Academy of Management, and the American Philosophical Association. As a blend of theory and practice, The Moral Compass is unique among
business ethics books in providing a framework for including and managing the volatility of ethical issues arising from tensions between traditional
religious and modern secular morality. Rather than avoid these conflicts, the book anchors their source in the inherent complexity of human
neurochemistry, individuation, and socialization as a context for moral meaning and conscience. The
book includes numerous exercises in reflection, dialogue, and discernment that enable readers to find
common moral ground with people from divergent wisdom traditions. The book synthesizes a wide
range of knowledge in a presenting practical model for moral discernment, dialogue, and decisionmaking.