How to Spark Moral Imagination
Moral insights often arrive as suddenly and unexpectedly as lightning. But that doesn't mean we wait around for them to strike.
Featured Thought Leadership
Stories Make Your Values Stick
When it comes to building character and ethical cultures, stories aren't entertainment. They are essential.
Is ethical leadership an art?
Leaders who want to do the right thing can find help from an unlikely source: the imagination.
The Power of Positive-Sum Thinking
We can tell a better story about business. First, we need to recognize how cooperation—and not greed—makes business tick.
Want to be a compassionate leader? Start with self-compassion.
Being kind to yourself empowers you to grow and give.
Our Favorite Books of 2020
The books listed here have helped us find a higher—and more hopeful—way of thinking during the pandemic. We know they can help you emerge from the mire of 2020 ready to lead your team into a better and brighter 2021.
What Most Leaders Miss About the Value of Virtue
New research suggests that to achieve the highest levels of performance, leaders need both character and competence.
Get better at disagreement with this four-step "receptiveness recipe."
Here's how a new research-based formula—generated with the help of machine learning—can keep conflicts from escalating out of control.
Finding Profit and Purpose by Hiring a Workforce Others Overlooked
As a Senior Vice President at Walgreens, Randy Lewis bet his career on a plan to hire 200 people with disabilities to staff a brand new distribution center. Lewis's plan worked, and it taught him powerful lessons about using business as a tool to help others succeed.
A New Framework for Advancing Racial Literacy in Tech
Mutale Nkonde, CEO of AI for the People, shares her approach to advancing racial literacy in the tech industry.
Announcing the Next Chapter in the Center's History
We are pleased to announce that moral philosopher James Otteson will serve as the new Faculty Director of the Notre Dame Deloitte Center for Ethical Leadership. Otteson is the John T. Ryan Jr. Professor of Business Ethics at Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business. He received his BA from the Program of Liberal Studies at the University of Notre Dame and his PhD in philosophy from the University of Chicago. He specializes in business ethics, political economy, the history of economic thought, and eighteenth-century moral philosophy. His most recent book is Honorable Business: A Framework for Business in a Just and Humane Society (Oxford, 2019).
The Center would like to thank Christopher Adkins, who has served as the Rex and Alice A. Martin Faculty Director of the Notre Dame Deloitte Center since 2016. As of January 1, 2021, Chris is serving as the inaugural academic director of a new program, Leadership Development, a uniquely Notre Dame leadership development program to be offered to Mendoza graduate program students. Chris will continue to work with the Center as a faculty fellow.
The Center’s mission will be to continue to support engagement, targeted research, and outreach and dissemination that reflects the Center’s identity and promotes ethical leadership in business. The Center’s goal is to disseminate innovative, targeted and accessible programming and research in ethical leadership, and to become a leading home and platform for impactful business ethics research, education and outreach.
Why do people do the right thing?
At the Notre Dame Deloitte Center for Ethical Leadership, we believe that ethics can drive the business world forward. We aim to understand how ethical behavior is generated in work contexts. By connecting academic and business thought leaders to explore character ethics, we create and disseminate content that is forward-looking, pragmatic, and provocative.
Collaboration with Ethical Systems
Our behavioral science one-sheets, developed in collaboration with Ethical Systems, are designed to connect behavioral science concepts to daily workflow and organizational cultures. We use simple language and concrete examples about how to apply behavioral science concepts in practice. We have added a creative commons license to allow you and your organization to use these one-sheets in a variety of ways, including:
- Handouts to team members
- Posting in common areas
- Including in new-hire packages
- Incorporating into training seminars
- Executive coaching programs
Downloads
- Bounded Ethicality
- Ethical Fading
- Ethics Pays
- Motivated Reasoning
- Nudging for Ethics
- Speak Up Culture