Overview to Knowledge and Opportunities

The courses selected can be audited for free and you can find the audit instructions for Coursera and Edx courses.

Justice (Harvard University)

Taught by lauded Harvard professor Michael Sandel, Justice explores critical analysis of classical and contemporary theories of justice, including discussion of present-day applications.

Justice Today: Money, Markets, and Morals (Harvard University)

Explore the ethical controversies of financial markets. Led by award-winning Harvard Professor Michael J. Sandel, professor of the popular HarvardX course Justice, you will explore topics that might sound familiar, like price gouging and human organ sales—but have you thought of linestanding, refugee quotas, or lookism? This course will take a deep dive into various “needs” and whether they abuse market mechanisms.

Conscious Capitalism (Babson College)

Explore ways to cultivate economic, personal, cultural, ecological, and social value simultaneously with Conscious Capitalism

Global Impact: Business Ethics (University of Illinois)

One of the important challenges in global business is working out the extent of these obligations in the interrelationships between businesses and the particular local cultures in which that business operates. The ethical issues arising from these engagements, the kinds of values-based considerations out of which an organization negotiates with local concerns, and how an organization can be both an enabler of economic value while respecting cultural differences are important topics of this course.

Ethical Leadership in a Changing World (Victoria University of Wellington)

What does ethical leadership really mean? Discover the importance of an ethical approach, how ethical issues can be addressed, and how to become an ethical leader yourself.

Ethical Leadership Through Giving Voice to Values (University Virginia)

This course was developed at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia and is taught by top-ranked faculty. You will come away from GVV with an expanded toolkit, as well as practice, in a variety of methods and techniques for voicing and enacting your own values and principles. You will develop and practice leadership skills in "peer coaching” with other learners.

Managing Responsibly: Practicing Sustainability, Responsibility and Ethics (University of Manchester)

Managers are increasingly confronted with issues of sustainability, responsibility and ethics. Managing responsibly is an integrative approach to sustainability, responsibility and ethics, which allows you as a manager to deal competently with such challenges. This course will facilitate your learning process to engage in changing practices to make them more sustainable, responsible, and ethically informed.

Stanford Innovation Lab Entrepreneurship and Ethics (Stanford e-Corner)

Conversations on the leading edge of entrepreneurship, featuring Stanford faculty and other experts on strategy, creativity, technology and smart growth.

List Your Principles, Then Live Them

MasterClass founder and CEO David Rogier stresses the importance of establishing clear principles for your venture. This can be particularly crucial, he finds, when it comes to choosing investors, and shares a story of turning down an attractive VC funding offer because of a value mismatch.

How to Increase Performance and Become a Better Leader | Morten Hansen x Dov Seidman

To produce great value at work is to create output that benefits others tremendously and that is done efficiently and with high quality. Redesign your work to focus on activities that maximize value. Download 5 Steps to Become a Top Performer Guide to learn exactly how to do that.

Facing a Crisis with Principles

Strong, clear principles can help leaders and companies weather a storm. In the first episode of our “Entrepreneurship and Ethics” miniseries, Stanford professor Tom Byers speaks with Stanford lecturer Jack Fuchs and Jazz Pharmaceuticals CEO Bruce Cozadd about how strong principles can help a leader navigate a crisis. Fuchs discusses his “Principled Entrepreneurial Decisions” course, and Cozadd walks through a case study he first presented in that class, focusing on how he leaned on his principles when his company hit a wall during the 2008 economic crash.

Global Ethics: What Should Aspiring Entrepreneurs Know (UMass-Lowell)

Ethics plays a key role in any business, particularly in new ones. Large and established businesses – especially those operating in developed countries – have established ethical codes and practices mainly due to regulatory and normative pressures. However, entrepreneurs in new businesses might not have yet established ethical programs. In this webinar, we will discuss the importance of business ethics with special emphasis on entrepreneurs. We will also analyze the most important aspects of sound business ethics programs that entrepreneurs should consider when growing their ventures.

The Zen of Entrepreneurship (Stanford eCorner)

In the 1990s, Toby Corey co-founded the world’s largest web development company. Since then, he’s started other companies; held senior management positions at SolarCity, Tesla and most recently PlanGrid; and lectured in Stanford’s Department of Management Science & Engineering. Now, he finds himself as concerned by social and environmental problems as with building companies. In response to global crises of climate change and inequality, he advises an approach that he calls “zentrepreneurship,” and articulates principles aimed at helping entrepreneurs integrate creativity and ambition with social and environmental consciousness.

You can search Harvard Business Review to learn more articles on this topic. You can also check if your university library has a subscription to the Business Source Complete database, which provides full-text access to Harvard Business Review articles, or use the library’s interlibrary loan service to access the article.

How to Establish Values on a Small Team

Developing your corporate values early in your company’s history can have a lasting and positive effect on your organization and its culture, and it’s easier to do when your team is small. Whether you’re running a startup or a small business, it’s important to follow a process that allows everyone to contribute. Start by including everyone — this is the advantage to doing this when your company is small.

What You Can Do to Improve Ethics at Your Company

Enron. Wells Fargo. Volkswagen. It’s hard for good, ethical people to imagine how these meltdowns could possibly happen. We assume it’s only the Ken Lays and Bernie Madoffs of the world who will cheat people. But what about the ordinary engineers, managers, and employees who designed cars to cheat automotive pollution controls or set up bank accounts without customers’ permission? We tell ourselves that we would never do those things. And, in truth, most of us won’t cook the books, steal from customers, or take that bribe.

We Shouldn't Always Need a “Business Case” to Do the Right Thing

It’s a relief to have finally moved on from the era in which corporate responsibility meant feel-good philanthropic efforts divorced from an enterprise’s main activities. The problem is that our obsession with making the business case for ethics makes us sound apologetic and hollow. After all, there is also a business case for tax avoidance, deregulation, and even higher death rates.

How to Be a Leader Who Stays True to Their Ethics

Honest conversations are a crucial tool in helping leaders and their organizations successfully act on their ethical ambitions. If you aspire to lead ethically and with high purpose, first turn inwards. Take the time to have an honest conversation with yourself to help figure out what matters to you, and where your ethics lie. Next, align your senior team. Third, be prepared to be derailed. Unfortunately, at some point, pressure to meet shareholder expectations will derail your aspiration to lead with a higher purpose and values. And finally, don’t wait for the whistle to blow.

Companies Need to Pay More Attention to Everyday Unethical

Many large scandals have sounded the alarm on the need to monitor corporate corruption. The typical response from policy makers is to propose a patchwork of reforms to address various corporate transgressions. But by and large, these reforms focus on preventing gross and blatant violations of the law – and they ignore the more banal, ordinary acts of unethicality that are far more common in organizations.

Find more Harvard Business Review articles on Business Ethics.

Click the link to find a Worldcat book record; enter a zipcode to check which library nearby has the book you can borrow. When the record is not available, a link to Amazon is provided.

• Duncan, Sarah. The Ethical Business Book: 50 Ways You Can Help to Protect People, the Planet and Profits. 2019. Print.

• Gratton, Lynda. Living Strategy: Putting People at the Heart of Corporate Purpose. 2015. Print.

• Howard, Ronald A, Clinton D. Korver, and Bill Birchard. Ethics for the Real World: Creating a Personal Code to Guide Decisions in Work and Life. Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2008. Print.

• Sandel, Michael J. Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?, 2015. Print.

• Sandel, Michael J. What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013. Print.

• COLLINS, Jim, and Morten T. HANSEN. Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck-Why Some Thrive Despite Them All. New York: Harper Business/An imprint of Harper Collins publishers, 2011. Print.

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