 Speech Topics
The Guts of Tough Decisions
You know it’s the right thing to do—but have you got the moral courage to do it? In the rogue’s gallery of executive failures, there’s a wing reserved for those whose integrity buckled in a crisis. Legendary leaders are known for two things: They make the tough ethical calls, and they’ve got the guts to act when their values are put to the test. Kidder, a consummate storyteller, uses gripping accounts from his decades of interviewing to describe how individuals and organizations build Ethical Fitness® —a term so unique and compelling that he’s had to register it. Drawing on two of his highly regarded books—How Good People Make Tough Choices, and Moral Courage—he
· Explains why our toughest decisions are not right versus wrong but right versus right.
· Describes the four dilemma paradigms that help us make these decisions—truth vs. loyalty, individual vs. community, short-term vs. long-term, and justice vs. mercy.
· Shows how moral courage—the willing endurance of significant danger for the sake of principles—lets us put ethics into action.
Sketches out the characteristics of morally courageous leaders—high tolerance for ambiguity, public exposure, and personal risk—while emphasizing the crucial role of trust.
It Pays To Do the Right Thing: Building Cultures of Integrity
Today’s financial washout is sending public moral outrage off the charts. It’s also raising the toughest business question of our age: Can companies be both highly successful and unflinchingly ethical? Kidder, founder of the Institute for Global Ethics and an award-winning author, explains how this crisis is forcing us to reinvent integrity not as an option but as an essential strategy for success. Using well-chiseled concepts and real-life stories based on his 2009 book, The Ethics Recession: Reflections on the Moral Underpinnings of the Current Economic Crisis, Kidder invites us to think beyond personal ethics and into organizational integrity. Extracting deep lessons from the ethics recession, Kidder helps us learn how to
· Harness the five core global values of honesty, responsibility, respect, responsibility, and compassion to help employees learn to want to do right, strengthen reputations, and set best-in-class standards.
· Treat ethics as a decision skill for resolving right-versus-right dilemmas, not just as a compliance device for enforcing rules.
· Recognize and apply ten hallmarks of a culture of integrity that help us align stated culture with practiced culture.
Measure organizational progress as it moves from cultures of authority through cultures of communication and on to cultures of integrity.
How Technology Tests Our Ethics
As technology blows back the limits of the physical world, it’s reshaping our ethical universe. How? Largely by enabling single unethical individuals to create world-class calamities. The meltdown at Chernobyl, the $5.5 billion damage from the I LOVE YOU computer virus, the deadly Los Angeles train wreck caused by a text-messaging driver—technology leverages our ethics, turning bad choices into terrible consequences. Rushworth Kidder, the first Western journalist to visit Chernobyl and a long-time tech watcher, raises the core question for our age: Can we survive the 21st century with the ethics of the 20th century? Drawing three crucial learnings from his experience, he argues that:
· New technologies always raise ethical challenges. Just as genome research invited designer babies, so cell-phone cameras produced “sexting.” We can’t abolish innovation. But we can learn to be moral futurists, spotting ethical issues and addressing them before they slam into our culture.
· True, our ethical barometer is slowly rising—but the pace of technology is always skyrocketing. Our job? Narrow that gap by making sure that those who run tomorrow’s massive systems learn to do it with real integrity.
· Technology always creates global systems, not just tech-savvy individuals. Tomorrow’s organization, too, needs more than just personal ethics. We can learn to build entire cultures of integrity that promote innovation, reduce risk, and telegraph trustworthiness to clients, regulators, and the public.
Using compelling accounts of this technological leveraging, Kidder sets forth a well developed, easily grasped methodology for coherent ethical decision making in an age where “CIO” must mean not only chief information officer but chief integrity officer.
About Rushworth Kidder
The tools Dr. Rush Kidder provides help people challenged by situations with no easy answers see through the complexities and moral dilemmas to make the best decision.
Beyond Compliance: The topic of moral courage - the difference between “talking” ethics and “doing” ethics—is front and center in today’s culture. Every day, organizations must decide between competing choices, both seemingly “right”—Truth vs. Loyalty; Short Term vs. Long Term; Individual vs. Community; Justice vs. Mercy. With exceptional clarity, Dr. Rush Kidder brings compelling examples to audiences seeking to move beyond compliance to create cultures of integrity.
No Easy Answer: While the choice between right and wrong is generally clear-cut, today’s business environment often forces choices between competing “rights.” Kidder serves up a common language and a methodology for analyzing situations where two values conflict. A superb storyteller, he uses current case studies to show his audiences how to choose the “higher right” based on universally shared core values including compassion, fairness, honesty, respect and responsibility.
Prolific Author and Teacher: As founder and head of a non-profit organization committed to enhancing ethical education, Kidder has worked for more than decade to refine his guidelines for ethical decision-making. Now, he lends his wisdom, narrative style, and sense of humor as a former award-winning journalist and author of several books, including The Ethics Recession, How Good People Make Tough Choices, Moral Courage and Good Kids, Tough Choices: How to Help Your Children Do the Right Thing (September 2010) to the boards of corporations, universities, think tanks and charitable groups.
Ethical Fitness ®: Both society and organizations benefit when individuals are armed with tools for responding decisively to ethical challenges at work, at home and in the community. Kidder gives audiences immediate, usable decision-making frameworks that enable leaders to make clear, confident moral choices in an increasingly complex environment:
* Proffers guidelines to employees for seeing the issues clearly and thinking for themselves
* Delineates a path to understanding how to “do the right thing”
* Makes clear connections between values, ethics and the bottom line
* Changes the cultural mindset from “I’m right - you’re wrong” to “What’s the higher right?”
* Enhances audiences’ ability to distinguish right from wrong in a technology-driven age where the consequences of ethical abuse are magnified
* Regularly leaves his audiences wanting more, but able to put into immediate practice-in the workplace and in their personal lives-the key take-aways from the discussion.
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