Showing results by author "Skip Worden" in All Categories

This pamphlet provides an alternative basis for understanding and applying ethical leadership. Ethical ideologies and the managerialization of leadership are treated as problems to be overcome.

This collection of essays suggests that the EU and US are both cases of modern federalism at the empire political-level and scale.

That the early United States was (or were) referred to as the New Empire would seem nonsensical or flatly erroneous today on both sides of the Atlantic. In fact, Europeans and Americans alike viewed the United Colonies as a potential empire existing uneasily within an empire, the British Empire. This perspective impacted the crafting of the Continental Congress and the US government, whereas the governments of the member states were viewed as commensurate with the contemporary kingdoms in Europe.

This booklet begins by applying Norman Vincent Peale's theory of positive thinking to leadership. From this basis in Christian leadership, the booklet goes on to consider integrity from a Christian standpoint. Christian ethical leadership is then modeled on the Biblical figures of the servant, shepherd, and steward.

Dr. Worden carefully traces the historical shift through the centuries of Christianity through the Reformation on how profit-seeking and wealth are assumed to be related to the sin of greed. In short, making and accumulating money was thought by most major theologians for centuries to indicate the presence of greed, the love of more and more. The uncoupling of greed from earthly treasure began to take hold only with Aquinas amid novel pressures from Commercial Revolution.

The spiritual business leader who searches for personal and professional integration is the chief beneficiary of this audio guide, which can also be taken for a way to promulgate meagerly a new theory on the phenomenon of religion that stresses its uniqueness and distinctiveness. I begin with spirituality in order to find cleave distinctive nature off any reduction to ethics. In distinguishing spirituality from ethics, I look at religious experience of transcendence as a more suitable basis for spirituality.

This audiobook constitutes a critique of the modern notion of a stakeholder as it has been applied in business contexts.

Typically people react emotionally more severely to an exploited conflict of interest when a person gains a personal benefit such as through a bribe. If company, or even an office or department, stands to benefit inordinately, American society typically looks the other way on the institutional conflict of interest rather than taking it apart. This may just be human nature. However, the troubling institutional arrangements within an organization or between them may be tolerated because of the erroneous assumption that conflicts of interest are unethical only when they are exploited.

This pamphlet evaluates Starbucks' corporate responsibility forays given the alternative need to fix managerial flaws down to the store level.

Are American businesses generally less ethical than their counterparts around the world? Does a particular unethical mentality exist in the American business-culture? This book presents a number of cases of unethical conduct at American companies, along with a part on such conduct in companies in other regions of the world. Rather than following with the traditional orientation to ethical decision-making, the emphasis here is on the underlying mentality out of which the decisions come. The mentality itself, often times mendacious, is presented here as inherently unethical in itself. A variety of industries are represented so to demonstrate such a lower common denominator.

In his book, Governor Rick Perry of Texas provides a basis for viewing the states of the US as equivalent to the EU's member-states. All of these states are semi-sovereign, as they have all transferred some governmental sovereignty to federal institutions. This implies that the EU and US are commensurate. I subject these inferences to critique in my booklet on American and European federalism.

The financial crisis that peaked in the United States during the fall of 2008 is an excellent case study of what can go wrong with leadership and corporate governance - in business, financial ethics, government regulation directed both at the firm level and at that of the financial system itself, and legal accountability for the culprits.

The collection begins with a series of essays on Lehman Brothers, with particular attention to its last CEO, Richard Fuld....

Beneath the gloss of Walmart's corporate social responsibility program lies the reality of how the stores are actually managed on a daily basis. This booklet asks whether corporate social responsibility can make up for bad customer treatment and faulty management. Do corporate-level programs geared to societal problems compensate in terms of the company's reputational capital and to the customers? The booklet also looks at whether managers and other employees of a large retail company can be so incompetent that the incompetence itself, apart from any related "attitude," is unethical, given societal expectations as to how businesses are normally operated and customers treated.

Mark Zuckerberg originally intended Facebook to "accomplish a social mission - to make the world more open and connected". The company's troubled IPO compromised that lofty vision as its CEO quickly learned that he had to appease investors rather than employees and users. Hence employees had to hold unsalable stock-options and user-data became fair game. Finance is hegemonic where it plays.