An innovative business book positioning ethical practice as the cornerstone of success

“Business ethics? Isn’t that an oxymoron?” As a lecturer in ethics, communication, and leadership at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and a moderator of the Aspen Executive Seminar, Leigh Hafrey has heard time and again that ethics and business don’t mix. In The Story of Success: Five Steps to Mastering Ethics in Business , Hafrey draws on fifteen years of conversations with businesspeople at all stages of their careers, from MBA to Chairman of the Board, to articulate five steps that generate ethical practice:

1. Speak Up, Speak Out: define your managerial style

2. See the Big Picture: recognize the forces that affect your practice

3. Break the Rules, Make the Rules, Absorb the Costs: drive change, and know it

4. Tell Good Stories: find stories that bring out the best in your people and yourself

5. Test for Truth: distinguish fact from fantasy in your story-telling

Hafrey illustrates these five steps through contemporary books and movies: to show how we elaborate a managerial style from early childhood, he discusses adult readings of Du Bose Heyward’s classic children’s tale, The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes ; to explain professional standards, he quotes Chinese MBA’s on the warrior code of characters in Ang Lee’s Academy Award-winning film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Hafrey juxtaposes these reports with real-life businesspeople’s stories of career challenge and personal success, and speculates on the way in which American business values increasingly shape and will be shaped by global culture.