Ethical Business Leadership: Balancing Theory and Practice

The concept of ethical business leadership is clarified in part by the notion of a Platonic philosophical statesman. It is clarified further in a discussion of a quixotified Sancho Panza (Sancho educated by Don Quixote) as a managerial statesman and in an analysis of Aristotelian ethical business leadership and corporate culture. In his discussion of ethical business leadership, Sherwin Klein strikes a balance between an overly idealistic and theoretical view of this concept and a narrowly practical and realistic one. Moreover, he argues that Aristotelian virtue ethics provides business leaders with a better account of ethical decision-making and a more balanced business ethic than does modern ethical theory.