Spiritual Leadership in Business: Transcending the Ethical

The spiritual business leader who searches for personal and profes-sional integration is the chief beneficiary of this booklet, 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. Next I’ll look at the business literature on spiritual leadership—scholarship that conflates such leadership with ethical leadership. I extract residue from that extant literature that can serve as a launching pad for an account of spiritual leadership that is grounded in transcendent religious experience.

The book: Spiritual Leadership in Business is available in print and as an ebook at Amazon.com

Essays on the Financial Crisis

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 to the firm level and that of the financial system itself, and legal accountability for the culprits. The collection of essays begins with a series of essays on Lehman Brothers, with particular attention on its last CEO, Richard Fuld. Given the fraud surrounding subprime-mortgage bonds at numerous banks, the second part of the book looks at why legal accountability was so elusive in the United States. Weaknesses in the financial regulation, with particular attention to whether agencies had been captured by their respective regulated firms, comprises the third part. The fourth part examines the culpability of the Federal Reserve Bank, which had perhaps been too close to its regulated banks to anticipate the crisis. The book concludes with essays on why business ethics had been so very weak. The careful reader will take from the book a sense that the financial system remained vulnerable even after government attempts to reduce the systemic risks of a big bank going under. 

The book: Essays on the Financial Crisis, is available in print and as an ebook at Amazon.com.

Essays on Two Federal Empires

This collection of essays suggests that the E.U. and U.S. are both cases of modern federalism at the empire political-level and scale. Distinct attributes and dynamics apply, which do not apply at the state level. Unfortunately, too often today, people treat a state in one union as equivalent to the other union rather than to one if its own states. This category mistake ignores vital differences, and thus is apt to result in sub-optimal public policy and even governmental design. To be sure, each union faces its own risks--dissolution being a threat for the E.U. and consolidation for the U.S. Though correcting for the passage of time, dissolution is/was a risk for both the early E.U. and the early U.S. Such a basis of comparison is optimal. Americans and Europeans can indeed learn from each other, with more perfect unions resulting. 

The book, Essays on Two Federal Empires, is available in print and as an ebook at Amazon.com.