I am Guido Palazzo,
a professor of business ethics at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland and in my research I try to understand, why all those big corporate scandals happen that we read about in the news every day.
why do good people do bad things?
what drives epic ethical failure in organizations?
Have you ever read about a corporate scandal in the news and thought that next time, it could be you and your organization? Probably not.
We all tend to believe that bad things are done by bad people. And since we consider ourselves to be decent human beings, we don’t believe we would ever engage in similar behavior. And yet, most of the time, it is people like you and me who push organizations over the ethical edge.
We need to better understand the mechanisms behind systematic organizational misbehavior. What if there is the same repeating pattern in all those scandals? What if you could see it coming? What if you could learn to better protect your own integrity and that of your organization?
what people say
“Fantastic, real energy boost”
“I now view the world through a different prism”
“An incredible experience. Guido is a magician”
my latest blog posts
From Übermensch to Uber-man
Discover the many frightening parallels between early Italian Fascism and tech entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley today.
Reimagining Academia in the Face of Urgent Global Challenges
Our system of knowledge production is increasingly dysfunctional from a societal perspective and one of the reasons might be the incentive mechanism of the academic world.
“Put on your management hat” – How framing contributes to unethical decisions
Why do good people sometimes make unethical decision? One answer to this question is that they are caught in a too narrow frame of their decision and become victims of unintentional blindness.