Today's business leaders regularly face complex ethical challenges that impact them, their businesses, and other stakeholders. Unfortunately, they often unconsciously make decisions using underlying principles that predispose them to biases and errors in judgment. By recognizing some of these challenges, they can learn to avoid 'ethical danger zones' and become more effective leaders. The authors explain that developing a framework to improve ethical decision making entails a focus on three key areas: quality, breadth, and honesty. By identifying and confronting the biases outlined herein, managers can make more rational and ethical decisions

Preparations for GPC's 75th anniversary are in full swing when the company archivist, David Fisher, uncovers a stash of letters from the founder to a wartime sweetheart. Amid Hud Parker's declarations of devotion is a page featuring formulas for GPC's first product, Parkelite. But it seems clear from the document that Hud Parker was not the miracle plastic's true inventor. David recalls that a lawsuit was brought against the company in 1938 by the father of Karl Gintz, claiming that his son, by then deceased, had been the sole inventor of Parkelite. Hud and Karl had been fellow chemistry students at Princeton, close friends, and army buddies. The lawsuit was decided in favor of GPC, but, David believes, this newly unearthed document would have allowed the Gintz family to prevail. Now Hap Parker, grandson of the founder and GPC's current CEO, must decide what to do. His grandfather's name doesn't deserve to be impugned: Even if Hud hadn't invented Parkelite, he built the company that brought it, and many innovations since, to market. Newland Lowell, GPC's lawyer, counsels Hap that it may not be necessary to divulge the discovery. He lays out a convincing argument that this evidence might not have changed the trial's outcome and he states that no heirs to Karl Gintz have been located. He speculates, plausibly, that the two fellow chemists might have been collaborating on the innovation all along. Still, concealment makes Hap uncomfortable: GPC's corporate culture has always embraced integrity. He's just decided to make the finding public when a chance encounter with three managers gives him pause again. Is it fair to GPC's 8,000 employees to destroy a myth--even if it is a myth--that informs a vibrant and fair-dealing culture? In R0206A and R0206Z, four commentators weigh in on this fictional case.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Executives today face many difficult, potentially explosive situations in which they must make decisions that can help or harm their firms, themselves, and others. How can they improve the ethical quality of their decisions? How can they ensure that their decisions will not backfire? The authors discuss three types of theories--theories about the world, theories about other people, and theories about ourselves--that help executives understand how they make the judgments on which they base their decisions. By understanding those theories, they can learn how to make better, more ethical decisions.