KEYNOTE

Guido Palazzo

Professor

Biography.

Guido Palazzo is a Professor of Business Ethics at HEC Lausanne and one of the world’s most cited scholars in the field. With a PhD in political philosophy from the University of Marburg, he was awarded the Max-Weber-Price for Business Ethics in 2008. Guido has trained leadership teams of global corporations, including Audi, Allianz, Ericsson, and Biontech, and directed a sustainability program for Chinese Vice Ministers. His popular MOOC on unethical decision-making in organizations has attracted over 40,000 participants worldwide.

Talk.

From Yale to Jail. The Dark Pattern of Corporate Moral Failure

Volkswagen, Boeing, Theranos, Uber, FTX, the UK Post office. Almost every day we find another big corporate scandal in the news and in many of those scandals, the production and use of software as at the core. Have you ever asked yourself whether your company could be the next one? Whether you could be involved in such huge trouble? Probably not. People in all those companies also believed it would never happen to them. Until it did. We all tend to believe that bad things are done by bad people – and we are not like them. However, most of the time, it is people like you and me who push organizations over the moral (and legal) cliff. Managers with values and good intentions. If this is the case, 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? After investigating numerous corporate scandals, digging deep into court documents, testimonials, insider reports, I have found the dark pattern that connects all scandals. Find out what it takes to protect your own integrity and that of your organization!

 


 

Learn from Guido Palazzo: Keynote Speaker & Author

book
From the creators of the theory of ethical blindness comes an investigation into how corporate scandals happen, revealing the common pattern behind them and how your organization can avoid them.
Too often, the stories of corporate scandals are narrated like Hollywood movies in which once-celebrated CEOs are unmasked as sociopaths and ultimately convicted for their crimes. What we fail to realize, however, is that most bad things are done by average people with honorable values and without bad intentions.
In The Dark Pattern, two experts in business ethics and decision-making challenge the conventional view that corporate misconduct happens because of a handful of bad actors. Instead, the book shows how entire organizations can fall off the moral cliff because good people become ethically blind.
Drawing on the latest insights from behavioral science, the authors identify nine toxic elements that lead to corporate scandals and offer nine actionable lessons for building morally resilient organizations.
Essential reading for business leaders, The Dark Pattern offers real-world guidance for defending companies against the subtle dynamics of moral erosion.

 

GUIDO PALAZZO is a consultant and professor of business ethics at the University of Lausanne and a business adviser in Switzerland. His work has been published in leading management journals such as the Academy of Management Review and the Academy of Management Journal.
ULRICH HOFFRAGE is a professor of decision theory at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. He is a highly cited psychologist who builds and tests models of bounded rationality to better understand how people decide and navigate in a social world characterized by risk and uncertainty. Both live in Lausanne.Available at 03.06.2024 in your favorite book store.

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