The Conscience Code

Lead With Your Values. Advance Your Career

The essential guide for standing up for your values at work.  Kirkus Reviews calls The Conscience Code “an inspiring business book” that provides a “blueprint for ethical behavior in a frequently unethical world.”

What should you do when you discover that a fast-track colleague is elbowing their way up the corporate ladder in your department by faking their sales reports?  How about if your entrepreneur boss asks you to lie to would-be investors or your team leader is sexually harassing a summer intern? Nobody prepared you for this part of professional life. You face a gut-wrenching choice: “go along to get along” or risk your job by speaking up for what you know is right.  Conscience or career?

At the Wharton School, MBA students have shared all these stories, and many more, with award-winning Professor G. Richard Shell. They are not alone. Surveys show that more than 40% of employees report seeing ethical misconduct at work, and most fail to report it—killing office morale and allowing the wrong people to set the example.

Shell created The Conscience Code to point to a better path: recognize that these conflicts are coming, learn to spot them, then follow a research-based, step-by-step approach for resolving them skillfully.  By committing to the Code, you can replace regret with long-term career success as a leader of conscience.

The Conscience Code:

• Solves a crucial problem faced by professionals everywhere: What should they do when they are asked to compromise their core values to achieve organizational goals?
• Teaches readers to recognize and overcome the five organizational forces that push people toward actions they later regret.
• Lays out a systematic, values-to-action process that people at all levels can follow to maintain their integrity while achieving true success in their lives and careers.

Driven by dramatic, real-world examples from Shell’s classroom, today’s headlines, and classic cases of corporate wrongdoing, The Conscience Code shows how to create value-based workplaces where everyone can thrive.

Springboard

Launching Your Personal Search for Success

Everyone knows that you are supposed to “follow your dream.”  But how, exactly, are you supposed to find out what your dream is?  And suppose you are a practical, down-to-earth person who simply wants some help figuring out what to do next with your life? What are some simple steps you can take to get started?

G. Richard Shell, an award-winning author and the creator of the popular Wharton School course on the meaning of success, has answers to these and a host of other questions that confront you when you consider how best to use your life.  In Springboard: Launching Your Personal Search for Success, he helps you find your future – regardless of your passions, your past experience, or your personality.

His advice: Take an honest look inside and then answer two questions.

What, for me, is success? 

How will I achieve it? 

You will begin by assessing your current beliefs about success, including the hidden influences of family, media, and culture.  Steve Jobs once famously said “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.”  So Step 1 in your work on success is coming to terms of the expectations others have placed on you.  Once you gain perspective on these outside forces, you will be ready to look inside at your unique combination of passions and capabilities. The goal: to focus more on what gives meaning and excitement to your life and less on what you are “supposed” to want.

Drawing on his decades of research and mentoring, Shell offers personalized assessments to help you probe your past, imagine your future, and measure your strengths. He then combines these with the latest scientific insights on everything from self-confidence and happiness to relationships and careers. Throughout, he shares inspiring examples of people who found what they were meant to do by embracing their own true measure of success. You will meet:

• Eric Adler: one of Shell’s former students who walked away from a conventional business career to help launch a revolutionary new concept in public education that has placed hundreds of inner-city high school students in top colleges.
• Kurt Timken: a Harvard-educated son of a Fortune 500 CEO who found his true calling as a hard-charging police officer fighting drug lords in southern California.
• Cynthia Stafford: a California office worker who won the lottery and, instead of getting lost in her new-found wealth, stayed grounded to became one of her community’s leading promoters of theater and the arts.

Get ready for the journey of a lifetime—one that will help you reevaluate your future and envision success on your own terms. Students and executives say that Richard Shell’s courses and executive training programs have changed their lives. Let this book change yours.

More about the book

• SIX LIVES EXERCISE

The Art of Woo

Using Strategic Persuasion to Sell Your Ideas

G. Richard Shell and Mario Moussa know what it takes to drive new ideas through complex organizations. They have advised thousands of executives from companies such as Google, Microsoft, and General Electric to organizations like the World Bank and even the FBI’s hostage rescue training program. In The Art of Woo, they present their systematic, four- step process for winning over even the toughest bosses and most skeptical colleagues. Beginning with two powerful self-assessments to help readers find their “Woo IQ,”they show how relationship-based persuasion works to open hearts and minds.

Bargaining for Advantage: Negotiation Strategies for Reasonable People

3rd Edition

As director of the renowned Wharton Executive Negotiation Workshop, Professor G. Richard Shell has taught thousands of business leaders, administrators, and other professionals how to survive and thrive in the sometimes rough-and-tumble world of negotiation. His systematic, step-by-step approach comes to life in this book, which is available in over ten foreign editions and combines lively storytelling, proven tactics, and reliable insights gleaned from the latest negotiation research.

This updated edition includes:

• A brand-new “Negotiation I.Q.” test designed by Shell and used by executives at the Wharton workshop that reveals each reader’s unique strengths and weaknesses as a negotiator
• A concise manual on how to avoid the perils and pitfalls of online negotiations involving e-mail and instant messaging
• A detailed look at how gender and cultural differences can derail negotiations, and advice for putting talks back on track