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.