Book Description

You discover your best sales rep has been taking thousands of dollars from the company on the side. She begs for mercy. What do you do? Your company's legal department advises you to "trap" an incompetent subordinate into dismissal by giving him an impossible workload and then documenting his failures. You agree he's incompetent--but he's also a decent person. What do you do? Your biggest client says that if you don't fire an employee who has admitted being gay, you will lose his business. What do you do? In the twilight world of ethical dilemmas, where every option seems difficult or painful, you can find yourself frightened, paralyzed, or just plain miserable as you try to decide what to do. And in a business environment, the choices become even more crucial as you wrestle with how they will impact on the company, profits, co-workers, and customers. But there is a way to make decisions that are both ethical and better for business. A Rock and a Hard Place gives you a system for making decisions that are responsible, practical, and defendable. Author Kent Hodgson, who has a Ph.D. combining psychology, management, and business organizational behavior and is a consultant to major companies, sheds light on the gray zone of ethical quandaries. He shows you how to methodically examine a sticky situation and then make a decision you can live with--personally and from a good-business point of view. "This book is a road map leading you to ask the right questions on the way to dilemma solutions," explains Dr. Hodgson. "It will draw out your personal and organizational values in order to help you make your own best choices." A Rock and a Hard Place sets out his unique three-step process, which combines business values and principles with ethical values and principles. Dr. Hodgson illustrates the process with real-world examples and offers you short exercises to complete, which bring the process into focus. Decision making is probably the most critical of your professional tasks. In A Rock and a Hard Place you will learn how to examine the problem objectively; determine who the key stakeholders are and what they each want; analyze the values and company norms at play for each stakeholder; project possible outcomes of different choices; discover what actions are necessary for a given choice and how those actions will affect you and the other stakeholders; and evaluate the options to get a clear sense of which one is the most responsible, given all the circumstances. A Rock and a Hard Place doesn't promise you will make perfect decisions (in many cases, there is no perfect decision), but you will be able to make better decisions. You'll deliver stronger, faster, more consistent decisions--and you'll move confidently between the "rocks" and the "hard places" of the business world whenever and wherever you find them.