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Audio Interview

Moral and ethical practice in organizations

Published on May 26, 2020   22 min

Other Talks in the Playlist: Interviews with business leaders and scholars

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Interviewer: Today I'm speaking to Charles Wookey, CEO of Blueprint for Better Business, a charity devoted to inspiring businesses to serve society. We will be discussing ethics in business and in management. I will be asking a simple question that perhaps is more difficult to answer (and has many and varied answers), that will revolve around what middle and junior managers should do in different circumstances. To obtain some context, may I ask you, Mr. Wookey, to describe your role in the charity and what the charity does? Mr. Wookey: My role is that I'm the Chief Executive of the charity, it's a small charity, we employ seven people. We are a catalyst for change in business, and as you say, our role is to help businesses to be inspired and guided by a purpose that benefits society. We do that by working with large companies, in the senior management (usually) of those large companies, inviting them to think about using a framework that we've developed. This is a set of principles of a purpose-driven business, and more fundamentally, a way of thinking which the best businesses have always adopted. In many ways, the way business culture (particularly in the Anglo-American world) has developed over the last 30 to 40 years, has often created a narrow way of thinking and acting in business, which has been the cause of so many of the problems of trust that we are aware of. Interviewer: Okay. Perhaps you'd like to explain what it means when you say the charity has the concept of 'bringing your whole self to work'. What does that encompass? Mr. Wookey: We do have a concept of bringing your whole self to work,