Leadership and Social Responsibility in Business Ethics

About Global Leadership and Global

Ethics, and a Possible Moral Compass:

an Introduction to the Special Issue Marc T. Jones

Carla C. J. M. Millar

ABSTRACT. This paper reviews a number of huge

challenges to ethical leadership in the twenty-first century

and concludes that the need for global ethical leadership is

not merely a desirable option, but rather – and quite

literally – a matter of survival. The crises of the recent past

reveal huge, and in some cases criminal, failures of both

ethics and leadership in finance, business and government.

We posit that mainstream economic theory’s construct of

‘homo economicus’ and its faith in the ‘invisible hand’ of the

market constitute deeply flawed foundations upon which

alone policy may be built and, farthermore, that these

problematic foundations exert substantial shaping power

over the institutional and discursive landscapes in which

international business is transacted. Analogously, we argue

that dominant approaches to business ethics and corporate

social responsibility are, if not incorrect, at least in need of

revisiting in terms of questioning their basic assumptions.

Instead of the smugness of Western (especially Anglo-

American) attitudes towards other ways of thinking,

valuing and organising, it appears clear that openness,

cooperation and co-creation between the developed and

developing worlds is a basic prerequisite for dealing with

the global challenges facing not just leaders, but humanity

as a whole. This objective of stimulating discussion

between dominant and marginal voices has guided our

selection of papers for this Special Issue. We have thus

included not only representatives of research from within

the parameters of mainstream business ethics, IB or

leadership scholarship, but also innovative contributions

from fields such as military history, information tech-

nology, regulation, spirituality and sociology.

KEY WORDS: challenges, ethics, leadership, moral

compass

We write this introductory chapter to the Special

Issue against the background context of the global

economic and financial crisis, which began in earnest

in September 2008 with the fall of Lehman Brothers

investment house in the USA. This crisis, with its

roots at the very heart of the global financial system –

Wall Street and the City of London – differs from

more typical events occurring on the periphery of that

system, such as the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis or the

Mexican Peso Crisis of 1994. It reveals a huge (and in

some cases, criminal) failure of both ethics and lead-

ership in the financial sector in particular, and also in

the wider corporate establishment. Responsibility

also rests with many central government regulators,

whose ‘‘light touch’’ approach and belief in ‘the

market’ and market forces worked to prime the

powder keg for the eventual explosion and collapse.

The genesis of this Special Issue was the Ashridge International

Research Conference held at Ashridge Business School in

Berkhamsted, UK in May 2009. The central theme of this

event was ‘‘Global leadership, global ethics? – In search of an

ethical leadership compass’’. Participants from all over the

world met for 3 days to present research, share ideas, engage

in debates and move forward our understanding of key the-

oretical and practical matters in leadership, global business

ethics and corporate social responsibility.

Marc T. Jones is a faculty member of Ashridge Business School

in the UK and an MSM professor of strategy at the Maas-

tricht School of Management in the Netherlands, and holds a

PhD in strategic management from the University of Cali-

fornia, Irvine.

Carla C. J. M. Millar is a professor of international marketing

and management at the School of Management and Gover-

nance of the University of Twente and a fellow of Ashridge

Business School in the UK, after a career with major MNCs,

at the University of Greenwich and City University Business

School in London, UK, as dean of TSM Business School

and professor at the University of Groningen in the

Netherlands.

Journal of Business Ethics (2010) 93:1–8 � Springer 2010 DOI 10.1007/s10551-010-0622-y

Yet, this situation – where the ‘‘real’’ economy

has essentially become de facto hostage to personal

greed and financial sector interests – has been long in

the making. Some time ago, Mintz and Schwartz

(1990) conceived of financial hegemony in terms of

high concentration levels of investment capital and

structural interdependencies amongst major financial

institutions. They observed (p. 205), ‘‘The central-

isation of the financial sector…allows for coordi- nated decision-making over the disposition of

investment capital…such centralised decision-mak- ing over capital flows confers upon financial lead-

ership the intermittent capacity to coordinate

activity amongst a wide range of economic

actors…this phenomena is properly understood as financial hegemony…’’. The structuring power of financial capital has increased even further in recent

years through the heightened activities of private

equity funds and the emergence of sovereign wealth

funds as actors in the global system (Barber and

Gould, 2007). Moreover, Gowan (2009) examines

the extent to which even ostensibly industrial firms

such as General Electric (through GE Capital) and

General Motors (through GMAC) have become

‘‘financialised’’, thus increasing their exposure to the

current crisis.

Recently, Johnson (2009) identified financial

hegemony as a direct cause of the ‘‘made in the

USA’’ crisis. He notes on the first page of his article

‘‘…financiers, in the case of the U.S., played a central role in creating the crisis, taking ever-larger

gambles, with the implicit backing of the govern-

ment, until the inevitable collapse. More alarming,

they are now using their influence to prevent pre-

cisely the sorts of reforms that are needed – and fast,

to pull the economy out of its nosedive. The gov-

ernment seems helpless, or unwilling, to act against

them.’’ To suggest that key actors in the process

leading up to the crisis were ‘‘ethically challenged’’

seems somewhat of an understatement. However, it

is certainly disturbing that we are relying on many of

these same players to pull us out of the situation they

managed to get us into in the first place, as it seems

unlikely that they have become more ethical or far-

sighted in the period since the crisis began.

Despite its overwhelming salience, the fact

remains that there are other, far more challenging

events looming on the horizon than the current

crisis. We will refer to these developments as giga

challenges to ethical leadership. These include climate

change, energy depletion, the ascent of the BRIC

nations (and the consequent relative fall of the

West), the dislocations which will be unleashed by

the genome revolution, and the rise of ‘‘global

slums’’ in (mostly) Southern mega-cities, with their

populations of ‘‘surplus humanity’’ constituting a

source of permanent discontent, potential violence

and ethical embarrassment to the ‘‘winners’’ of

globalisation wherever they may reside.

We would argue that these giga challenges are

directly relevant to our theme of ‘‘global leadership,

global ethics?’’ in two ways. First, they are in some

cases the result of a conspicuous lack of effective

global leadership and/or ethically unacceptable (if

not illegal) business practices. Second, each challenge

will require ethical global leadership going forward

to realise the opportunities existing either alongside

or latent within the threats themselves, or at least to

ameliorate the negative aspects of the various trends.

What we will need is leadership that is cosmopolitan

(see Levy et al., 2007; Maak and Pless, 2009), open

to widely alternative views and values, able to

integrate long-term considerations and a broad

selection of stakeholders’ interests into its strategic

choices, and based on a stable and transparent ‘moral

compass’. And this moral compass needs to be

globally valid. In the following passages, we will

briefly review the giga challenges to ethical leader-

ship that in our view will shape the global business

environment for years to come and comment on the

specific ethical challenges that each represent to (in

particular) senior executives of global firms.

The first and pre-eminent ethical leadership giga

challenge facing not only global business leaders, but

also all of humanity, is that of climate change. The

overwhelming judgement of the scientific commu-

nity is that global warming is a fact (Gore, 2006;

Stern, 2007), and that human industrial activity

(based on fossil fuels) is a major contributor to the

process (Lovelock, 2006). Sea levels are already on

the rise (fostering ‘‘climate refugees’’ (Klein, 2007)),

weather patterns appear increasingly unstable in

comparison to historical norms (undermining agri-

cultural productivity), and the latest estimates of

warming (c.f., Guardian, 2009) expect a global

average increase of at least 3�C by 2100 (a threshold that should be sufficient to trigger positive feedback

loops, which will drive runaway temperature

2 Marc T. Jones and Carla C. J. M. Millar

increases – a disaster scenario (Lynas, 2007)). Clearly,

some industries will benefit from these changes,

whilst entirely new industries will be born; other

industries will suffer, even to the point of extinction.

Business leaders in the fossil fuels segment of the

energy sector are particularly confronted by ethical

challenges (e.g. do they suppress alternative tech-

nologies or deploy them, thereby making their

existing asset bases obsolete?), as are other executives

running firms producing non-essential products and

services with significant carbon footprints (e.g. long

distance tourism).

The second giga challenge to global ethical lead-

ership is that of continuing (and accelerating) energy

depletion associated with ‘‘peak oil’’ and its conse-

quences for energy security and, ultimately, the

sustainability of the model of technologically

advanced, energy intensive civilisation that emerged

first in the West during the nineteenth century. The

relevant science indicates that we have passed the

point in time at which known global petroleum

reserves exceed consumed reserves (i.e. the defini-

tion of ‘‘peak oil’’), meaning that we are in the early

stages of a ‘‘long descent’’ (Greer, 2008) in which

first oil, then other fossil fuel (coal and natural gas)

deposits will be run down to near zero levels

(Guardian, 2009). Meanwhile, alternative energy

sources and technologies (e.g. geothermal, hydro,

solar) will not come near to offsetting the energy

deficit left by fossil fuels because their ‘‘net energy

yield’’ – the difference between the amount of

energy one unit of a substance generates and the

amount of energy that has been expended in pro-

ducing it – is only a fraction of that typical of fossil

fuels (Greer, 2008). The ethical dilemma for cor-

porate leaders, then, is whether they will have the

vision and courage to make the type of long-term

strategic choices, which will not bear fruit for many

years. If we are going to avoid the more negative

future scenarios associated with energy depletion

(e.g. ‘catastrophic collapse’), entire industries will

need to be ‘‘managed out’’ and resources shifted to

more sustainable endeavours.

The third giga challenge to ethical leadership

driving large-scale structural change in the world is

the rise of the so-called ‘‘BRIC’’ nations and the

consequent (at least relative) decline of the West

(USA and Europe) and Japan in terms of their role

and status in the global economy. Inevitably, with

rising economic power also comes political clout –

witness the recent morphing of the G-8 into the

G-20 as the world’s most important international

forum on economic affairs. Perhaps most significant

from a longer-term perspective, however, will be

the eroding value of the Western narrative of

development through markets and democracy so

celebrated in the ‘‘end of history’’ (Fukuyama, 1992)

thesis and manifested in the neo-liberal policies of

the ‘‘Washington Consensus’’ (see Panitch and

Konigs, 2009). The extent to which the Western

(i.e. Anglo-American) model has been discredited

should not be underestimated. Conversations within

key international institutions (e.g. the WTO, IMF,

World Bank) going forward will take on a much

more pluralistic tone where multiple varieties of

capitalism with differing roles for market, state and

democracy will compete for policy influence over

the institutional architecture of the global system.

Important in this regard is the fact that for China and

many other emerging nations, the benchmark

development model is not the USA or western

European, but rather Singapore. With its effective

mix of strong state, political stability, attenuated

democracy, knowledge economy, creative and

innovation base and social ‘‘harmony’’, the success of

Singapore puts into question the global robustness of

the Western formulation of ‘‘democratic capitalism’’

as a normative model for developing countries

(Kagan, 2008; Millar et al. 2009). For global business

leaders, at least those from democratic countries, an

ethical challenge going forward will be whether: to

leave their political values ‘‘at the door’’ when

conducting commerce in non-democratic contexts;

to consider themselves and their organisations agents

of change through ‘‘constructive engagement’’; or to

exempt themselves entirely from certain geographies

due to chronic levels of corruption and ethical

malpractice. This challenge severely tests any ‘global’

moral compass for ethical leadership.

The fourth giga challenge for global ethical

leadership impacting future history relates to the

potentially vast implications of the genome revolu-

tion, particularly with respect to life extension

technologies. Whilst some scientists believe that we

are within reach of living to 1000 years old (de Gray,

2004), more widely held opinions routinely expect

children born today to live to be 150 or so. Yet the

exploitation of technological possibilities needs to

3About global leadership, global ethics and a moral compass

take into account political, social and cultural factors.

The impacts on superannuation systems, labour

markets and occupational structures are only the

most obvious areas of disruption, but there are even

more fundamental issues at stake. For example, in a

world of vastly unbalanced distribution of life

chances due to chronic inequality, it is entirely likely

that only those who can afford it will get to live

longer – i.e. just like today, only much more so.

A plausible scenario would depict a predatory global

minority of ‘‘elders’’ being serviced by masses of

much younger and less healthy (due to eroding

public health infrastructures (Greer, 2009)) people

working in factories, on farms, in retail establish-

ments, and in retirement communities and rest

homes – a kind of Logan’s Run (Nolan and Johnson,

1967) in reverse! For business executives in the

health-care sector, real ethical conundrums must be

confronted as to whether or not to bring such

destabilising technologies to market or rather, in the

interests of social cohesion, to ‘‘let sleeping dogs lie’’.

As a final giga challenge to ethical leadership

shaping the global business environment we define

the rise of global slums in the mega-cities of the

South. This trend is largely a consequence of glob-

alisation, as rural populations are induced or forced

off their land through contemporary ‘‘enclosure’’

measures aimed to free up formerly subsistence

acreage for agro-industrial production of specialised

crops for export. Davis (2007) notes the linkages

between global neo-liberalism, the increasing urban-

isation of world poverty and the rise of a surplus

humanity, which is excluded from formal networks

of production and exchange. He argues that the

state’s capacity to create formal jobs and housing has

been sacrificed to the goal of monetary stability

imposed by neo-liberal regimes. This is consistent

with an earlier United Nations’ report, which

observed that ‘‘The collapse of formal urban

employment in the developing world and the rise of

the informal sector is seen as a direct function of

liberalization…Urban poverty has been increasing in most countries subject to structural adjustment

programs, most of which are deliberately anti-urban

in nature’’ (United Nations, 2003). The point here is

that transnational agro-industrial firms such as Cargill

or ADM, working in conjunction with local elites,

have benefited from these new enclosures without

accepting moral responsibility for the millions of

peasants they have displaced.

Given the huge challenges reviewed above, the

current and future need for ethical global leadership

is not merely a desirable option, but rather – and

quite literally – a matter of survival. The current crisis

has established that markets do not work the way

they are ‘supposed to’ according to orthodox eco-

nomic theory. The notion that well-functioning

markets (with competition and oversight) can max-

imise allocative efficiency and economic growth has

not been proven wrong in theory. However, the

Washington Consensus and many similar policy-

driven applications of the theory in practice have lead

to unacceptable results. We posit that economic

theory, by itself, is the wrong model around which

to build policy. As its pre-eminent policy influenc-

ing position is lost, the institutional and discursive

landscapes in which international business is trans-

acted will likewise no longer be totally dominated by

familiar economic principles and arguments. Anal-

ogously, we would argue that dominant approaches

to business ethics and corporate social responsibility

are, if not incorrect, at least in need of revisiting in

terms of questioning their basic assumptions about

how the world works. The certain smugness char-

acteristic of Western (especially Anglo-American)

attitudes towards other ways of thinking, valuing and

organising in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall

in 1989 and the so-called ‘‘end of history’’

(Fukuyama, 1992) has worn thin. Going forward, it

appears clear that we (in the West) are increasingly

going to have to listen to them (in Asia and the

South) and co-create ways of dealing with the

above-defined challenges facing not just leaders, but

humanity as a whole.

This objective of stimulating conversation be-

tween the mainstream and ‘‘voices from the fringe’’

has guided our selection of papers for this Special

Issue. We have thus included not only representa-

tives of research from within the parameters of

mainstream business ethics or CSR scholarship, but

also innovative contributions from military history,

information technology, regulation, spirituality and

sociology. We are very grateful to the authors of the

papers we present below: they have allowed us to

put together a Special Issue that is challenging,

pushes the boundaries of research and explores many

4 Marc T. Jones and Carla C. J. M. Millar

new insights that will clarify the concept of global

ethical leadership.

The first and last papers are written by two of the

conference’s keynote speakers and serve to frame the

Special Issue’s contributions through more

personalised accounts, and the first two pieces in this

Special Issue focus on the moral compass – however

in very different ways. The first one, by Deborah

Poff, explores the essence of the ethical leadership

compass. She argues that perhaps the most promising

orientation to an ethical leadership compass has

emerged from the work of those scholars working in

the traditions of two value-based leadership theories

with their focus on authenticity and integrity in the

leader, and on idealised inspiration, higher order

purposes and goals for the followers – transforma-

tional leadership and servant leadership. Deborah

states that any version of an ethical leadership

compass must combine global and ‘culture free’

competence or effectiveness with values such as

integrity, honesty, trustworthiness and a commit-

ment to virtue as well as to service to the organisa-

tion. Not only is the development and elaboration of

such a compass important for the future, but also

there will be no indefinite future if such a compass is

not developed and embraced. The ‘‘free rider’’ lea-

der who commits evil acts, even when the evil is of a

small scale, is no longer affordable in a world where

globalisation is the basis of much of the world’s

economy. In fact, what Daly and Cobb (1989)

argued about corporations escaping community may

no longer be true. The current global financial crisis

has manifested how truly interconnected our econ-

omy is, just as our overly extractive global produc-

tivity has made clear that we will all suffer from the

unsustainable utilisation of non-renewable resources.

So, the answer is unfortunately easy to articulate if

difficult to enforce. We must educate our leaders to

be ethical, re-appraise the misguided nature of val-

uing material goods in place of human beings and

the environment, and create a worldview that

embraces sustainability and global justice. Once we

do that, everything else will be easy.

Our next paper by Lindsay Thompson directly

confronts the notion of the ‘‘moral compass’’. She

links the metaphor of the moral compass with the

applied ethics literature, generating three key con-

tributions. First, she develops a conceptual model of

the moral compass as a unifying and accessible

framework for understanding human morality by

integrating disparate, but important, themes in the

evolving business ethics literature. She then links

these themes to relevant literature in leadership,

business and management, cultural studies, anthro-

pology and neuroscience. Thompson’s second con-

tribution is to apply the framework of the moral

compass to explore the role of business leadership in

relation to the moral challenges of globalisation,

arguing that it is the work of leaders to engage

people in a shared wisdom tradition of enduring

values (the Good and the Right) to foster human

flourishing under disorienting conditions of uncer-

tainty, risk and threat. Thompson then applies

transformational learning theory to demonstrate the

moral compass model’s potential application and

utility for enhancing leadership skills in creating

adaptive wisdom through exemplars of collabora-

tive discernment, dialogue, consensus building and

decision-making.

The next two papers focus on the role of the

CEO as an ethical leader. Both authors used com-

puter simulation models. Stephen Chen employs a

computer simulation model to examine the role of

ethical leadership versus institutional constraints in

driving financial misreporting by CEOs. Chen’s

study addresses the effect of senior leaders on cor-

porate social performance (CSP) by using upper

echelon theory and the KLD Research Analytics

CSP ratings to show that observable CEO charac-

teristics predict differences in CSP between firms,

even when firm and industry characteristics are

controlled for. Using a sample of 650 public US

firms, Chen finds that strong or exemplary CSP (as

measured by the strong categories of KLD’s ratings)

is positively related to the CEO having a bachelor’s

degree in humanities, having a breadth of career

experience and being female. Stephen finds that

KLD strength ratings are negatively related to the

CEO having a bachelor’s degree in economics and

to their level of short-term compensation. Pre-

liminary tests of causality support the assertion that

these effects reflect CEO discretion rather than being

an artefact of reverse causality. He does not find

significant relationships between CEO characteristics

and poor social performance, suggesting that CEOs

have more discretion in influencing strong and

exemplary social performance than they do in

impacting poor CSP. The author discusses the

5About global leadership, global ethics and a moral compass

implications of his findings for economics education

in particular, as well as identifying new directions for

future research.

Mikko Manner examines the proposition that

unethical corporate leadership was a major cause of

recent high profile financial accounting scandals, by

comparing the role of leaders in a variety of scenarios.

Whilst not dismissing the importance of individual

moral agency, Manner argues that it is necessary to

consider the circumstances and institutional envi-

ronment in which a firm operates. Through the use

of computer simulation models, he shows how a

combination of CEO narcissism, financial incentives,

shareholder expectations, subordinate acquiescence

and CEO dishonesty can be understood as consti-

tuting drivers of financial accounting misreporting.

Interestingly, the research reveals that in certain cir-

cumstances, ethical leadership can have either a

negligible or even opposite effect to that expected.

Linking his work to globalisation, Manner suggests

that the nature and impact of ethical leadership

depend greatly on the institutional setting and can be

expected to vary greatly by country and culture.

In the next paper – and examining ethical lead-

ership from a completely different angle – Fahri

Karakas links what he calls ‘‘value compasses’’ with

nine ‘‘spiritual anchors’’ drawn from Sufism (an in-

ner, mystical dimension of Islam). Building on the

concept of ‘‘career anchors’’ (Schein, 1990), Karakas

introduces the concept of ‘‘spiritual anchors’’, pat-

terns of deeply held spiritual motives, value, and

attitudes that provide direction, meaning, wholeness

and connectedness to one’s life or work. Based on

qualitative interviews conducted with 32 managers

in Turkey, the article develops a typology or tax-

onomy of spiritual anchors, each of which can be

thought of as the spiritual DNA of a person, or a

fractal of that person’s holistic value system. Each of

the spiritual anchors refers to a unique way of per-

ceiving and practising spirituality. The author

introduces nine spiritual anchors as the underlying

basis of leadership values and team roles in organi-

sations: perfection, compassion, passion, inspiration,

investigation, dedication, appreciation, determina-

tion and cooperation. Karakas argues that the spiri-

tual anchors model provides professionals and

managers ‘‘a big picture’’ of spirituality, values and

leadership in organisations, which they can use to

frame and evaluate strategic choices.

After this inward exploration, the next two papers

examine how global ethical leadership may be

challenged by the changes in boundaries in com-

parison to ‘ethics as normal’, ‘ethics as practised by

leaders at home’, and ethics in the MNC. Do one’s

leadership ethics change in a situation of war, of

occupation, of globalisation, of the ‘third sector’?

Josep Maria and Josep Lozano take a critical

sociological approach to the broad question of what

‘‘responsible leadership’’ means in the context of

globalisation, particularly with respect to developing

countries. They argue that the present process of

globalisation excludes a significant part of humanity,

but that inter-organisational dialogues can create

economic and social value by promoting inclusion.

The paper explores the main features (visions, roles,

virtues) of leadership in organisations necessary for

this dialogue. The exploration consists of the com-

parison between two theoretical approaches and

their illustration by two cases, a federation of

cooperatives in Nicaragua and an employer organi-

sation in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The

theoretical approaches compared are: responsible

leadership (Maak and Pless, 2006), a management

theory focused on the contribution of business

leaders to a better society; and the work of translation

(de Sousa Santos, 2004), a sociological theory that

stresses the need for a dialogue between organisa-

tions to build an alternative to hegemonic

‘‘neo-liberal’’ globalisation. Both approaches are

compared in terms of perspective adopted, diagnosis

concerning the present situation, main tasks to be

performed by leaders and key outcomes. Maria and

Lozano conclude their paper by outlining the fea-

tures of leadership necessary for promoting an

inclusive form of globalisation.

The second paper of the ‘more unusual circum-

stances’ set is by Paul Sanders who finds useful

ethical lessons in his historical analysis of the Nazi

occupation of the British Channel Islands during

World War II. He identifies several global challenges

for which executives are inadequately prepared,

including climate change, resource depletion, envi-

ronmental degradation and economic turmoil, as

well as problems traditionally considered as belong-

ing to the exclusive domain of politics, such as

growing inequality, corruption and human rights

violations. He notes that this ‘‘underbelly’’ of glob-

alisation belies the post-Cold War consensus that

6 Marc T. Jones and Carla C. J. M. Millar

equated globalisation with emancipation. It also

counters the claim that the prosperity generated by

economic integration would drive un-free societies

along the road to democratisation. In fact, whilst

economic integration has led to impressive achieve-

ments in economic development and poverty

reduction, it has also enabled oppressive regimes to

enhance their stranglehold on captive societies. In

some instances, global corporations are helping to

prop up these regimes – they are collaborating. Sanders

refers back to Machiavelli several times and con-

cludes that executives who believe that business

should be accountable for its involvement in

emerging markets will find little reason to rejoice

from his analysis, but that their ethically informed

willingness to ‘‘stand up and be counted’’ can con-

tribute to positive change.

Our last paper, by Phil Harris, takes us back to the

ethical leadership compass and fully focuses on what

can be learnt from Machiavelli, probably one of the

greater sources of insight into the challenges sur-

rounding leadership and ethics. The paper discusses

the posthumous denigration, dissemination and per-

petual debate on Florentine’s ethical values and

leadership ideas and the consequent creation of the

mythical reputation and negative epithet ‘‘Machia-

vellian’’. It outlines Machiavelli’s career, philosophi-

cal thought and written works and proposes

recommendations on how this can best be best

applied to bring genuine clarity and value to organi-

sations – providing a further hopefully viable compass

for ethical leadership in a globally changing landscape.

We feel that this Special Issue has assembled a

strong and diverse array of perspectives on our

theme of ‘‘Global leadership, Global ethics?’’ We

hope that its publication constitutes a step towards

opening the field of enquiry of business ethics to

new voices, as well as suggesting that it would be

useful to reconsider some of our core theoretical

assumptions in the light of the current crisis and

future giga challenges to ethical leadership globally.

Indeed, if a lack of ethical leadership has been ‘‘part

of the problem’’, effective global ethical leadership in

the corporate, public and third sectors is surely a

necessary and significant ‘‘part of the solution’’ in

going forward.

Bringing this Special Issue together would have

never been possible without the help of our team of

reviewers and to our support staff at Ashridge,

especially Eileen Mullins, to whom we are tremen-

dously indebted.

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Marc T. Jones and Carla C. J. M. Millar

Ashridge Business School,

Berkhamsted, Herts HP4 1NS, U.K.

E-mail: [email protected]

Carla C. J. M. Millar

School of Management and Governance,

University of Twente,

P.O. Box 217, 7500 AE Enschede,

The Netherlands

E-mail: [email protected];

[email protected]

8 Marc T. Jones and Carla C. J. M. Millar

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