When we teach MBAs, we give them an exercise for the final day of class: We ask them to write a statement of their core values – those that will guide them in their personal lives and as leaders of organizations. We also have them read each other’s statements and provide feedback. This exposes them to the diversity of values systems (even among MBAs!) and helps them get a sense of how others will react to their values. We’ve included this exercise at the end of this final chapter.

Opioids are a powerful tool for relieving pain and preventing suffering. But they also can cause addiction, and in the early 2000s the United States experienced a massive opioid epidemic, leading to over 400,000 deaths. For many of the millions who survived addiction, the experience was miserable. Medical bioethicist Travis Reider, who became addicted while undergoing a series of surgeries after his foot was crushed in a motorcycle accident, said that as he went through withdrawal “every moment in those four weeks was the worst moment of my life.” It was so bad that for his final surgery he decided to suffer through excruciating post-operation pain rather than take opioids to treat it.

In the summer of 1997, Apple Computer was struggling and on the verge of bankruptcy. The stock was trading at $3.56 per share. The company’s last blockbuster product was the Macintosh personal computer in 1984, and since then the Microsoft operating system and IBM PC clones had established market dominance. In a desperate move, Apple decided to bring back cofounder Steve Jobs as CEO, twelve years after he was ousted from Apple in a power struggle with then-CEO John Sculley.

People often demand that leaders be “fair.” But what exactly does fairness mean? What Person A perceives as fair often strikes Person B as unfair, particularly if Person A is the “winner” and Person B is the “loser” in a situation. One of the biggest challenges that leaders face in organizations is the clarion call of “But that’s not fair!” In this chapter, we will delve into the concept of fairness, motivated by philosophical theories of justice.

About twenty miles from Stanford University, across the marshlands of the San Francisco Bay, is the Tesla Factory in Fremont, California. This five million square foot building produces some of the most cutting-edge and technologically advanced vehicles in the world, including Tesla’s four mass-market “sexy” cars: Models S, 3, X, and Y.

This book is a remarkable human achievement. Just to be clear, we don’t mean the text that we wrote. We mean the physical book itself.

In the early 1900s, an average of 1,528 Americans died from smallpox each year. A few decades later, that number was zero. In the early 1950s, there were 16,316 cases of polio each year, with a mortality rate of over 10 percent. By the 1980s, the number of cases was in the single digits. For measles, the numbers dropped from 508,282 cases and 432 deaths per year in the 1950s and 1960s to fewer than 100 cases and zero deaths per year in the 1990s.

In 2000, the early employees of Google were deciding on the fledgling company’s core values. Software developer Paul Buchheit, who later went on to create Gmail, offered three simple words: “Don’t be evil.” Although this suggestion was initially dismissed, founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page ultimately embraced the phrase and included it in Google’s prospectus when the company went public in 2004.

As COVID-19 began to rampage through the world in the spring of 2020, societies began to ask tough questions. Should we keep stay-at-home orders in place, even though economic hardship and unemployment can lead to drug abuse and suicide? Should we maintain distance learning in schools even though it may permanently stunt child development, particularly among disadvantaged populations? Should we reopen businesses, even though doing so may cause the virus to spread and increase deaths? How do we balance the well-being of the elderly, who have the greatest risk of dying from the disease, against the well-being of children, who have their whole lives ahead of them? Others rejected the premises of these questions. Some argued that these were false choices, because the only way to have a thriving economy was to first get the virus under control. On the other side of the spectrum, some downplayed the severity of the virus altogether.