The Business Ethics Blog

Today’s NYT has a neat little story about the personal libraries of CEO’s:
C.E.O. Libraries Reveal Keys to Success

Michael Moritz, the venture capitalist who built a personal $1.5 billion fortune discovering the likes of Google, YouTube, Yahoo and PayPal, and taking them public, may seem preternaturally in tune with new media. But it is the imprint of old media — books by the thousands sprawling through his Bay Area house — that occupies his mind.
…
Forget finding the business best-seller list in these libraries. “I try to vary my reading diet and ensure that I read more fiction than nonfiction,” Mr. Moritz said. “I rarely read business books, except for Andy Grove’s ‘Swimming Across,’ which has nothing to do with business but describes the emotional foundation of a remarkable man. I re-read from time to time T. E. Lawrence’s ‘Seven Pillars of Wisdom,’ an exquisite lyric of derring-do, the navigation of strange places and the imaginative ruses of a peculiar character. It has to be the best book ever written about leading people from atop a camel.”

Interestingly, there’s no mention, in the entire article, of books on ethics (with the notable exception of one exec who owns the collected works of Aristotle). This got me thinking: I wonder what books on ethics real, live business leaders do read?

So, it’s audience participation time:
I’d like you to send me anything you know on this topic. If you’re a biz exec, you can send me the title of your own favourite ethics book. Alternatively, have you seen a CEO quoted in the press, citing admiration for a particular ethics book? Two rules, please: don’t send quotations from book dust-jackets as evidence. Every book has those, so I don’t find them terribly meaningful. And authors, don’t tell me that so-and-so said he/she loved your book. I’d like something a little more credible than that. So, send me your input by email.
I’ll blog the results of what you send me at some point in the future.
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Update: extra points for timeliness if you can find evidence of a CEO who counts one of the Harry Potter books as a book on ethics.