博客來Legal but Harmful is the culmination of decades of work with global corporations in ethics, communications, behaviour change and regulatory and social compliance. The book provides a text for corporate leaders, their advisors and academics and students from several disciplines, to explain why the current approach to behaviour change and compliance fails, and documents why the author’s approach has been successful in more than 60 countries. The book synthesises into a practical guide, research insights from evolutionary psychology, behavioural sciences, neuro-science and neuro-chemistry. It explains why systems for behavioural guidance and control based on beliefs, religions, ethics, cultures and the law are ineffective in our globalised, hyper-connected, multi-cultural world.
The author proposes that harm, first introduced by Hippocrates to guide the practice of medicine, provides a more useful linguistic model.Harm and the Harm Principles provide an objective, independent and universal measure for assessing behaviour, applying equally regardless of race, religion, gender, age or status. Harm is culturally neutral and operates independently of laws, philosophies or codes of conduct. Harm transcends geography and time. Corporations are particularly vulnerable operating not just across jurisdictions and cultures, but their behaviour is influenced by the very nature of incorporation, corporate structure and stock-market pressure.
Legal but Harmful contains tools for Boards and senior executives who want to build a more trustworthy organisation. It will not stop bad people doing bad things, but at least the self-righteous mask of legality will be removed.
