Teaching Versus Living: Managerial Decision Making in the Gray

Preparing students for the consequential ethical decisions that they will face in their careers is among the most difficult tasks of management education. I describe some of these challenges based on my book Why They Do It: Inside the Mind of the White-Collar Criminal and recent work in behavioral ethics. I explore why some decisions are much more easily resolved in the classroom than in practice and offer three ways to more effectively prepare students: integrating ethical decision making with core-discipline teaching, cultivating moral humility rather than moral confidence, and creating opportunities for norm reinforcement.