In this book, New York Times syndicated columnist Jeffrey L. Seglin shows how the good is good for your business, too. He reveals how successful managers navigate the ethical dilemmas inherent in various dimensions of business and how they make decisions that are good both for short and long-term health of the business and its people.

Often, ethical conduct is waylaid in equating it to narrowly mean merely complying with the law, rather than as "knowing the difference between what you have a right to do, and what is the right thing to do." But perhaps the most common challenge in embracing ethical behaviour is the perception that doing the right thing does not always guarantee a "good" business outcome. This may appear to be true in the short-term. On the other hand, there is little doubt it does payoff in the long-term — in both the pragmatic as well as the philosophical sense — in building up the reputation of a business and in shoring up public confidence and support for business.

The world's greatest investor, Warren Buffett, once advised his son, "It takes twenty years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that you'll do things differently." Henry David Thoreau once observed, "Goodness is the only investment that never fails."

In this book, Jeff Seglin builds a strong case why both are correct and shows how to successfully overcome the pitfalls to building a truly ethical and highly successful business.

Jeffrey L. Seglin is an editor-at-large at Inc. magazine where he writes a business ethics column called Black & White. For the 1998-1999 academic year, he was a fellow in residence at the Center for the Study of Values in Public Life at Harvard University. He writes the monthly "Right Thing" column on business and workplace ethics for the Sunday New York Times. And he is also an assistant professor in the graduate department of Writing, Literature, and Publishing at Emerson College.

At Inc., he was founding editor for the launch of Inc. Technology, a quarterly management and technology magazine to which he contributes a column called "Road Warrior." He also served as the inaugural editor of the first two issues of "The State of Small Business," an annual publication from Inc. that explores the small business economy.

In addition to his work at Inc., Seglin is the author and coauthor of more than a dozen books on small business, marketing, and banking. And he has written articles for a variety of publications.

He holds a master's degree in theology and literature from the Divinity School at Harvard University and an undergraduate degree in English from Bethany College in West Virginia. He has two grown children, both of whom are teachers. He lives in Boston with his wife, Nancy. Seglin can be contacted via e-mail at jseglin@post.harvard.edu.