My co-author, Jim Sprouse, and I are excited to announce our new book, Business Ethics for Executives – A Christian Decision Guide, which will be published and available for purchase on Amazon.com and elsewhere by early August. The book will be available in both paperback and Kindle format.
It is a Christian business ethics guide that challenges you to make business decisions that serve a higher purpose than maximizing profits. Think of it as Harvard Business Review meets the Ten Commandments!
The book covers topics such as leadership, fair compensation, expectations of employees, sources of revenue and pricing, how sales are made, cost reduction, automation and globalization, as well as other ethical challenges that executives are faced with every day. Each chapter is a combination of research from contemporary business sources juxtaposed with moral teachings from the Bible. While the primary aim of the book is to challenge Christian business leaders to “lift their game”, we hope that it will be a useful reference for anyone who wants to live a more moral life at work. And we pray that it will influence for the better the business decisions made in corporate America and elsewhere.
Why did we write it? Many of us attend worship services over the weekend, and hear inspirational sermons that motivate us to work for the Kingdom. Yet the working world we step into on Monday mornings is a very different environment from the one we experience in the pews. It can be all too easy to deal with this dichotomy by compartmentalizing our lives. We are after all working in legal enterprises and following ethical rules set by our companies. We do not necessarily think so much about our faith while we are at work and making our business decisions. But think how much of our waking hours are spent at work. And think how consequential so many of our business decisions are for other people. This book is aimed at bridging that gap, to help you think differently about all the core business decisions you make and how they affect people.
This is a contemporary business book shaped by Christian values, not a Christian book for people in business. It is also not written as an autobiography, though it has been influenced by the life journeys of its authors. Instead it is analytical and practical, looking at the same business issues you read about in the financial or popular press with a Christian lens. If fact, we frequently reference press reports and the latest business research out there. And while it covers typical issues thought of a ethical issues like bribery and corruption, it’s main focus is on core business decisions. For people who are trying to lead moral lives at work, any decision that impacts another human must be viewed as an ethical decision. Are our everyday business decisions benefiting or harming our fellow human beings?
Because it bridges the gap between the business world and the worship service, writing this book needed to be a collaboration between people who could bring both perspectives to bear on the issues at hand. I have spent decades in the business world and Jim has decades of experience as a pastor. Writing the book together has been a fruitful collaboration and also wonderfully enriching for both of us personally. One’s faith truly comes alive when you try to figure out how to act on it, and then, when you see the right path, to take that path even if it is not the easiest. Writing the book has been one such a leap of faith for us as authors, and we hope and pray that it will encourage our readers to take their own leaps of faith.
There are many workers in God’s vineyard and we are just two of them. We want to acknowledge and celebrate the many Christians who are already actively involved in workplace ministry. We hope this book will be an additional resource for you and encourage you to reach out to us with any suggestions or requests.
Please bookmark this website and use the sign-up page to subscribe to our updates. We will let you know when we post new blogs and material here. For example, we will be posting a video interview with the authors in a couple of weeks and will also share free extracts from the book with our subscribers in the run-up to the August launch.
Posted by Peet van Biljon
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