Why They Do It: Inside The Mind Of The White-Collar Criminal By Eugene
Soltes (Hardback, 2016)

Product Description

From the financial fraudsters of Enron to the embezzlers at Tyco to the insider traders at Mc Kinsey to the Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff the failings of corporate titans are regular fixtures in the news But what drives wealthy & powerful people to white-collar crime? Harvard Business School professor Eugene Soltes draws from extensive personal interaction & correspondence with nearly fifty former executives as well as the latest research in psychology criminology & economics to investigate how once-celebrated executives become white-collar criminals The product of seven years in the company of the men behind the largest corporate crimes in history Why They Do It is a breakthrough look at the dark side of the business world Soltes reveals how the usual explanations fail to tell the whole story of why many seemingly successful people go over the line White-collar criminals are not merely driven by excessive greed or hubris nor do they usually carefully calculate costs & benefits before breaking the law Instead Soltes shows that most of the executives who committed crimes made decisions the way we all do- on the basis of their intuitions & gut feelings The trouble is that these gut feelings are often poorly suited for the modern business world where leaders are increasingly distanced from the consequences of their decisions & the individuals they impact The extraordinary costs of corporate misconduct are clear to its victims Yet never before have we been able to peer so deeply into the minds of the many prominent perpetrators of white-collar crime With the increasing globalization of business threatening us with even more devastating corporate misconduct the lessons Soltes draws in Why They Do It are needed more urgently than ever