Adaptive Ethics for Digital Transformation: A New Approach for Enterprise Leaders (Featuring Frankenstein vs the Gingerbread Man)

Digital transformation doesn't just raise ethical issues, it—in itself—is an ethical shift.

Business leaders today are struggling to manage conflicting imperatives, those of the emerging digital world and those of the bureaucratic world of the past. The act of digital transformation requires a deep change in the moral outlook and ethical assumptions of a business. But how do we get there?

Enterprise strategist and author Mark Schwartz shows how we need to learn to think differently about relationships with customers and employees. That the ethics of digital transformation is a matter of cultivating and applying virtues rather than applying rules. Ethics is not just a matter of refraining from doing bad things. It's a matter of building the world we want, and it's the job of company executives.

Featuring a chapter on bullshit, a handy chart of excuses for bad behavior, and Schwartz's typically paradoxical blend of deep insight and pasta jokes, this book guides business leaders as they struggle to adapt their bureaucratic framework of ethics to the emerging landscape of the digital world. By the end of the book, business leaders will rethink what it takes to be an ethical organization.

Mr. Schwartz has been passably ethical in a wide range of organizations, public sector and private sector, large and small, good and evil, benevolent, and malevolent. As an enterprise strategist at Amazon Web Services, he works with leaders of the world's largest companies on the challenges of digital transformation: cultural change, organizational structure, governance models, investment strategies, and his favorite topic, overcoming bureaucracy. He has been the CIO of US Citizenship and Immigration Services and Intrax Cultural Exchange and CEO of Auctiva. His four previous books on IT leadership have earned him a passionate following that might very well be in need of ethical instruction. Mr. Schwartz has a BA in computer science and an MA in philosophy from Yale and an MBA in Unethical Studies from Wharton.