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Comparative Book Review: Alexander Hill and Badaracco

Background: Alexander Hill and Joseph Badaracco both have written guides they hope will help the practitioner act in ethical ways within the practice of leadership in organizations. This said, the two authors take very different approaches. Hill explicitly provides the ground for his ethical perspective, while Badaracco focuses on the mechanics of effective ethical leadership.

Hill's work provides an explicit explanation of his worldview. Badaracco's worldview is implicit. Leveraging your knowledge and understanding of the facets of worldview discern both of these author's perspectives and summarize what you believe them to be. Having summarized their worldviews, write a few comments regarding the impact of their worldview on their suggested practices of ethical leadership.

Compare Hill's foundational values of holiness, justice and love with Badaracco's three "quiet virtues" of restraint, modesty and tenacity. What might this tell you about the goals of the two authors? Do their foundational values offer hints? It might be said that comparing the foundational triplets are like comparing apples and oranges. Do you agree? Why or why not? Finally, what do you offer as your triplet of foundational values? What reasons do you have for your foundational values?

The books are:
Just Business by Alexander Hill
Badaracco, Joseph L. (2002) Leading Quietly: An Unorthodox Guide to Doing the Right Thing

Solution Preview

Hill is dealing with holiness. But this is a complex thing. His four elements of that are:
- Enthusiasm
- Purity (moral rectitude)
- Accountability (assuming free will)
- Humility (a realistic concept of yourself)
Four basic concepts of justice:
- Basic procedure, which includes basic virtues like fairness and impartiality.
- Basic rights, including security, etc.
- Meritocracy: this means that the better people for position x should get it, regardless of other circumstances and finally,
- What might be called contract: follow though on basic promises.
According to hill, Holiness and justice must be joined with love (I'm willing to say that this is the worldview in general).
Love has three basic components:
- Empathy (this is not pity), but a sense of being in someone else's shoes.
- Mercy - strict justice is not good enough - we must forgive.
- Self-sacrifice - this comes from humility above and is the essence of a loving relationship. It's not just all about me.
Law is like justice it is not sufficient.
A problem with law and justice (if we define justice as following law) is that the legal order is about power. Not necessarily about justice or true life. Following the law as such means that we can be self-righteous and still not behave ethically. The law can simply be wrong. God is above law. We ...

Solution Summary

The solution summarizes each work and then compares them for a total of 918 words.