Summary

"WorldCom. Enron. Tyco. Shocking accusations of dishonesty and silent complicity have dominated headlines recently, and cost the American economy trillions of dollars. Clearly, dishonesty doesn't pay.

Drawing from these stories, as well as from more positive ones, Absolute Honesty shows how to establish and maintain a culture where honest communication is the norm, and employees can speak openly without fear of retribution. The book illustrates the impact that truthfulness and accountability can have on organizations, attacking the sort of passivity that allows little lies to grow into giant disasters.

Structured around the Six Laws of Absolute Honesty, this insightful book goes beyond simply extolling the virtues of ethics to provide a template managers can use to maintain an environment of healthy debate. It also contains a toolbox of techniques anyone can apply to improve his or her ability to confront and resolve difficult issues.

Companies can reap huge benefits from cultivating an atmosphere of trust. Absolute Honesty is an important, timely book that provides readers with the tools and strategies to establish a culture in which communication thrives and results speak for themselves."

Choice Review

One has to applaud a book that provides a template by which companies can operate both ethically and profitably. Experienced in human resource management and consulting, the authors offer a framework for honest and ethical corporate behavior, supported by an impressively documented variety of anecdotal examples. Stories about real people making real choices are an effective and engaging means of enlivening theoretical precepts. That many of these stories feature bad guys such as Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling from Enron and good guys such as Andy Grove from Intel adds to their currency. Nevertheless, this reviewer fears that many readers will start but never finish this book because of its PowerPoint presentation format. Almost every chapter begins with a bulleted list, followed by sections expanding on each bullet with a series of examples in story form. Although the format is attractive and easy to follow, and the stories--especially those at the beginning of the book--are timely, the repetitive structure makes it difficult for the reader to see how laws 5 or 6 differ from those that came before. Primarily of the "airplane reading" genre, this book could also be useful to undergraduate business students writing papers based on secondary sources. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduate and practitioner collections. M. S. Myers Carnegie-Mellon University