An ILA Leadership Perspectives Webinar

Ethics Education of Business Leaders

Presenters: Tom Culham Date: 17 September 2014

Visit Amazon or your favorite bookstore to buy the book on which this webinar is based.

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Tom Culham, management consultant for business schools and author of Ethics Education of Business Leaders, urges business schools to teach a modified form of emotional intelligence, linked with research-supported contemplative practices from the great meditative traditions. Events on Wall Street and Main Street reveal that some business leaders make dramatically unethical self-serving decisions that ignore the public interest. Philip Ivanhoe, professor of philosophy at the City University of Hong Kong, says Culham deftly and persuasively argues for the need, viability, and effectiveness of educating business leaders to develop virtue as well as business knowledge, skill, and acumen.

Within this webinar, Culham will present his book and work on virtue ethics for educating business leaders. His work includes ethics, leadership education with an emphasis on emotional intelligence, and research evaluating the effectiveness of pedagogy, incorporating contemplation and emotional intelligence in improving student’s ethics. The book details Culham’s ethics curriculum and explains its successful application at the Sauder School of Business at the University of British Columbia.

Join the ILA in this webinar and learn more about transforming the way business schools teach decision-making. Hear how Culham’s fascinating interdisciplinary and highly practical curriculum integrates philosophy (virtue ethics), Daoist thinking, psychology, and neuroscience. You’ll explore with the author how neurological findings show that unconscious processes and emotions play a significant role than reason in making ethical decisions.

Speaker Information

Tom Culham

An engineer for over 30 years, Tom Culham has held a variety of senior business leadership roles including consulting engineer, trade association representative, and forest products manufacturing executive. He is the author of Ethics Education of Business Leaders (2013, Information Age Publishing).

He completed his Ph.D. in 2012 at Simon Fraser University in the Faculty of Education. His thesis, from which he drew material for his book, focused on virtue ethics, Daoist contemplative practices, and pedagogy of leadership education with an emphasis on emotional intelligence. His research interests are evaluating the effectiveness of pedagogy, incorporating contemplation and emotional intelligence in improving student’s ethics.

The principal of his management consulting firm, Culham is also a sessional instructor of supply chain and ethics courses at the Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. Over the past four summers he taught university business classes in Shanghai and Tianjin, China.

He won the 2013 Simon Fraser University Dean’s Convocation Medal, and the 2010 Paul Tai Yip Ng Memorial Award for best graduate student paper.