Abstract
Plato's paradigm for statesmanship in the Statesman, the “weaving” of temperate and courageous properties, provides the contemporary business ethics theorist with an aid for determining certain problems and solutions with regard to business leadership. The history of American business values manifests the destructive, and especially unethical, effects of deviating from this paradigm by over-emphasizing one or the other of the above types of qualities. However, with the aid of Plato's model for leadership in the Statesman and suggestions from Peters and Waterman's In Search of Excellence, progress can be made towards constructing an adequate model for corporate leadership, especially from an ethical standpoint.
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Sherwin Klein, a Professor of Philosophy at Fairleigh Dickinson University, holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Virginia. He has recently published the following articles: ‘The Managerial Creed’ (included in a symposium on ‘The Case Against Corporate Virtue’), Business and Society Review; ‘Two Views of Business Ethics: A Popular Philosophical Approach and a Value Based Interdisciplinary One’, Journal of Business Ethics; ‘Socratic Dialectic in the Meno’, The Southern Journal of Philosophy. An article entitled ‘Some Reflections on the Question: Is Business Ethics a Fiction?’, will appear in the August 1987 edition of Scholar and Educator.
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Klein, S. Plato's Statesman and the nature of business leadership: An analysis from an ethical point of view. J Bus Ethics 7, 283–294 (1988). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00381834
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00381834