Complicit

More about the book

This book addresses the widespread tendency to enable wrongdoing across various sectors, including workplaces and politics. While it's easy to denounce high-profile wrongdoers like Elizabeth Holmes and Harvey Weinstein, we often overlook the many individuals who supported their unethical actions. These include business partners, employees, investors, and media organizations. The author, a Harvard Business School professor, confronts our complicity and provides strategies to recognize and avoid the psychological traps that lead us to ignore or support unethical behavior. Through compelling stories related to scandals like Theranos and WeWork, the opioid crisis, and the #MeToo movement, the book outlines seven behavioral profiles that contribute to complicity, from active partners to those benefiting from systemic privileges. It also shares the author's personal experiences with complicity. Ultimately, the book offers practical solutions for individuals, leaders, and organizations to prevent complicity, challenging the idea that only a few individuals are responsible for societal issues and advocating for a collective effort toward a more ethical world.