Profiting from Integrity: How CEOs Can Deliver Superior Profitability and Be Relevant to Society. Alan Barlow.
Routledge, 2017. 178 pages.

If you believed the Left, you might think that people in business are all cutthroat crooks. This book aims to demonstrate - through hard evidence - that when a corporation is run with integrity, it delivers better financial performance, too. As the most successful and robust capitalists, like Charles Koch, already know. "Conducting all affairs with integrity,” he says,  "is the first principle because it is the basis for trust and the foundation for mutually beneficial relations with our constituencies - employees, customers, suppliers, partners, communities and governments."

The book’s author, Alan Barlow, illustrates the integrity-based management approach from his own experience in running a multi-national corporation. To him, integrity in business means: transparency in what management and staff say and in what they do and how they behave; management and staff taking a proactive stance as to what is acceptable and unacceptable behaviour; integrity as a prerequisite of how CEOs go about leading and managing their corporation, not an afterthought; and making integrity a core business process.

His recommended approach has several elements. Feedback, for example...

On April 26, 1759, the Scottish philosopher Adam Smith published The Theory Of Moral Sentiments. He may be less well known for this book than for his path-breaking 1776 economics text, The Wealth Of Nations — but it was Moral Sentiments that made his fame and fortune. 

Thinkers at the time were struggling to discover how we can separate right and wrong. Some thought that religious texts were the authority on how we should act, and that religious leaders could authoritatively interpret those texts in cases of doubt. Others of a more practical bent suggested that we had a "moral sense" by which we could detect right and wrong, much as we could sense light and dark or rough and smooth. Some argued that we could reason out which actions were moral or immoral. But no explanation was found entirely convincing.

Smith’s Moral Sentiments was a real scientific breakthrough. It showed that our moral ideas and actions are a product of our nature as social creatures. Social psychology was a better guide to moral action than books, authorities or reason. We applaud actions that help our society to survive, and rules (like prudence and justice) which it could not survive without.