Why they do it : inside the mind of the white-collar criminal /

Rarely does a week go by without a well-known executive being indicted for engaging in a white-collar crime. Perplexed as to what drives successful, wealthy people to risk it all, Harvard Business School professor Eugene Soltes took a remarkable journey deep into the minds of these white-collar crim...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Soltes, Eugene (Author)
Format: Book
Language:English
Published: New York : PublicAffairs, [2016]
Edition:First edition.
Subjects:
Table of Contents:
  • Prologue: Managing in the gray
  • Part I: The struggle to criminalize
  • "Not...bucket-shop operators, dead-beats, and fly-by-night swindlers" : pillars of the community
  • "Guys...don't drop out of windows for no reason" : creating the white-collar criminal
  • Part II: Nature or nurture? Reasoning or intuition?
  • "Inherently inferior organisms" : bad people making bad decisions
  • "I thought it was all going to pass" : a press release with consequences
  • "If you don't take it then you will regret it forever" : the triumph of reason
  • "I never once thought of the costs versus rewards" : intuitive decisions
  • "I never felt that I was doing anything wrong" : overlooking harm
  • "If there was something wrong with this transaction, wouldn't people have told me?" : the difficulty of being good
  • Part III: The business of malfeasance
  • "You can't make the argument that the public was harmed by anything I did" : misleading disclosure
  • "Unfortunately, the world is not black and white" : financial reporting fraud
  • "You go from just being on top of the world" : insider trading
  • "I thought we were freakin' geniuses" : deceptive financial structures
  • "You couldn't stop because you would wreck everything" : the Ponzi scheme
  • "When I look back, it wasn't as if I couldn't have said no" : Bernie Madoff
  • Conclusion: Toward greater humility.