Several years ago, we were commissioned to work with the brilliant Mote Oo Education in Myanmar to research, write and produce a textbook on ethical leadership. We were excited by the challenge of writing a textbook that would respond to the needs of community groups and organisations in the challenging environment of Myanmar.
The textbook has been a long time in development involving intensive collaboration with the Mote Oo team, Myint-Mo Education Foundation, Payap University’s Centre for Social Impact, and many community groups in and around Myanmar who were involved in field-testing. But we’re delighted to say that the book has now been published on the Mote Oo website, and is available as a free-to-access beautiful PDF download..
The crucial question the book asks is this: how can organisations be “good” in both senses: effective at bringing about their aims, and having aims that are ethically good? When researching this textbook, and reading what else was available, we decided on two things. The first was that we wanted to put ethics at the very heart of questions of leadership. We wanted this to be a book that isn’t just about ethics as an add-on, but that sees ethics as fundamental to human co-existence. In this way, we wanted to encourage students to reflect on the craft of ethical leadership from the ground up. The second thing we aimed for was to think about ethical leadership in a truly global context, highlighting case studies from Myanmar and the global south, and drawing on traditions and perspectives from a wide range of sources, for example drawing on traditional Buddhism in our section on communication ethics.
We are really excited by how the textbook is looking, and we look forward to seeing where it is used, to help build better, stronger communities, and to inspire future leaders.
To give you a taste of the textbook, here’s a gallery of images.
