Many anthologies exist for classroom use that include essays on the whole range of issues in business ethics. Some anthologies are noticeably biased against business in their selection of articles, but most attempt to include essays that represent all of the major sides of the debate. The best in this regard is the first edition of W. Michael Hoffman and Jennifer Mill Moore's Business Ethics: Readings and Cases in Corporate Morality. (The second and third editions are not as good.) A useful supplement to anthologies of theoretical essays is a collection of real-life cases. Tom Beauchamp's Case Studies in Business, Society, and Ethics is a good collection of 35 real-life cases representing the range of often difficult issues that business practice raises. An excellent introduction to the economic issues is David R. Henderson's The Fortune Encyclopedia of Economics. A surprising number of criticisms of business are based on ignorance of the economic facts involved, and Henderson's anthology collects brief, well written articles by experts on the full range of business and economic issues.
Very little in the business ethics literature captures the passion and commitment that most business professionals feel for their life's work, and very little in the literature communicates the sense that business is something that could be celebrated in poetry and song. This is a consequence of the "Business ethics is a contradiction in terms" attitude that underlies to some extent all writings in business ethics. Two books that fall outside the mainstream and that communicate a richer feel for the spirit animating successful business are Paul Hawken's Growing a Business and Cameron Hawley's Executive Suite. Hawken's book is an engaging, non-technical and non-philosophical account of entrepreneurship. Hawken is not an Objectivist in principle, but his discussion of the commitments and characteristics necessary for successful business practice is directly on target. Hawley's Executive Suite is a fictional account of a struggle by five men for the presidency of a corporation, after the sudden and unexpected death of the energetic and charismatic man who had taken over a nearly bankrupt company and built it into a giant in its field. Hawley deftly profiles core characters of the main contenders for the presidency and shows a good sense for the actual machinations of corporate life as well as for the virtues of character that make business success possible.
