The Noble Edge provides readers with actionable guidance they can use to make ethical decisions in their lives. Why was this an important book for you to write?

I want to start a sorely needed, national and dare I say, international, conversation about making good choices and trust building. In a time of deepening divisions and “alternative facts”, trust and authenticity grow more precious by the hour. The truth is that our most rewarding business, personal, and family relationships are founded on honesty. My book, The Noble Edge shatters the myth that situational ethics and half-truths are the right path to a rewarding life. It is based on nine research-proven steps and twenty-one principles for leading an ethically driven life. The book offers mastery of an essential virtue for living well and building strong, useful relationships. I wanted to create an accessible, and essential guidebook spiced with humor and personal experience about one of the most poignant purposes of life – the essential journey for our own moral progress.

What is a common obstacle you find people face when making ethical decisions?

It is what I have come to phrase the ethics out-of-body experience- in essence judging others with a different set of lenses than we judge ourselves. It’s the common act of standing apart from our own ability to make bad choices that we rationalize are right for us even as we see bad choice-makers caught in public sandals who do exactly the same thing only on a bigger scale. We need a shot in the arm to inoculate us against the thinking that bad ethics come from the bad folks and good ethics come from the rest of us when we all move up and down the moral ladder with our different choices every day.

What were some key ideas you wanted to share in this book?

I’ll tap three major ideas:

First and foremost, to remind folks that ethics are an exercise of our virtues not an exercise of our rights. Trustfulness and trustworthiness are perhaps the most important virtues that we have. Love may be our most human virtue, and an important one at that but what underscores true love is trust. Concentrate on the idea of creating more trust or at least not eroding any trust with every decision you make.

Second, we must stop thinking about ethics as situational or iffy or grey. Ethics, like the guardrails on a high bridge, are there to protect our direction- tell us the right choice. The situation may be complex and the right choice hard to see, but like those guardrails, there is guidance for the right path and protection against the wrong direction in our ethics. Using the phrase ethics are grey is like using the phrase, “sort of pregnant,” or “I sort of voted”, or “I’m sort of human”. Either you are or you are not , you did or you did not. Ethics tell us right from wrong and we are starved for that solid ground, especailly when we make our toughest choices.

And third, the most powerful action in the book is climbing the moral ladder. Each step brings greater moral clarity- from the lowest rung, the outcome of my ethical choice is all about me, to the middle rung, the outcome of my choice is about some of us, those I care about for instance, to the third and highest rung, the outcome of my ethical choice is about all of us- all of us affected by what happens. That is a powerful thought process for our ethics.

What is one thing you hope readers take away from your book?

The truth is, when it comes to an honest world, we have two choices. We can either continue down our current path of increasingly “situational ethics” that treat some more fairly than others and where honesty, empathy and compassion in our professional connections and personal relationships is the luck of the draw, or we can believe we have the capacity to create a world where integrity is practiced by everyone for everyone. The book is action-oriented toward that latter world

There is a great reward in thinking about advancing your character–climbing toward what the book describes as The Noble Edge. There is so much better of a world in knowing that we’re consistently making ethical choices. The community thrives and as it does, we thrive and visa versa. It is our two-fold moral purpose in life.

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