Reference reading
Executive Vices
Power changes whose decisions become other people's working conditions. These readings examine what happens when that entrusted influence serves image, advantage or avoidance instead of a defensible common purpose.
Twenty-two dispositions expressed through entrusted organizational power. Read the situations, compare the distinctions and examine what an accountable response would change.
Twenty-two patterns to recognize
- 01
Arrogance
An inflated sense of one's importance or judgment that discounts correction and other people's standing.
- 02
Vanity
Excessive dependence on admiration and the appearance of importance.
- 03
Domineeringness
A persistent desire to control others that overrides their reasonable agency.
- 04
Vindictiveness
A habitual disposition to seek payback against someone for a real or perceived injury, slight, embarrassment or challenge.
- 05
Envy
Resentment of another's advantage, with a desire to diminish or deny it.
- 06
Callousness
Habitual indifference to another person's suffering or serious needs.
- 07
Partiality
Persistent, unjustified favoritism in the weight given to people's claims, evidence or opportunities.
- 08
Dishonesty
A readiness to make or preserve a misleading understanding for advantage, convenience or concealment.
- 09
Venality
A readiness to trade a considered ethical commitment or entrusted responsibility for personal reward.
- 10
Greed
Excessive desire for gain that persistently overrides fair claims or defensible limits.
- 11
Profligacy
Habitually indulging expenditure or consumption without fitting regard for the resources entrusted to one's care.
- 12
Miserliness
Habitual unwillingness to part with resources even when their proper use calls for expenditure or provision.
- 13
Willful Blindness
Deliberately avoiding available inquiry or evidence in order not to confront an unwelcome reality.
- 14
Self-Deception
Habitually sustaining a comforting or self-serving interpretation despite reasons one could reasonably acknowledge against it.
- 15
Rigidity
Habitual unwillingness to revise a view or method when relevant reasons call for reconsideration.
- 16
Complacency
Unwarranted satisfaction with one's adequacy that weakens needed attention or improvement.
- 17
Negligence
Habitual disregard for the attention and care one could reasonably give to entrusted concerns.
- 18
Inconstancy
Habitually abandoning considered purposes or commitments without an adequate reason.
- 19
Impatience
Habitual unwillingness to allow the time or process that a worthwhile purpose reasonably requires.
- 20
Irresolution
A persistent unwillingness to settle a choice when adequate grounds for an appropriate decision are available.
- 21
Cowardice
Habitual surrender of a considered, defensible purpose to fear when a fitting response was reasonably available.
- 22
Recklessness
Disregard for foreseeable, significant consequences, including risks imposed on other people.
Power and purpose
Executive responsibility concerns an undertaking whose effects extend beyond the person making the decision. Authority allocates work, opportunity, resources and the conditions under which people can speak. A private habit can therefore become an organizational arrangement before anyone has given it a name.
These twenty-two readings concern dispositions expressed through entrusted power. They do not rank leaders by financial success or explain every failed initiative through character. A sound decision can have an unfortunate result; an attractive result can follow a decision that treated other people’s claims irresponsibly.
The cases use ordinary imagined scenes rather than portraits of named executives. They make a choice visible so that its reasons can be examined. Begin with what happened, what was reasonably known, whose interests were affected and what responses were actually available.
Similar effects can have different causes
An objection can be dismissed through Arrogance, excluded from inquiry through Willful Blindness, explained away through Self-Deception or punished through Vindictiveness. Each can obstruct information, but the mechanisms differ. The relevant distinction is not how severe the label sounds; it is what the person is doing with the inconvenient fact.
Resource decisions need the same care. Greed excessively claims a gain; Profligacy indulges spending without fitting regard for entrusted resources; Miserliness withholds provision even when its proper use is warranted. An expensive purchase, a reserve or a reward is not sufficient evidence of any one of them.
The categories can overlap within an incident. They are reading aids for investigating conduct, not a test that assigns every event to exactly one box. The definitions shared with Business Vices remain the same; leadership situations develop their consequences rather than redefine their meanings.
The organization helps shape the choice
The person directing the enterprise helps establish which behavior is rewarded, what information travels and who bears the cost of delay. An executive who requests criticism and punishes its first appearance creates an obstacle rather than a culture of candor.
Responsibility is not unlimited control. People have different powers, capacities and dependencies. A worker protecting a livelihood from credible retaliation cannot be treated as if they held the leader’s available choices. Ethical boundaries, rest, disability, uncertainty and justified caution remain relevant to any interpretation of conduct.
The Vindictiveness reading explicitly considers retaliation against whistleblowers, while distinguishing payback from other motives for suppressing information and from fair accountability. It does not prescribe a disclosure or confrontation. An accurate account of power must include the risks faced by the person who would speak.
Read the case and examine the reasons
Each article develops the mechanism, what it can cost the work, an important boundary, possible repair and questions for reflection. Constructive virtue readings offer other ways to think about the situation, without treating a vice and a virtue as a simple pair of switches.
Three source passages on each page bring further perspectives, including objections to an easy reading of the label. Their context matters: a historical statement about princes, schools or industrial relations is not automatically a current rule for an employer. The original poems and paradox examine the same situation through a lighter form.
This is a reference catalog. It does not enroll users, score character, track vices or create another Workbook. Business Vices remains the companion collection for everyday work and commercial relationships. Neither collection makes organizational convenience the measure of a person’s worth.
Other perspectives
We are learning that a standard of social ethics is not attained by travelling a sequestered byway, but by mixing on the thronged and common road where all must turn out for one another, and at least see the size of one another's burdens.
Jane Addams · Democracy and Social Ethics · Read the source
Addams asks a social ethic to encounter other people’s burdens. Executive decisions need that encounter because their inconvenience is often carried by people absent from the decision.
The vices, when they have leave from power and authority, go greater lengths than the virtues;
William Hazlitt · Characteristics and other writings, Collected Works volume XII · Read the source
Hazlitt considers what authority permits others to do. This excerpt stops before his embedded Shakespeare phrase; its question is how leadership can make an excess seem authorized.