Soltes questions common theories, like one most recently espoused by former federal prosecutor Preet Bharara, who said the white-collar criminals he prosecuted were “‘highly skilled at cost-benefit analysis’ and they ‘weigh the risk of getting caught against the potential reward, and they decide it’s worth the risk.’” Rather, there seemed to be no method to the madness of the executives the author interviewed. But struck by the “bewildering number of theories about why white-collar criminals ‘did it,’” he began talking to them directly, ultimately corresponding with and visiting more than four dozen of the most senior executives who oversaw some of the most significant corporate failures in history. Not many case studies on white-collar crime are taught at HBS, where Soltes teaches accounting and management. Two of this year’s three narrative-focused best business books raise important and uncomfortable questions about the way in which we define and attempt to curtail and punish corporate practices that aren’t good for society (or how we fail to make those attempts). The third, Jonathan Taplin’s Move Fast and Break Things, considers the way in which some of the largest digital companies seek to capture our attention. “I say corruption, but it’s all legal, because that’s how institutional corruption works - the guys taking the money make the laws,” writes Cyrus Bozorgmehr in Once Upon a Time in Shaolin: The Untold Story of Wu-Tang Clan’s Million-Dollar Secret Album, the Devaluation of Music, and America’s New Public Enemy No. Others believe the crime is what is sanctioned by law and hence goes unpunished. Sutherland was the first to argue that stealing wasn’t restricted to deviant, lower-class individuals on the streets “but rather was present within many of the leading corporations of America,” writes Soltes. But it was a novel concept in 1939, when sociologist Edwin Sutherland coined the phrase, according to a new book by Harvard Business School (HBS) professor Eugene Soltes, Why They Do It: Inside the Mind of the White-Collar Criminal.
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May 2023
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