Maximilian B. Torres
professor
Business Ethics
IESE Business School Universidad de Navarra
Spain
Biography
Max Torres joined IESE?s faculty in 1992 and currently holds visiting appointments in two departments, Business Ethics and Managing People in Organizations. Formerly a member of the permanent faculty, he returned to his native United States of America in 2002. He teaches courses in business ethics, organizational behavior and leadership in various IESE programs, and has taught corporate law, business associations, and securities regulation in the US since 2004. He is currently the founding director of the Three-Dimensional Leadership Institute in Ann Arbor, MI. His research centers on the relationships among decision-making, personal character and organizational culture and is multi-disciplinary in scope, spanning business, ethics and law. In aims to identify, model and harnesses the intangible human phenomena underlying measurable results in organizations. His most recent publication, "Getting Business Off Steroids" (2009) was the opening chapter of Doing Well And Good: The Human Face of the New Capitalism (Information Age Publishing, Ethics in Practice Series). He has won numerous awards, and was recipient of the 2003 Novak Award from Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty in Grand Rapids, MI. He serves on the executive board of the Journal of Markets and Morality and the editorial board of the Journal of Business Ethics Education. His opinions on the financial crisis of '08 can be heard on Ave Maria Radio, WDEO in Ann Arbor, MI, and found in the podcast archives of "Kresta in the Afternoon." In addition to IESE, Prof. Torres has held academic appointments at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth in Hanover, NH; IMEI -Institute for Media and Entertainment in New York, NY; Ave Maria School of Law in Ann Arbor, MI; and Ohio Northern University's Pettit College of Law in Ada, OH. He has taught in executive education programs at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business in Ann Arbor, MI; been a Visiting Scholar at the Stanford Graduate School of Management, Stanford University; taught at IEDC-Bled School of Management in Bled, Slovenia; and taught at the Southern New England School of Law in New Bedford, MA. Before joining IESE, Prof. Torres worked in the financial services industry, first as a registered representative with Dean Witter Reynolds and then with Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, both in San Francisco, CA. He later served as Executive VP of Investments at the D/A Financial Group in Orinda, CA, and was Principle of Max Torres Co. in Walnut Creek, CA.
Research Interest
Areas of Interest * Ethical decision-making * Leadership and motivation * Corporate governance * Organizational pathology
Publications
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Self-leadership - one's own leadership - is absolutely necessary in order to lead others. This self-leadership is nourished by competences such as self-knowledge, emotional intelligence, proactivity, time and stress management, personal and professional career management, and affective maturity, which is the fruit of evaluative learning generated through the resolution of intermotivational conflicts.
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We open paths of reflection on the true core of relational leadership and our happiness. There is also an in-depth study of the various lessons learned from the resolution of motivational conflicts.
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In this report, I will survey the dominant theories employed in the academic sub discipline of business ethics, describing and critiquing each one. By "theories" I mean not only the various philosophical approaches which inform discourse and research in this field, but also the alternative paradigms to which those approaches pertain according to the following schema. I will adopt for this survey the nomenclature proposed by William Shaw (1996) in his survey of business ethics, which is one of the most recent in the literature and, additionally, illustrative of certain misconceptions regarding alternative ethical paradigms. Shaw distinguishes among three rival orientations, or three different ways of conceptualizing research and pedagogy, in business ethics: 1) the standard or individual moral decision model; 2) the politics model; and 3) the virtue model. I will comment on Shaw's categories as well as on some of the specific theoretical currents he identifies.
