Why They Do It - by Eugene Soltes (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

What drives wealthy and powerful people to white-collar crime? Why They Do It is a breakthrough look at the dark side of the business world.

From the financial fraudsters of Enron, to the embezzlers at Tyco, to the insider traders at McKinsey, to the Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff, the failings of corporate titans are regular fixtures in the news. In Why They Do It, Harvard Business School professor Eugene Soltes draws from extensive personal interaction and correspondence with nearly fifty former executives as well as the latest research in psychology, criminology, and economics to investigate how once-celebrated executives become white-collar criminals.

White-collar criminals are not merely driven by excessive greed or hubris, nor do they usually carefully calculate costs and benefits before breaking the law. Instead, Soltes shows that most of the executives who committed crimes made decisions the way we all do-on the basis of their intuitions and gut feelings. The trouble is that these gut feelings are often poorly suited for the modern business world where leaders are increasingly distanced from the consequences of their decisions and the individuals they impact.

The extraordinary costs of corporate misconduct are clear to its victims. Yet, never before have we been able to peer so deeply into the minds of the many prominent perpetrators of white-collar crime. With the increasing globalization of business threatening us with even more devastating corporate misconduct, the lessons Soltes draws in Why They Do It are needed more urgently than ever.

Review Quotes

"A deep and important analysis of one of the most important and least studied problems of our times: corporate crime. But it is also a page turner."--Luigi Zingales, University of Chicago

"A landmark study of business gone wrong."--Andrew Lo, MIT School of Management

"A rare, intimate, and fascinating glimpse into the series of decisions, each one mundane enough, that lead by steps to high crime. Leaves you wondering, could it happen to you?"
--John Coates, former trader and author of The Hour Between Dog and Wolf

"Groundbreaking...[an] impressive debut...A forcefully developed and documented contribution to our further understanding of high-level criminality in lightly regulated free markets."--Kirkus

"This fascinating book reads like a fast-paced novel that details the motivations and consequences of white-collar crime."--Arthur Levitt, former chairman of the US Securities and Exchange Commission

"[Soltes] has done a great service with Why They Do It. Not only does he draw on psychological research to dissect the way white-collar criminals think-or fail to think-before they act. But he also interviews several of the most famous white-collar criminals of our time, among them, the corrupt lawyer Marc Dreier and the financial swindlers Allen Stanford and Bernie Madoff. He presents what he has found in a spirit of understanding rather than condemnation."--Wall Street Journal

"[Soltes] takes a unique approach, looking for the connections between what motivated these men - and yes, they are all men - and asking not what they did but why they did it....Soltes creates some fascinating portraits."--Washington Post

About the Author

Eugene Soltes is the McLean Family Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and the founder of Integrity Lab, a compliance analytics and advisory firm, His research on corporate malfeasance has been extensively cited by the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, New York Times, and The Economist.