Keep Your Integrity, Grow Your Influence: A Six-Step Method for Leaders Facing Hard Calls at Work
Your boss just asked you to cross a line. What you do next will shape your career and your character.
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Ethical failure is a slow slide, a thousand tiny decisions that each seem harmless at the time. This book teaches you to spot the slide early and stand firm without torching your career.
Richard French pairs the story of Daniel, who rose to the top of two empires while keeping his principles, with true-to-life workplace cases: a physician resisting an unfair triage rule, a procurement officer exposing bid-rigging, an executive refusing to hide a product’s flaws. Every chapter follows the same clear shape, an episode from Daniel’s story, a modern case, the principles drawn out of both, and questions to work through, so you always know where you are and what comes next.
The resource library draws on leading ethics voices including Rushworth Kidder, Mary Gentile and Max Bazerman. This second edition adds cross-sector case studies, further decision frameworks, deeper historical context on Daniel’s world, and a fuller treatment of ethical resilience. You need no particular faith to use any of it.
A six-step decision method, Define, Analyze, Navigate, Investigate, Evaluate, Lead, that turns your hardest call into a sequence you can actually follow.
A written statement of your non-negotiable values, set down in advance, so pressure in the moment never catches you unprepared.
A way to consciously rank your duties for the times your employer, the law and people’s welfare pull in different directions.
A team exercise for rehearsing an ethical emergency before a real one arrives.
A test of your values, your stakeholders, your alternatives and your courage, applied before you act rather than after.
“I never saw it coming. There wasn’t one big moment where I chose to compromise my values. It was a thousand tiny decisions, each seemingly insignificant at the time.”
How the slide actually begins
“Authentic leadership isn’t about choosing between ethics and success; it’s about using one to achieve the other.”
The argument the whole book rests on
“A crisis doesn’t define our ethical character; it reveals it.”
On why the work happens beforehand
who live in the gap between what shareholders want and what is right, and need ethical clarity to be an advantage rather than a cost.
who entered the field to treat people and now spend their days inside insurance rules and budget constraints.
building capability faster than anyone can govern it, who want responsibility designed in rather than bolted on.
who can feel the pressure to compromise and want to recognise it early enough to do something else.
“This book completely shifted how I view ethical leadership. It’s clear, practical, and deeply relevant.”
Aurelia Hulls, reader
“Transformation, not just history. This book gave me tools to make ethical decisions every day.”
Wendy Walker, reader
“A masterpiece in ethical leadership. Deeply moving and intellectually rich.”
Caleb Frost, reader
Some of this is better argued out loud. The discussion guide takes leadership teams, professional groups and book clubs from understanding the principles to applying them in their own organisation. It carries chapter-by-chapter questions, application exercises, role-playing scenarios for rehearsing difficult conversations, and reading schedules that assume everyone is busy.
Free. Nine sessions, ninety minutes each, with a leader’s section. Delivered by BookFunnel in EPUB and PDF.
Daniel as a Blueprint opens Ethics & Leadership, a series about holding your values under pressure and building the kind of influence that lasts.
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