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I'm a great believer that leadership, in a large part, is moral leadership. And people want to follow moral leadership. They respect it. And they expect it, too.

When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want or need something ... but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen Â… and then is when we are in bad trouble.

We talk about moral viruses, which are simply inaccurate or incorrect beliefs about the world or oneself. Almost all viruses stem from fear-based beliefs, which are usually irrational or inaccurate fears, such as the fear of an ethnic group.

Leaders have their own set of moral viruses. One that's lethal relates to trust--the idea that you can't trust people until they've proved they're worthy. That's a vicious circle. If you're looking for ways in which they're untrustworthy, you'll find those and a lack of trust will be perpetuated. Another virus is a belief that there's a hierarchy of value for people. The people who don't have that virus tend to know the name of the night watchman and the janitor, and chat with them about baseball scores.

Business "ethics," should not be confused with business "morality." Morality is the sum total of a particular society's or organization's current perceived traditions, beliefs, values, attitudes and norms that have been cultivated over time, institutionalized in religious doctrine, laws, regulations and codes of conduct which explicitly or implicitly suggest how an individual should behave in situations as they are encountered daily. Ethics may well include a discussion of moral trends, but morality defines primarily where we are.

J. Jacobs in her famous book Systems of Survival (1992) distinguishes between two ethical systems that she calls ‘moral syndromes’. The public domain is characterised by the guardian syndrome, the private domain by the commercial syndrome. The guardian syndrome involves values such as avoidance of trade and commerce, pursuit of discipline and loyalty, and respect for tradition and hierarchy. There is also a certain degree of fatalism, linked to a strong devotion to the task in hand. The commercial syndrome, by contrast, comprises values such as violence avoidance, arriving at voluntary agreements, honesty and competitiveness. Other values, such as optimism and appreciation for initiative, also play their part. There are two types of survival, according to Jacobs: tasks that are part of the state and trading that is linked to the market system. Each moral syndrome belongs to a pattern of survival and cannot be mixed without a problem. They are, according to Jacobs, mutually exclusive.