In the past, I have done blog entries looking at the difference between morality and ethics and questioning why business schools have failed to address this issue.

Now it's good to read a report that Harvard Business School is running a course on The Moral Leader. Read between the lines of what HBS Professor sandra Sucher says and you see that it requires a completely different way of thinking to what's usually expected in business where managers and executives expect certainty. For a start, it requires the need to embrace the kind of ambiguity and uncertainty where the answers are not necessarily right or wrong.

"Most challenges that feature moral issues are not that clear-cut, and the situations they are embedded in can go on for quite a long time without resolution," she says."Leaders also require a capacity for complexity. Most business challenges involve moral duties to many parties-shareholders, customers, employees, suppliers, even the public-and often these duties can conflict. What enables a leader to wend his way through such a situation is a capacity for complexity, the ability to hold multiple perspectives in view at the same time."

In other words, the kind of moral reasoning required of business leaders today is about managing differences.