Ultimate Questions

The accumulated wisdom of a beloved business professor's signature course

Who are we, and who am I? Why are we here, and why am I here? What is the good life, and what is my good life? For years, business ethics professor Andrew Wicks pursued these lines of inquiry in his perennially popular course Ultimate Questions and Creating Value for Stakeholders. Now his book distills the intellectual explorations and hard conversations he and his students navigated together in the classroom into an accessible form available to readers everywhere.

Ultimate Questions is grounded in stakeholder theory: the idea that business leaders need to consider the humanity and complexity of all stakeholders- employees, community members, suppliers, and more- to thrive in ways that go beyond profit. It takes as a given that money is not the only goal of life or work and, like the course, encourages constant curiosity and a spirit of exploration.