About This Course
Why This Book Exists
In December 2024, a healthcare CEO was assassinated on a Manhattan sidewalk. The public reaction stunned me. Instead of universal condemnation, social media filled with people who saw the killing as a form of justice—vigilante accountability for an industry that had denied their claims, delayed their treatments, and profited from their suffering.
I had worked for that company. I knew most people that worked there were highly ethical. However I also understood the rage, even as I rejected the violence.
That moment crystallized something I'd been thinking about for decades: millions of people feel utterly powerless against institutions that harm them legally. They watch corporations externalize costs onto communities, exploit regulatory capture, and optimize for extraction while calling it "shareholder value." And they see no way to fight back.
This book is my answer to that powerlessness.
The Missing Education
During my MBA at the University of St. Thomas, every course was required to include ethics content. Most professors either ignored the requirement entirely or tacked on a brief discussion at the semester's end—a box-checking exercise with no teeth.
That pattern repeated throughout my career. Ethics was treated as an afterthought, a compliance matter, something to manage rather than something to live. Meanwhile, the most profitable firms I encountered had perfected the art of borderline behavior—technically legal, systematically harmful:
- Financial institutions pushing high-interest credit cards to people who could least afford them
- Healthcare providers incentivizing expensive, sometimes unnecessary procedures
- Pharmaceutical companies promoting addictive drugs that created demand for more addictive drugs
None of it was illegal. All of it caused immense harm.
The Data-Drive Systems Thinking Solution
Everything changed when I discovered systems thinking. I learned to see organizations not as collections of decisions but as systems—with feedback loops, leverage points, and emergent behaviors. I learned that complex problems rarely yield to simple solutions, but that small interventions at the right leverage points can transform entire systems.
Most importantly, I learned that feeling powerless is often a failure of seeing. When you understand how systems work, you can find where they're vulnerable to change.
This course teaches that way of seeing. It is a form of visual thinking.
What You'll Learn
This is not a philosophy course about abstract ethical principles. It's a practical toolkit for people who want to make a difference:
- Measure harm rigorously using frameworks like DALYs and social cost accounting
- Gather data ethically without introducing the biases that corrupt so much research
- Map complex systems to understand how harm propagates through networks
- Find leverage points where small efforts produce large changes
- Design interventions that account for how humans actually behave
- Build coalitions and advocate effectively for systemic change
The approach is data-driven but not data-limited. We take what can be measured seriously—and remain humble about what cannot.
Who This Is For
I wrote this for young people who will inherit the systems we've built—and who deserve better tools for changing them. But it's equally for anyone who has ever felt that something was deeply wrong with how our institutions operate, yet couldn't quite articulate what or why or how to fix it.
If you want to move from outrage to effectiveness, from powerlessness to agency, from seeing problems to solving them—this book is for you.
The people who will benefit most from this work are our children and grandchildren. But the work starts now.
Dan McCreary
December 2025
Acknowledgments
Arun Batchu introduced me to systems thinking and complex adaptive systems. That introduction changed how I see the world. I am forever in his debt.
Dr. David West provided detailed feedback that pushed me to look beyond individual industries to the deeper systemic forces—extractive capitalism, fundamentalism, and the limits of purely quantitative thinking—that enable harm across all sectors. His critique made this work more honest.