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The longtime general counsel at General Electric Co. has written a book about his experiences managing the global giant's legal department of 1,000 lawyers spread around 100 countries.

Ben W. Heineman Jr.'s "High Performance with High Integrity" will be published Tuesday by Harvard Business School Press. According to the publisher's Web site, Heineman speaks frankly about the "dark side" of capitalism -- a "temptation to cut corners, fudge accounts, or worse."

Heineman says that the only way for companies to avoid such failures, according to the publisher, is for chief executives to "create a culture of integrity through exemplary leadership, transparency, incentives, and processes, not just rules and penalties."

Heineman was GE's GC from 1987 to 2003, when he became senior vice president for law and public affairs. He retired from GE at the end of 2005.

Some of Heineman's lawyers from GE went on to be CEOs, including Home Depot's Frank Blake and Pfizer's Jeffrey B. Kindler.

The publisher calls the book "a much-needed corporate blueprint for doing well while doing good in the high-pressure global economy." It is part of a series called Memo to the CEO -- "solutions-focused advice from today's leading practitioners."

In his book, Heineman details "performance with integrity principles and practices" that CEOs can use, and he shows how chief executives "can drive performance by integrating integrity systems and processes deep into company operations."

The book grew out of an article Heineman wrote for Harvard Business Review last year, "Avoiding integrity land mines," which became a best-seller in reprint orders.

"It is now time to shift this debate about corporate integrity from board oversight of the CEO to how the CEO and top company leaders can most effectively fuse high performance with high integrity at all levels in a challenging, fast-changing and at times hostile world," the article stated. "This is a grinding, complex, day-in, day-out task that is difficult in the best of circumstances to do well. GE has certainly learned its own hard lessons along the way, sometimes dealing with integrity violations that went unnoticed and unreported for far too long."

The article highlighted "how GE has tried to build a culture that fuses high integrity and high performance using a series of core principles and key practices."

Heineman, chief legal advisor to GE CEOs Jack Welch and Jeff Immelt, described an outline of "how the company has attempted to continually improve its systems and processes and to build a culture where executives and employees are motivated to do the right thing, even in GE's famously high-pressure business environment."

Heineman is now a distinguished senior fellow at Harvard Law School's Program on the Legal Profession in Cambridge, Mass. He is also a senior fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and a senior counsel to the law firm of Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale & Dorr. He is a graduate of Harvard University, Oxford University and Yale Law School, and a Rhodes scholar. He served as a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart. Before joining GE, he was a staff attorney for the Center for Law & Social Policy in Washington and a litigator at Williams & Connolly.

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