During the past week of panicked news about the latest turn taken by the cancerous credit crisis, stories of this one being potentially worse in some ways than the Great Depression have fanned concern. Of course, it only stands to reason that it would turn out to be the same week I found myself reading Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” a physically and spiritually exhausting post-apocalyptic journey of a search for salvation and hope. A disorienting coincidence. . .
When I was a young, guileless student finishing my college degree in my mid-thirties, one of my favorite professors gave a lecture about seminal years in the course of history. He said modern times seemed to have seen one of these per century. The most recent was 1968, when students took to the streets to fight for “people” power. Previous to this were the French Revolutions of 1848 and 1789. . .
Let’s leave aside – just for today – the many difficult questions raised together with the problematic prospect of change in an organization. We will presume, for the sake of our main discussion, that we have a perfectly valid and widely accepted change project under consideration. What does it do to or for the organization? [...]
Of the few things that can clearly be distinguished as being purely in the leadership realm – that is to say, something that management cannot do – is the establishment of the purpose of an organization. There are valuable things that managers can do with respect to purpose in an organization, but they cannot legitimately decide what it will be. . .
Did you know that the vast majority of businesses in the United States are family-owned? Moreover, between three-fifths and three-quarters of employment and wages can be attributed directly to family businesses. And this type of structure isn’t restricted to small, local companies. . .
A big problem with the concept of the stakeholder is that it is so elastic. The general idea is that a person or group that may not actually be a shareholder in a corporation is nevertheless intimately and directly affected by the activities of the corporation. This term was initially used to encompasses rather obvious members extending from shareholders themselves to employees and communities. But the theoretical foundation of the concept is intended to justify the exercise of power over an organization by groups that had not been anticipated by traditional legal and regulatory methods, and in ways that had been viewed as restricted to owners. And in public reaction to an environment of apparently widespread corporate corruption and scandal, topped off with a blithely detached culture of extraordinary compensation for senior executives, the idea has found traction. . .
This year is shaping up to be a pointer to not only the direction the corporate governance debate takes, but the venue in which it is held. Thankfully, that direction seems to be toward more responsible assessments of the issues rather than denial of their existence, and that venue seems to be in the boardroom rather than in the bureaucracy. Let’s take a brief look at this. . .
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