Business at a Crossroads The Crisis of Corporate Leadership

by Lloyd, Tom

• ISBN13: 9780230230941
• ISBN10: 0230230946
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-12-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Recent events suggest liberal capitalism harbours two dangerous seeds of self-destruction; growing inequality and a tendency for markets to spiral out of control. This book advocates the restoration to an earlier state of another sub-system of liberal capitalism, some of the features of which lie at the heart of liberal capitalisms malaise.

Author Biography

TOM LLOYD is a management writer and author. He is a former editor of Financial Weekly and Management Today, was founder editor of Gemini Consulting's quarterly management journal Transformation and wrote the 'Working Brief' column in The Sunday Telegraph for several years. He has written five books, including Managing Knowhow, with Karl-Erik Sveiby, (Bloomsbury, 1987) and The 'nice' company (Bloomsbury, 1990).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	p. xi
Introduction	p. 1
Reference	p. 11
What ails big business	p. 13
What people want	p. 15
Self-respect is a primary good	p. 17
Free	p. 19
Fair	p. 20
Reasonable	p. 21
Decent	p. 24
Power and powerlessness	p. 26
Good work	p. 29
The argument so far	p. 30
References	p. 30
A feudal heritage	p. 31
A cat ponders a king	p. 31
Business is natural	p. 32
Early trade	p. 34
The precursors of companies	p. 35
The English East India Company	p. 37
From mercantilism to capitalism	p. 39
The Industrial Revolution	p. 41
An accidental birth	p. 42
The birth environment	p. 43
Medieval tournaments	p. 45
The evolutionary puzzle	p. 47
The argument so far	p. 48
Box: Hudson's Bay Company	p. 48
References	p. 50
The steam-age corporation	p. 51
Why the MuBE emerged	p. 52
Why the MuBE thrived	p. 56
Chandler's contribution	p. 66
The argument so far	p. 67
Box: Vickers-Armstrongs	p. 67
References	p. 68
The decadent corporation	p. 69
Justice as fairness	p. 69
Growing inequality	p. 72
More than fair shares	p. 78
TARP restrictions on executive pay	p. 79
The gathering storm	p. 82
Barriers to reform	p. 83
A dangerous decadence	p. 85
The argument so far	p. 86
References	p. 87
Not so much greed	p. 88
Greed	p. 88
Asset-skimming	p. 92
An unwholesome alliance	p. 93
An unhappy coincidence	p. 95
The cult of leadership	p. 98
The buck and the bucks stop here	p. 102
The argument so far	p. 102
References	p. 103
The myth of leadership	p. 104
The CEO system	p. 105
The management ideas market	p. 107
The CEO as principal and conductor	p. 109
Systemic risks	p. 111
Fortunes from good fortune	p. 114
The CEO as ambassador	p. 115
Leaders and leadership	p. 116
Progress report	p. 119
The argument so far	p. 119
References	p. 120
Reforming big business	p. 121
Leaderless competitors	p. 123
Roads not taken	p. 124
A fractured landscape	p. 127
Box: Patches on landscapes
Phase transition	p. 130
The poverty of strategy	p. 132
New roads	p. 135
Linux	p. 135
Wikipedia	p. 139
Stewards, seeders, guardians	p. 142
The argument so far	p. 143
References	p. 143
The adaptive challenge	p. 145
The question of purpose	p. 145
Soul and community	p. 148
Too few women	p. 150
Feminine management	p. 153
The arrow and the spiral	p. 156
The female advantage	p. 157
Talent	p. 157
Moderating macho	p. 158
Risk	p. 158
Ethics	p. 158
Box: Ethics and gender	p. 159
Pay	p. 159
The promise of women	p. 160
The argument so far	p. 160
References	p. 161
Size and shape	p. 162
Real business	p. 163
Small and local	p. 164
Power with	p. 165
Box: From an Acorn	p. 167
The parasite's strategy	p. 169
Partnership problems	p. 170
Yielding power	p. 174
Creative conversation	p. 175
Partnership enterprise	p. 176
The argument so far	p. 177
References	p. 177
Corporate reformation	p. 178
The Individualized Corporation	p. 178
The regents committee	p. 182
Corporate democracy	p. 185
Numbers that nudge	p. 187
Open-book management	p. 188
Measuring CEO performance	p. 190
Redeeming the corporation	p. 191
Box: Semco's steps to democracy	p. 193
References	p. 193
Index	p. 194
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

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