former CEO Andy Grove declared: “These days I’m ashamed
I’m part of corporate America.”
Where does this leave today’s leaders? One likely outcome
of the recent tumult is that, eventually, executive compensation
will become more modest, although CEOs are still likely to
make more in a year than the average worker will make in a
lifetime. Because workers are now stockholders, thanks largely
to those now shrunken 401(k)s, they are likely to demand more
genuine performance of their leaders in the future and to pay
them less lavishly for it. Heads of nonprofits and other large
organizations will likely receive less money and more scrutiny
as well. That will probably be a good thing. Everything we
learn about creativity suggests that money is more often an ob-
stacle to creative work than an incentive. More modestly paid
leaders might be able concentrate more fully on the intrinsic
rewards of doing good work. And they might be more likely to
recognize that their role has a moral dimension that is just as
important, in its way, as fattening the bottom line.
My hope is that the furor will die down enough for people to
look, deeply and critically, at such vital questions as, What are
the purposes of the corporation and other organizations in to-
day’s world? The metaphor of the organization as a machine that
creates value for stakeholders is too simplistic, everyone agrees.
But what metaphors are more illuminating? I am intrigued by
the notion of the organization as a changing, re sponsive organ-
ism and by Charles Handy’s ideas about the organization as
community. The case for viewing a company or other organiza-
tion as a community is especially compelling in a world where
we spend more and more of our lives in the workplace and grow
ever hungrier for greater balance between work and personal
life. Even as we are shackled by our pagers and cell phones to the
workplace, we long for work that seems meaningful enough toIntroduction to the Revised Edition, 2003xix0465014088_fm.qxd:0738208175_fm.qxd 12/2/08 2:52 PM Page xix