Managing Leadership^®

Welcome back. I hope your weekend’s celebrations went well, and bode just as well or better for your new year.

I want to review for a moment what we will be attempting to accomplish on these pages in the coming months. Inasmuch as our stated purpose is to provide a venue for the serious consideration of the independent value and conduct of the management profession, we will concentrate on topics that directly address its nature and performance, as well as on those that indirectly illuminate its distinct role and importance in the world of business and organizations, and in society as well.

In the next few months, we will begin to do these things in a slightly different way. To begin with, each week will likely contain two to four daily posts touching on topics of interest in current events, as indicated above, with brief commentary. There will also be one to three daily mini-essays, somewhat like those that have characterized the posts of the past few months. These will fall into three general categories:

1. A discussion of a topic of general import, of interest to me based on my overall concerns in this field or arising from observations made during my work, or on a topic of wide interest suggested by you.
2. A review of the topics of the previous few days’ current events postings, considering their meaning in the broader pattern of unfolding developments in the business world.
3. Book reviews. These will be selective, and will generally only be done of books I believe managers will benefit from. These may be works written specifically for this audience, but they may just as likely be books written in other fields that I believe contain insights or ways of viewing or examining issues that managers will benefit from on a practical, as well as a theoretical, level. I am unlikely to review a book I do not recommend, although I may make general remarks concerning certain of these. Again, book reviews may also arise from your suggestions; it is in such cases that I am most likely to do a full review of a book that I do not recommend.

Related to book reviews, I will be adding a “Reading List” page to the “Contents” section in the sidebar on the right. This will contain books that I believe every manager should read and consider. Eventually, they all will also be reviewed on the main page. Look for this in the coming weeks.

To begin with, please consider this WSJ article about the corporate democracy movement. We have discussed here the fact that one of our most important issues in corporate governance isn’t merely if and how to control CEOs, or what to do about executive directors; we need to examine more carefully how boards actually determine and express their fiduciary duty. The author of this article touches on this subject by attacking the insistence by some activists that companies be governed more like political institutions in the civilian world. He underplays the meaning and importance of politics a bit, and he also appears to counter rather too profusely that the root of all corporate scandals is in over-regulation. Nevertheless, he effectively makes the point that we need to be careful of recourse to emotionally-charged argumentation in order to gain the rhetorical high-ground in discussions such as these. We should consider the implications of the forces playing over this issue by business and legal considerations, and by capitalism itself, before settling too quickly on a model for viewing the overall problem.

Thank you again for joining us. I think we can look forward to an interesting 2007 together.

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