In the past year or so, business leaders have learned about a phenomenon usually reserved for athletes: that it is possible, in an astonishingly short period of time, to change from hero to goat — the one who gets blamed, rightly or wrongly, for the whole team’s failure. The image of the CEO as Alexander the Great has faded; comparisons today are more likely to be made with Charles Ponzi.
When applied indiscriminately to all CEOs, the goat label is no doubt as unfair as the hero worship was unjustified. But even if corporate crimes are a matter of a few bad apples rather than a blighted orchard, the reality is that the public is outraged and the politicians smell blood.
It may seem like odd timing, then, for an important thinker on corporate leadership and public policy to be issuing a call for CEOs to undertake a serious, committed engagement with a whole range of social, economic and environmental issues — topics that for years have been at the bottom of most top-executive agendas. But that is precisely what Jeffrey Garten envisions in “The Politics of Fortune: A New Agenda for Business Leaders,” published by Harvard Business School Press. Garten — dean of the Yale School of Management, former undersecretary of commerce in the Clinton administration, a veteran of Wall Street in the 1980s and... To read the complete article, login or sign-up using the form below.
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