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Society in crisis
Newspaper headlines remind us that something is happening, has been happening, in corporate America, and that ultimately it will affect everyone. That something is the new breed of business executive - an executive tenaciously participating in a reformulation of the rules of business. Their "fast companies" are busy changing the status quo with respect to the way business is conducted, and a lot of innocent people are being left in the ditch[1] .
The public came to know of the outcomes of their decisions when the US media reported on the ostensible callousness of managerial decision-making and behaviour portrayed by business leaders such as Enron's Jeff Skilling and Andrew Fastow, Dennis Kozlowski of Tyco, Gary Winnick of Global Crossings, and John Rigas of Adelphia, as well as many others whose deeds did not make US national headlines. David Hart of Brigham Young University noted that the widespread publicity of the costly ethical failures of US organizational leaders is evidence of a critical problem in US society today - "the scarcity of men and women of good character in positions of significant leadership" ([19] Hart, 2001).
Hart's perspective was echoed by International Herald Tribune commentator William Pfaff, who discussed what he called the "pathological mutation" in capitalism as a systemic condition contributing to the Enron scandal. [24] Pfaff (2002) noted that a sharp decline in corporate morality gained speed with a switch from the traditional owners' capitalism to a new form, a model of "manager's capitalism" - a "version of capitalism [that] functions primarily to enrich corporate managers as a class".
John Bogle, founder and former CEO of the Vanquard Group (a mutual fund management group), wrote of the "pathological mutation" of capitalism in his book The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism ([4] Bogle, 2005). He discussed the exacerbating conditions that have led to the deterioration of corporate morality in America today. In part due to changes in societal, corporate and governmental oversight (or lack of), today's capitalists luxuriate in an environment different from that of their predecessors - free to run business more on their own and for their own interest. This environment did not occur in a vacuum:
While the modern world of business was built on a system of...