Good Business: Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning - Rilegato

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0670031968 ISBN 13: 9780670031962

Casa editrice: Viking Pr, 2003

Riassunto

The author of the best-selling Flow profiles the characteristics of a visionary leader, contending that business and work has replaced religion and politics, and demonstrating how business leaders and employees can find happiness while contributing to society. 35,000 first printing.

Su questo libro

L'autore:

Hungarian-born Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is the C. S. and D. J. Davidson Professor of Psychology at the Peter F. Drucker Graduate School of Management at Claremont Graduate University and the director of The Quality of Life Research Center, a nonprofit institute that studies "positive psychology," in Claremont, California.

Estratto. © Riproduzione autorizzata. Diritti riservati.:

Leading the Future

Our jobs determine to a large extent what our lives are like. Is what you do for a living making you ill? Does it keep you from becoming a more fully realized person? Do you feel ashamed of what you have to do at work? All too often, the answer to such questions is yes. Yet it does not have to be like that. Work can be one of the most joyful, most fulfilling aspects of life. Whether it will be or not depends on the actions we collectively take. If the firms that employ an increasing majority of the population are driven solely to satisfy the owners' greed at the expense of working conditions, of the stability of the community, and of the health of the environment, chances are that the quality of our lives-and that of our children-will be worse than it is now.

Fortunately, despite the scandals that have rocked the business world at the start of this century, there are still corporate leaders who understand that they are allowed to hold their privileges only because the rest of us expect them to improve the conditions of existence, rather than help to destroy them. This book is a survey of some of their values, their goals, their mode of operation-a guidebook for a way of conducting business that is both successful and humane.

While the book draws primarily on the experience of leaders of major corporations, it is really about how to improve one's work life at any level-be it janitor or manager. It tries to provide a context for a meaningful life in which work and the pursuit of financial rewards can find their proper places. The men and women we interviewed* had been nominated by their peers because they were both successful and because they cared for more than success. In one way or another, they all had demonstrated that selfish advantage was not their sole motivation. Their collective wisdom provides a blueprint for doing business that is good in both senses: the material and the spiritual.

Now that the entire nation is finally calling the bluff of rogue CEOs, every business leader is eager to mouth pieties to camouflage his true priorities. After the corporate giant Enron collapsed and became a global byword for irresponsible management, one of its leading executives, Jeff Skilling, described his job as doing "God's work." His CEO, Kenneth Lay, had earlier declared: "I was, and am, a strong believer that one of the most satisfying things in life is to create a highly moral and ethical environment in which every individual is allowed and encouraged to realize that God-given potential."

These are worthy sentiments, but worse than useless if one's actions do not support them. As opposed to those leaders who use language only as a disguise, the people on whose experience this book is based actually have shown that they tried hard to create ethical environments in which individuals could realize their potentials. By no means did they always live up to their stated intentions; but their ideas, words, and example show that doing business can be much more fulfilling than most of us realize. So, based in large part on the experience of these exemplary CEOs, this book will discuss what it means to be a good leader, a good manager, and a good worker.

Bookstores are full of volumes containing very good advice about how to be an effective manager or successful leader. Often such books will instruct a reader to model his or her behavior on the cynical wisdom of Machiavelli, the relentless drive of Genghis Khan, or the ruthlessness of Attila the Hun as a way to achieve power and plunder. Good Business has a more modest ambition.

It will explore how leaders who have impressed their peers for both their business success and their commitment to broader social goals go about their jobs-what ambitions motivate them, and what kind of organizations they try to develop in pursuit of those ideals.

The necessity for considering such issues is simple: Today business leaders are among the most influential members of society. While they are all trained to generate profits, many of them are oblivious to the other responsibilities that their new societal leadership entails. In this book, visionary leaders will explain what they consider to be their duties and how they go about fulfilling them. In the process of examining their philosophies and their practical applications, we will focus especially on how leaders and managers and even the concerned employees of any organization can learn to contribute to the sum of human happiness, to the development of an enjoyable life that provides meaning, and to a society that is just and evolving.

These may seem like goals that are beyond human reach, and certainly outside the scope of a book dealing with business. But the way we make a living, the jobs we have, and the way our work is rewarded have a tremendous bearing on our lives, making them either exciting and rewarding, or dull and anxious. For that reason alone anyone in charge of a workplace is obliged to consider the question: How am I contributing to human well-being? This is certainly not a concern that motivated Genghis Khan, or even Machiavelli. But to follow the examples of such social predators prevents business leaders from achieving their full potential. Of course there will always be single-mindedly ambitious executives concerned only with clawing their way to the top. But is such behavior really the kind of leadership we want in our society? In fact, there are enough people in business who do genuinely value organizations that promote happiness, and it is my hope that this book will help them.

As a first step, we should consider what it has meant to be a successful leader in the past, so that we can understand better what options the future may hold.

As humans, we cannot survive without hope. When we lack reasons for living apart from the urges that biology has built into our nervous system we soon revert to an animal level of existence, where only food, comfort, and sex matter. By contrast, the remarkable cultures that some of the great world civilizations have occasionally achieved were made possible by two very different prerequisites: a reasonable level of resources and the technology to use them, leading to a material surplus; and a defined set of goals that helped their citizens overcome the inevitable obstacles and tragedies inherent in living. If either of these conditions is absent, life devolves to a selfish scramble; if both are lacking, it becomes utterly hopeless.

Depending on the level of societal development, a particular class of individuals may step forth with the promise of improving the material conditions of the populace, and offer a set of goals for channeling its life energy. If these individuals can make a credible claim for their program, they are likely to emerge as the leaders of society because the rest of the population will agree to follow them. For untold thousands of years these leaders were typically the best hunters of the tribe, who offered good spoils to their followers, and inspiring stories about the happy hunting grounds in the thereafter. As technologies of food production and warfare became more advanced, however, groups of warlords and of kings surrounded by courtiers and priests assumed leadership. In some periods the clergy and the nobility-usually made up of great landowners-jointly shared power. More recently merchants and manufacturers have risen to the top of the social pyramid.

At the present time two categories of individuals hold the clearest title to providing for the material and spiritual needs of the community. The first is scientists, who promise hope through a longer and healthier life, an expansion of our ambitions into the solar system, and eventual control over both animate and inanimate matter. The second and larger group consists of men and women engaged in business, who promise to make our lives more affluent, comfortable, and exciting by allowing market forces to direct production and consumption in the most efficient way. Scientists and business leaders-the elite of the new knowledge workforce-have achieved an eminence reserved in former times for the nobility and the clergy. Those who do not belong to their ranks are nevertheless willing to grant them power and wealth because they believe that society as a whole will ultimately benefit from their efforts. Is this faith misplaced?

It is difficult to answer that question objectively, let alone accurately. But I believe that most people would agree that science (along with its handmaiden, technology) and business have indeed created living conditions that are more desirable than any that ever existed. Let us set aside for a moment the very real issue of whether such material blessings can be sustained indefinitely, or even as long as into the coming decades. Huge problems confront us, ranging from the inevitable depletion of scarce natural resources, to the many stresses of our increasingly hard-driven lifestyles, to the strains resulting from the unequal allocation of resources among the rich and the poor both within and between societies. Let us also overlook the real costs of progress in terms of maladies like drug addiction, violence, and depression, which have become so endemic in technologically advanced societies, and concede the fact that scientific and entrepreneurial leadership has indeed delivered on the promise of a more desirable material existence.

That leaves, however, the second condition for a good life unaccounted for. What about the sense of hope that successful leaders are also supposed to convey to those who follow them? In this area, the results are more equivocal. Basically science and business both follow empirical, pragmatic, value-free methods. Although there are individual scientists and business leaders who take a quasi-religious stance toward their work, they usually do so by drawing on some established spiritual or moral tradition, and not on any particular tenets of their profession. Science can promise truth, but its version of truth is as often harsh as it is soothing. Business promises efficiency and profit, but what do these ac...

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Viking Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0670031968
• ISBN 13: 9780670031962
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero edizione: 1
• Numero di pagine: 256