Why corporations need a new sense of purposeand how to get it.
9/30/2002
Complacent and overconfident, companies spend much time on shareholder satisfaction, but pay lip service to customers and employees. It's an age-old problem, according to author Richard Ellsworth. That's ultimately self-destructive, he says. His solution: a framework for instilling a new sense of purpose in corporate leadership, while weighing all the many constituencies a corporation is expected to serve. (Customers and employees get Ellsworth's vote.) Well studied yet accessible, this book describes how to consider the complexities of purpose through the lenses of strategy, capital markets, global competitiveness, and moral responsibility. Ellsworth is a professor at the Peter F. Drucker Graduate School of Management, at Claremont Graduate University in California.