Zhang finds another beacon in the writings of Immanuel Kant, the nineteenth-century German philosopher whose “categorical imperative” holds that we must never regard human beings as mere tools. In a long-ago meeting with the authors, Zhang echoed this belief when he laid out his aspirations for Haier: “We want to encourage employees to become entrepreneurs because people are not a means to an end but an end in themselves. Our goal is to let everyone become their own CEO.

The Corporation in the 21st Century- John Kay

PART 1: The Background

1: Love the Product, Hate the Producer

“Some of these billionaire executives are no superstars: individuals such as Philip Green, who extracted nine-figure sums from retailer BHS before selling the company to multiple bankrupt Dominic Chappell for £1, Mike Ashley, the domineering boss of the retailer Sports Direct, and Eddie Lampert, who inflicted similar destruction on Sears, for a century America’s leading store chain. The lifestyle of these executives contrasts with the fate of their businesses. The 90-metre yachts of Green and Lampert make good newspaper pictures. Green’s is moored in the harbour of the tax haven of Monaco, where he is resident, while Lampert’s is named Fountainhead, after Ayn Rand’s turgid paean to individualism.

In writing this book, I have been repeatedly struck by the frequency with which discussion is clouded, not illuminated, by the imposition of false binaries where no clear-cut distinction actually exists. Just as there is no usefully sharp distinction between heap and not heap, between dry and wet, so there is no sharp distinction between market and hierarchy, between public and private sectors, between profit and not-for-profit organisations, even – and critically – no sharp distinction between capital and labour. The concept of ownership is often complicated, and the ‘badges of ownership’ may be divided among several agents so that the ‘owner’ is hard to identify. Binaries are the natural currency of both lawyers and economists because, for different but related reasons, both law and mathematics demand precision.

From a cybernetic point of view, it’s interesting as an example of how the systems and structures mattered so much more than the individuals involved. The development of the Friedman doctrine into the intellectual backing for the leveraged buyout boom and the private equity industry are best seen as a conflict between two comprehensive systems of interest, both of which might have regarded the other as a threat. The great unremarked class struggle that happened in the 1970s and 1980s was that between capitalism and managerialism.

The managers lost this struggle, pretty comprehensively. And as we’ve seen, the combination of the blind spots in management and the blind spots in economics came together to produce an ideology which was bound to remove management capacity. And that created further blind spots, and further reduced the system’s ability to cope with shocks. The story of how we got to where we are is a story of the attempts of the system to cope with this, and to search for short-term equilibrium.

5. Taking Flight

It would seem in retrospect that each of the books Morrison published in 1974 turned on the notion that accepted ideas needed to be challenged. Much in the same way Herskovit’s collection upended long-accepted ideas about race and culture, the final book Morrison published that year, Land’s Grow or Die: The Unifying Principle of Transformation, decried conventional wisdom and prevailing business practices and promoted, instead, proactive approaches to organizational change and growth. At the core of Land’s argument was the claim that risk aversion and safe-decision making were guarantees for stagnation and death.