Listen to Employees in Board Rooms

Productivity Is Killing American Enterprise.
By: Mintzberg, Henry,
Harvard Business Review,
July/August 2007, Vol. 85, Issue 7/8






Corporate boards need to be opened up to the voices of people who care about the long-term health of the enterprise, most notably the employees.

Treat the enterprise as a community of engaged members, not a collection of free agents.

We can start, for example, with compensation systems that encourage cooperative effort. Corporations are social institutions, which function best when committed human beings (not human "resources") collaborate in relationships based on trust and respect. Destroy this and the whole institution of business collapses.



Henry Mintzberg is the Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at McGill University and the faculty director of its International Masters for Health Leadership.
You can access his views on managemengt at www.mintzberg.org.