How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything . . . in Business (and in Life)

Part IV. HOW WE GOVERN

INTRODUCTION: INNOVATING IN HOW

Business, simply put, is a vessel that contains and expresses the results of human endeavor. Within it pools much that we aspire to: meaning, success, significance, excellence, and contribution to the greater good. There, too, live greed, self-serving attitudes, covetousness, consumption, exploitation, and a host of our less savory qualities. A company or an organization forms to achieve a goal unattainable by an individual alone—a greater service to others, a larger product, or an advancement of human knowledge. For business to find its greatest expression and achieve its loftier aims, it must organize and govern itself in a manner that unleashes these higher forces in those who join within it. Every group faces the challenge of how best to accomplish this goal, an organizational premise that attracts the best and brightest, inspires them to achieve at the highest level, and generates sufficient reward—both monetary and nonmonetary—to compensate their efforts.

In Part One, we discussed the many forces and factors that have fundamentally changed the world in which business operates, placing a new and intense focus on how we do what we do. In Parts Two and Three, we examined in depth these new hows and explored ways we can, as individuals and groups, learn to master a way of acting and thinking about the world that aligns us more closely with these new realities. Taken together, these three parts provide a new lens through which ...