800-CEO-READ Excerpts

Purpose: A Critical Biography

At the end of Purpose by Nikos Mourkogiannis, there is a critical biography of the works that informed and inspired the book. The bibliography is written in a essay format with commentary and context that shows Nikos' thought process in the development of the book.

You can download it here in a pdf format or you can click through to read the bibliography in html.

I want to thank Palgrave MacMillan for giving us permission to run this portion of the book.

CRITICAL BIOGRAPHY

from Purpose: The Starting Point of Great Companies by Nikos Mourkogiannis

For those who are interested in the subjects covered in this book, I have found the following articles and books helpful.

PART ONE: WHAT IS PURPOSE?

Purpose in Organizations

Philip Selznick’s Leadership in Administration (1957) is an outstanding and unjustly neglected classic. Selznick observed business with the perspective of a sociologist, and he understood the company as an institution—a novelty in his time. He made the important distinction between "organizations," which were "technical instruments judged on engineering premises," and "institutions," which were "the receptacles of group idealism," and explained that it was the role of the leader to turn an organization into an institution.

William Guth and Renato Tagiuri in "Personal Values and Corporate Strategy," Harvard Business Review (September 1965), were among the first to argue for the importance of personal values in the development of corporate strategy. They wrote, "Are there new strategic alternatives which might effect a closer match between economic opportunity for the company and the other-than-economic values which they or their associates possess?" They were not concerned with the greater social good, but with the requirement that "corporate strategy inspire personal commitment" at the same time as the organization remains viable.

W. Ouchi, "Markets, Bureaucracies and Clans," Administrative Science Quarterly25 (1980). In this seminal article, Ouchi introduced the idea that organizations could be controlled through shared values—and that this represented a third form of control, along with markets and bureaucracies.

Tom Peters and Robert Waterman, In Search of Excellence (1982). At a moment in history when it looked like expediency was the only winning strategy for business, Tom Peters and Robert Waterman came along and proposed an alternative purpose, which they called "excellence." The examples tended to focus on discovery and heroism as well, but it was such a basically strong idea that it resonated with a large number of people. This tremendous book has been somewhat superseded by Collins and Porras (1994), who write in a similar vein, but it is still well worth reading.

Robert Jackall, "Moral Mazes: Bureaucracy and Managerial Work," Harvard Business Review(1983). This is a distinctly hard-edged view of the bureaucratic ethic. Jackall describes the political activity and attitudes required for survival in a modern corporation, which are quite incompatible with any personal or corporate Purpose.

E. H. Schein, Organizational Culture and Leadership (1985, 2nd edition 1992). Schein is probably the leading expert on corporate culture, and this is a sophisticated account of what it is and the extent to which it can and cannot be influenced by deliberate management.

Charles Perrow’s Complex Organizations: A Critical Essay (3rd edition 1986) is a useful antidote to the enthusiasms of Selznick, Barnard, Peters and Waterman, and Porras and Collins. He defends bureaucracy as the best form of organization we know, castigates the "beyond bureaucracy" school as writers of science fiction and points out that most people do notfind fulfillment through their employing organization—and that if they do, it is strictly on the organization’s own terms.

Gerard Langeler, "The Vision Trap," Harvard Business Review (March 1992). This is an entertaining account of how excessively grandiose visions might be inspiring for a while, but can distract managers from the pragmatic decisions needed to run an effective business (for example, encouraging perfectionism among software designers often results in endless delays).

James Collins and Jerry Porras, Built to Last (1994). An undoubted classic that adopts a rigorous approach to the question, What makes for a lastingly successful, visionary company?

The authors investigated the eighteen businesses founded before 1950 that received the most mentions as "visionary" in a survey of CEOs. For each of these companies, they identified a similar "comparison" company that was also successful but mentioned less often in the survey. The visionary companies outperformed the stock market as a whole by a factor of over 15 between 1926 and 1990, while the comparison companies outperformed by a factor of over 2.5. By comparing each pair, the authors drew the following conclusions:

1. At visionary companies, the leader’s role is to create (and re-create) the company, the machinery that allows people to work together effectively; it is not to have a great idea, or to inspire.
2. These leaders tend to be homegrown.
3. Visionary companies’ underlying values and purposes vary to a great extent, but in all cases go beyond profit, are widely and firmly believed in and do not change over time.
4. These values are combined with a constant drive for improvement and change in less fundamental aspects of the business, and are mobilized by a series of stretch targets and by mechanisms that stimulate discontent with the present.
5. Employees of visionary companies believe in their employers’ ideologies, to the point that they can appear brainwashed.
6. Visionary companies evolve by trial and error: They are open to new ideas and experimentation and then pursue those avenues that work.

In the paperback edition (1998), Collins and Porras added a short section on purpose. There is a particularly interesting sentence on page 224 in which they admit, "In our hardcover edition. . . we did not give enough attention to purpose as distinct from core values and we under-emphasized its importance."

Christopher Bartlett and Sumantra Ghoshal, "Changing the Role of Top Management: Beyond Strategy to Purpose," Harvard Business Review (1994). This groundbreaking article explains just why top management’s role is changing from strategy to purpose.

William Pollard is the former chairman of The ServiceMaster Company. His book The Soul of the Firm (1996) is a good case study of leadership driven by religious Purpose. The foreword to the book summarizes its message: "Leadership in the firm has a responsibility to the ethical, professional, and personal development of every individual in the organization." This responsibility is based on a belief that "all of us are created in the image and likeness of God" and "respect for the dignity and worth of every individual."

Jon Katzenbach’s Peak Performance (2000). An important book that describes five different paths companies can use to achieve emotional energy and commitment in the frontline workforce. They are "Mission, Values and Pride," "Process and Metrics," "Entrepreneurial Spirit," "Individual Achievement" and "Recognition and Celebration." His team looked at 20 large businesses and two U.S. government agencies. Both of the agencies but only one of the businesses, 3M, used "Mission, Values and Pride" as its sole path to peak performance. Like Porras and Collins, he argues that "it is not the content or appropriateness of 3M’s mission and values that makes the company so effective" but its "relentless consistency" in promoting these. Nonetheless, the approach will work only when there is a rich history that employees are proud of, the purpose of the organization is noble in the eyes of the employees and the leadership is driven by values. Of the other 19 ompanies, five make use of the "Mission, Values and Pride" path in combination with other paths.

Richard Ellsworth’s Leading with Purpose (2002) is principally an argument for putting customers before shareholders. There is evidence that this is often in the long-term interests of shareholders—because it creates loyal customers and motivated employees. In the long run, economies in which such views predominate will benefit at the expense of those in which they do not.

Patrick Lencioni in "Make Your Values Mean Something," Harvard Business Review (July 2002), argues, contrary to my position, that values must be created by the CEO and a handful of key people and then pushed hard, using all the human resource systems (recruitment, rewards, communication, dismissals and so on). A more democratic approach, he says, is in danger of diluting the organization’s strategy. I urge the reader to consider Lencioni’s case, especially as his point of view is different from mine.

Art Kleiner, Who Really Matters: The Core Group Theory of Power, Privilege and Success (2003). An interesting and entertaining account of a well-known phenomenon: Organizations exist to serve the interests and purposes of a core group. It would be nice if these organizations included a moral (Kleiner says noble) purpose, but, he argues, the time frame for feedback on Purpose is long, which undermines attempts to pursue it—look at how Browne backpeddled after the share price fell following the launch of the Beyond Petroleum brand. Nonmembers of the core group should recognize that they have a cold-hearted but possibly mutually rewarding deal with the company and should not get too emotionally involved. As always, Kleiner is offering wise advice that the practitioner can ignore only at his or her own risk.

Gerry Johnson and Kevan Scholes’s well-known textbook Exploring Corporate Strategy (7th edition, 2003) has a useful section on the purpose of business. They present four stereotypical ethical "stances" adopted by businesses: (1) Our duty is to maximize short-term shareholder gain—it is the responsibility of markets and governments to constrain us so that this results in optimum outcomes for society; (2) our duty is to maximize long-term shareholder gain, and this requires good relations with other stakeholders (the position is presented by Badaracco and others—see below under "Ethics and Business: The Management Literature"); it remains the duty of markets and governments to constrain us, but there is less to constrain; (3) our duty is to maximize the welfare of all our stakeholders—shareholders are only one group—and judgment is required as to how to achieve the right balance; (4) our duty is to further our mission, which is defined in terms of changing society in some way.

Economics versus Ethics

Both Purpose and the role of relationships are neglected in the standard "neo-classical" economics taught in universities, although there has always been recognition among academics outside this tradition that individuals’ decisions are influenced by ethics, that the social context does affect outcomes and that an adequate theory will need to take these things into account. Adam Smith is the pre-eminent example. He argued in The Wealth of Nations (1776) that the self-interest of each resulted in the wealth of all (the working of the invisible hand), but he was not a prophet of unbridled self-interest or amorality in business. The invisible hand works best when there are common standards of behavior in society, supported by a combination of self-restraint and Humean fellow feeling. The market is sustained by society, which is sustained by ethics. More on the ethical side of his theory is to be found in his earlier book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759).

The other classical economist with an ethical bent was of course Karl Marx. I leave aside the well-known failures of his analysis—notably his failure to appreciate how capitalism could expand its markets and so create prosperity for all. More relevant to this discussion is his insistence on the essentially communal nature of man, and that work was "life’s prime want"— in other words, an end in itself as well as a means of survival. Neither of these ideas found adequate expression under raw nineteenth-century capitalism, but of course they can under the advanced capitalism of Purpose. Fortunately it is not necessary to abandon markets to achieve this. For a very quick summary and assessment of his work see Jonathan Wolff’s Why Read Marx Today (2002), and for a one-volume collection see David McLellan (ed.), Karl Marx: Selected Writings (2000).

The divorce between economics and ethics took place in the late nineteenth century. The two main villains are generally thought to be William Jevons and Leon Walras, geniuses both who independently developed theories describing "general equilibrium" in the economy. They are the founders of "neo-classical" economics, and their work, subsequently refined, forms the basis for modern textbook economics. They were both trained as physical scientists, and Walras was also an engineer. They both applied the mathematical techniques that had been so successful in nineteenth-century science and engineering to the problems that had been described by Adam Smith and others, and created very powerful, internally consistent models that, within limits, have proven to have considerable predictive power. However, in order to describe human behavior algebraically they had to eliminate complexities about ethical motivation and social and institutional context. They also eliminated discussion about what outcomes were ethically desirable.

Perhaps the most famous rejection of their theory was that made by J. M. Keynes, most comprehensively in The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936). I am not concerned here with his technical arguments about the demand for money, but cite the following as examples of his more rounded description of the economy: "If human nature felt no temptation to take a chance, no satisfaction (profit apart) in constructing a factory, a railway, a mine or a farm, there might not be much investment merely as a result of cold calculation"; and, "if the animal spirits are dimmed and the spontaneous optimism falters, leaving us to depend on nothing but a mathematical expectation, enterprise will fade and die."

Recently there has been increased interest in re-establishing links between ethics and economics, and Amartya Sen’s splendid short book On Ethics and Economics (1987) is a manifesto for this program. He points out that behavior is driven by the need to cooperate as well as by individual goals, that in any case these individual goals can be driven by ethics as well as self-interest and that even self-interested goals are not all about material consumption. Sen also describes Adam Smith’s combination of ethics and economics and the subsequent divorce. Other books similarly sympathetic to "ethical economics" include Joan Robinson’s Economic Philosophy (1962) and Paul Ormerod’s The Death of Economics (1994).

James Buchanan in Ethics and Economic Progress (1994) also supports the re-integration of ethics and economics, but from the right rather than the left. He argues that what he calls "puritan" ethics—work hard, save—increase the size of the economy. It is therefore in everyone’s economic interest to help establish such ethics—to "pay the preacher," as he puts it. Of course some might say he puts the cart before the horse—after all, ethical decisions should precede economic ones—but at least the argument demonstrates an interaction of the two types of decision making.

Moral Philosophy

I have drawn heavily on Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue (1981). This is one of the best and most influential books of modern moral philosophy. MacIntyre’s starting point is the prevailing view among modern moral philosophers that ethical statements are simply an expression of emotion or preference and lack any real authority. This lack of authority dates back to the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, which undermined the authority of the Church and tradition, and thus of the morality dependent on them. The resulting vacuum prompted a project, lasting from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, to find an alternative basis for authority, a project that ultimately failed. Various candidates were put forward—reason, sentiment, utility, human rights—but all have been effectively undermined by critics.

During the nineteenth century both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche in their different ways recognized the hopelessness of the project, both insisting that the individual had to create his or her own moral authority. However, they did not show that this more traditional, Aristotelian morality was bound to fail in the same way. Unlike many subsequent philosophers, Aristotle does not justify virtues on the basis of some prior justification of rules, principles or goals, which can always be questioned. Rather, they are justified as leading to success, the good life for man, or human fulfillment, within a specific community. MacIntyre then sets out his own scheme based on this philosophy.

Modern life consists of a number of practices, for example professional activities, games, social forms, hobbies and so on. Each of these practices has associated virtues, that is, behaviors that lead to fulfillment or success within those practices. But morality is concerned with life as a whole, so the question arises: What is fulfillment or success in life as a whole as opposed to within the individual practices? The unity of a life is rather like the unity of a story, and this gives us a clue: Life is in fact a kind of quest, that most traditional of stories. It is a quest not for some specific thing but for fulfillment, the good for man.

This may sound circular, but it is not circular in an unproductive way, because the individual has something to start the quest with, namely the goods or fulfillments available within the specific practices. He or she then orders and balances these practices, searching for a larger fulfillment built on these, which is appropriate to the individual and the community he or she is part of. Thus, in addition to virtues that encourage success within practices, there are more general virtues that encourage success in this quest. (Those attracted by Peter Senge’s ideal of personal mastery will no doubt be attracted by MacIntyre’s ideas, too.)

MacIntyre is interesting but quite hard going, and certainly not suitable as an introduction to moral philosophy. For those looking for an introduction I recommend John Mackie’s Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977), Bernard Williams’s Morality: An Introduction to Ethics (1972) and a collection of essays: Joel Feinberg, Moral Concepts (1969). For those wanting a more general introduction to philosophy I recommend Roger Scruton’s Modern Philosophy: An Introduction and Survey (1994) and Bertrand Russell’s classics A History of Western Philosophy (1945) and The Problems of Philosophy (1912). These are extremely lucid and that rare thing—opinionated—introductions by leaders in the field. Scruton’s book contains a superb bibliography.

Existentialismis described in Mary Warnock’s Existentialist Ethics (1967), a short and brilliantly lucid account of the subject. She is sympathetic but sensibly skeptical toward the existentialist position.

Kierkegaard’s most famous work is Either/Or (1843), a collection of essays, diary entries and letters assembled by a fictitious editor in the course of which Kierkegaard asks the reader to choose between the "aesthetic" and the "moral" way of life. Kierkegaard’s philosophy was a reaction to Hegel’s philosophy, which was in turn a reaction to the ethical problems caused by the collapse of traditional authority and community during the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. According to Hegel, man was isolated and there was no basis for determining what he should do; if he followed his instincts alone he would be involved either in frustrating struggle or in the lassitude that accompanies lack of real Purpose. Hegel, building on the work of Kant, therefore elevated objective reason and the state into the tools that would release man from this unsatisfactory set of alternatives.

Kierkegaard was repelled by what he saw as the excessively systematic style of Hegel’s solution, which failed to take into account what it was really like to be a human being, and, as Kierkegaard saw it, made "everyone an observer" rather than an actor in life. He therefore proposed a different response to the problem: People should focus on what it was for them to be alive. In contrast to the grandiose schemes of "objective" science and philosophy, he emphasized the importance of subjectivity.

For those who want to read later existential texts, the best bets are probably Jean-Paul Sartre’s essay "Existentialism and Humanism" (1946) and his novel Nausea (1938).

Aristotle’s moral philosophy is set out in the lecture notes that became the Eudemian Ethics(edited by Eudemus) and the Nicomachean Ethics(named after his son Nicomachus), both written in the fourth century B.C. The latter is the better known and one of the most influential works on the subject. Despite this, readers brought up on contemporary ideas of "happiness" and "welfare" can easily misunderstand Aristotle’s central concept of happiness ("eudaimonia"), perhaps better translated as fulfillment, flourishing or success, and may be taken aback by his contention that an individual should aim for his own fulfillment, not the greatest happiness for the greatest number. But Aristotle is less concerned with how to be "good" in a nineteenth-century moralistic way than with how to live well, that is, how to be fully human. The Penguin edition—The Ethics of Aristotle(1976)—has a good introduction. MacIntyre’s After Virtue(q.v.) is an interesting attempt to apply Aristotelian ideas to modern life.

Hume’s two main relevant works are Treatise of Human Nature (1739) and An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals(1751). Other works in this tradition are Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (q.v.), which forms an important counterbalance to his Wealth of Nations (q.v.), and John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism (1861), which attempts to justify the pursuit of the general happiness as the supreme good. Modern philosophers are highly critical of Mill—for a modern discussion of utilitarianism, see J. Smart and B. Williams, Utilitarianism, For and Against(1973)—but his view of morality remains dominant in both Anglo-Saxon public policy and, to a lesser extent, private life.

Friedrich Nietzsche’s main works are Beyond Good and Evil (1886), On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), The Gay Science(1887) and The Will to Power (1901), all available in modern translation. Nietzsche wrote in a deliberately iconoclastic and shocking style. He did not produce systematic philosophy—indeed, he did not see himself as a philosopher but as a philologist—and at first sight much of his writing appears like ranting. However, his predictions about the twentieth century proved horrifyingly accurate. Readers who find the texts impenetrable may want to limit themselves to the apothegmsone-liners—in Beyond Good and Evil. For better or worse, Nietzschean morality has tended to be dominant in the executive suite. It has also influenced political thinkers such as Leo Strauss, whose The City and Man (1977) has in turn been highly influential among the neo-conservatives in the George W. Bush administration, notably Paul Wolfowitz.

Kant is not an easy read, and those who are interested might start with the relevant chapters of one of the introductory texts recommended above, or with Roger Scruton’s Kant: A Very Short Introduction (2001). For those who want to read the original text, the two main ethical works are Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals(1785) and Critique of Practical Reason (1788). Norman Bowie (1995), described in the next section on ethics and business, is an interesting if idealistic attempt to apply Kantian ideas to business.

Karl Deutsch’s Nationalism and Social Communication (1953) is excellent. It explains the mechanics behind the ideals—for example, nationalism could not have become a significant force before the arrival of cheap printing and circulation of newspapers.

The classic work on the impact of religious Purpose on business is Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904, English translation 1930), which argued that there was a link between Calvinism and the drive for material success that fueled the development of capitalism. Subsequent research has produced empirical support for some of Weber’s conclusions, but most of them are widely disputed.

The tradition of authority in the Catholic Church is captured in Hans Kung’s The Catholic Church(2001), a critical and riveting history. For those who wish to read, or dip into, the original texts, St. Augustine’s Confessions (398) and City of God(426) are widely available in modern translations and are quite readable. However, I do not imagine many readers will want to complete the five volumes of St. Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica (1272)—the expression of a unified, dominant theological and moral system that no one could attempt to compile today.

Ethics and Business: The Management Literature

In general I am not enthusiastic about the management literature in this area. My experience of consulting with large companies is that all too often it does not deal with the real issues senior managers face, and often the ethics it attempts is trite. Nonetheless there is some good work, and here, for those interested, is a sample.

Douglas Sherwin in "The Ethical Roots of the Business System," Harvard Business Review (November 1983), argues that business is a system in which shareholders, employees and other stakeholders are all components, and that managers must manage with this in mind. This requires that they are guided by values, which in turn reflect society’s ideas about what a business is for.

Edward Freeman and Daniel Gilbert in Corporate Strategy and the Search for Ethics (1988) argue that "almost all questions of corporate strategy are questions of ethics" and that "corporate strategy must return to the individual values of corporate members before it is formulated. . . addressing the problem as one of ‘implementation’ or ‘culture’ simply tries to fix (in vain) the wrong problem." They discuss the different kinds of objectives a company might have and they probe the ethical basis of "the excellence revolution" that was sweeping the United States in the 1980s. They believe this is "respect for the individual [that] lies beneath the surface of the concern for customer and quality, and is. . . the key to understanding the incredible commitment and performance that are the results."

Joseph Badaracco, "Business Ethics: Four Spheres of Executive Reponsibility," California Management Review (April 1992). Badaracco is a world expert on business ethics, and he argues in this article that managers should make moral judgments using standards provided by Aristotle, Mill, Jefferson and Machiavelli. These standards cannot be weighed against each other in a straightforward way; managers should use them flexibly rather than simply attempting to apply a set of general rules to particular circumstances.

Robert Solomon’s Ethics and Excellence (1992) is an exhortation to managers to adopt Aristotelian ethics in business and includes a summary of what this might mean. He quite correctly places particular emphasis on the importance of community. To be virtuous, "according to Aristotle one has to think of oneself as a member of the larger community. . . and strive to excel, to bring out what is best in ourselves and our shared enterprise." The communal nature of the virtues means there is no sharp split in what is good for the community and what is good for the individual: "What is best in us involves our virtues, which are in turn defined by that larger community, and there is therefore no ultimate split or antagonism between individual self-interest and the greater public good."

Martha Nichols in "Does New Age Business Have a Message for Managers?" Harvard Business Review (1994) describes the limitations and potential interest of the "New Age" model, as exemplified by The Body Shop, Tom’s of Maine, Ben & Jerry’s and so on.

Norman Bowie, Business Ethics: A Kantian Perspective (1995). Chapter 3, "The Firm as a Moral Community," is the most interesting in the book and explores the implication of Kant’s injunction to treat all humans as ends, not means. Managers can follow this injunction only if they operate on the basis that the organization is a vehicle for achieving the shared ends of its participants and as such becomes valued in itself. It becomes, to use John Rawls’s distinction (A Theory of Justice, 1971), a "social union" as opposed to a "private society," this last being an organization that is not valued in itself and in which participants have noncomplementary objectives.

Ryuzaburo Kaku’s "The Path of Kyosei," Harvard Business Review (July 1997) is an interesting account of the Japanese model of corporate citizenship by the ex-chairman of Canon.

Tom Morris’s popular If Aristotle Ran General Motors (1997) contains, in his own words, "a good dose of ancient wisdom mixed with some contemporary philosophizing about human motivation and human excellence." It is a striking example of the feel-good genre.

Tom Chappell’s Managing Upside Down (1999) is a firsthand account of trying to manage an "ethical" business—Tom’s of Maine—and some of the dilemmas this creates. Of course this kind of private business is not a model for publicly held businesses, but Chapell’s account of the dilemmas he faced is honest and interesting

Hess, Rogovsky and Dunfee, "The Next Wave of Corporate Community Involvement: Corporate Social Initiatives," California Management Review (January 2002). This is a good example of the "why ethics pay" literature. As they put it: "Moral desires expressed by stakeholders are embodied in capital, consumer and labor markets," with the result that managers must "respond to and anticipate" these desires. "A failure to do so may have a significant negative impact on shareholder wealth."

Diane Coutu, "How Resilience Works," Harvard Business Review (2002). Coutu argues that strong values enable organizations (and people) to find meaning in adversity, increasing their resilience.

Roger Martin, "The Virtue Matrix: Calculating the Return on Corporate Responsibility," Harvard Business Review(2002). Ethical "leaders" go beyond what is generally considered decent behavior in their business communities; they practice this virtue for its own sake, but this may produce commercial returns. These cannot be guaranteed—there may even be losses—but in principle the risk involved is no different than any other business risk and does not involve betting the firm. Martin goes on to suggest that business leaders can put pressure on their peers to adopt similar policies. In this way, the virtue that was at the strategic frontier becomes standard practice in the business community, increasing the social benefit that the original initiative brings about.

For a good example of the cynical approach to business ethics, read the article by two McKinsey consultants, David Cogman and Jeremy Oppenheim, "Controversy Incorporated," McKinsey Quarterly(2002). The authors argue that companies can use their social assets (partly created by corporate social responsibility activities) to allow them to engage in controversial activities.

The importance of an ongoing dialogue on ethical issues is illustrated in a story told in Edmondson and Cha, "When Company Values Backfire," Harvard Business Review (November 2002). An advertising agency owner promoted a set of well-meaning, benevolent values at his agency. However, the staff wove their own ideology into the values and felt that he was not living up to them—and became extremely disaffected. There were no feedback mechanisms to nip the problem in the bud.

Michael Porter and Mark Kramer, "The Competitive Advantage of Corporate Philanthropy," Harvard Business Review (December 2002). This is one of the most sophisticated articles in a field that generally has a rather cynical feel. The authors’ argument is that well-targeted philanthropy can change a company’s competitive conditions to its advantage.

Lynn Paine’s Value Shift (2003) reports that U.S. business leaders attach increasing importance to appealing to all stakeholders and to strong corporate ethics, although generally for instrumental reasons—that is, to reduce the risk of scandal, improve employee morale, help build reputation and create trust, so reducing transaction costs. She grapples with this question of whether ethics are a means to an end or an end in themselves. Paine’s practical prescriptions are similar to Badaracco’s (q.v.); she suggests that applying ethics is not about following codes but involves asking four kinds of question: (1) Will this action serve a useful purpose? (2) Is this action consistent with relevant principles? (3) Does this action respect the legitimate claims of the people likely to be affected? (4) Do we have the power to take this action?

For an up-to-date survey of what major corporations (mainly U.S. corporations) are doing to achieve profits with principles, see Ira Jackson and Jane Nelson’s book of the same name (2004). The book is packed with examples, which the authors use to illustrate seven principles of ethical business.

PART TWO: GREAT STORIES OF PURPOSE

Kevin Maney’s The Maverick and His Machine (2003) is strongly recommended to anyone who wishes to know more about Watson or IBM. The book gives an excellent sense of Watson the man and the development of the company. My only complaint is the title: Watson was not interested in convention, so from the outside he might have seemed like a maverick, but this word belittles the strong Purpose that drove him. Nor was he really interested in machines. The story is continued in Thomas J. Watson Jr. and Peter Petre’s Father, Son and Co.: My Life at IBM and Beyond (1990). This is a remarkably frank account of Watson Jr.’s stormy relationship with his father—and indeed just about everyone else he dealt with.

Roger Lowenstein’s biography Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist (1995) is excellent. The Berkshire Hathaway annual reports, including Buffett’s letters to shareholders, make good reading and are available on the Web. The letters are organized thematically in The Essays of Warren Buffett: Lessons for Corporate America, edited and introduced by Lawrence Cunningham (2001). Robert Hagstrom’s The Essential Buffett(2001) is one of several books drawing lessons from Buffett’s career—but I would recommend reading the master’s own letters first.

Sam Walton’s Made in America: My Story, written with John Huey (1992), is a gripping read. Even if you do not care for the folksy style, and do not take Walton’s homilies at face value, the book makes you feel privy to an astonishing story. It is probably best read in conjunction with more dispassionate accounts. Sandra Vance and Roy Scott’s Wal-Mart: A History of Sam Walton’s Retail Phenomenon (1994) is solid and useful. Also useful are two Harvard Business School case studies: Wal-Mart Stores’ Discount Operations (1986, revised 1989) and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (1994, revised 2002). For those who want an up-to-date account of Wal-Mart since Walton’s death, there is Robert Slater’s The Wal-Mart Decade (2003), written with the active support of the company’s PR department.

The outstanding book about Henry Ford and his company is Allan Nevins’s three-volume history of the Ford Motor Company: Ford, the Times, the Man, the Company (1954), Ford, Expansion and Challenge (1957), Ford, Decline and Rebirth (1962). It combines telling details about individuals with just the right amount of economic data. Also useful is the one-volume history of the company by Douglas Brinkley, which takes the story to the present day: Wheels for the World (2003).

Ron Chernow’s The Warburgs (1993) is a comprehensive and very well-researched history of the family since the late nineteenth century. It is better on family dynamics than on business dynamics, however, and those interested in Siegmund can also read Jacques Attali’s A Man of Influence(1986), which goes into more detail about his business career. It should be said that Attali’s book has been heavily criticized for inaccuracies by those who knew Siegmund, and, perhaps because materials about the subject were so hard to come by, the book is filled out with political and economic history that is not strictly relevant.

PART THREE:
HOW PURPOSE BUILDS GREATNESS

Introductions to Psychology and Its Main Schools

Different theories of morale all draw heavily on different theories of psychology. Among the textbooks introducing psychology, I can recommend D. P. Schultz and S. E. Schultz, A History of Modern Psychology (7th edition, 2000) and B. R. Hergenhahn, An Introduction to the History of Psychology (4th edition, 2001). The Schultzes start the story in the late nineteenth century and are particularly strong on behaviorism, gestalt and psychoanalysis, with a somewhat cursory summary of humanistic psychology (Maslow) and cognitive psychology. Hergenhahn begins the story with the pre-Socratics, but about half of the book (300 pages) covers the same ground as the Schultzes, and gives slightly more space to modern trends in cognitive psychology and psychobiology.

Psychoanalysis was developed as a therapeutic tool by Sigmund Freud in the late nineteenth century. For those who want to read some of Freud’s own work, I recommend his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis.For a commentary, read Richard Wollheim, Freud (1991).

Behaviorism was partly a reaction to psychoanalysis and other nineteenth-century schools that depended heavily on introspection. A new generation of self-consciously scientific psychologists (e.g., John Watson) declared that purely mental phenomena, such as beliefs, decisions and willpower, were unknowable, while later B. F. Skinner in Science and HumanBehavior(1954) continued to insist that mental concepts had no explanatory value and thereore were redundant in a science of behavior. This science could, however, measure correlations between stimuli and reactions, then build and test predictions. Naturally this perspective tended to encourage an industrial psychology in which workers were seen as cogs in the productive machine.

Meanwhile another school developed that also tried to create testable theories but that did allow for mental concepts. The Gestalt psychologists were particularly interested in how we come to know the world as we do; they postulated that we do not build our picture of the world up from the details, but start with various gestalts, or whole pictures, which we then fill in with the details. This had implications not just for how we learn about the world but also for how we are motivated—not primarily by extrinsic rewards but by a gestalt of the task and of one’s self. Kurt Lewin, author of Field Theory in Social Science(1951), worked in this tradition.

Cognitive psychology grew out of Gestalt and was originally primarily concerned with knowledge and beliefs. In the 1950s the advent of artificial intelligence gave it a great boost by helping psychologists conceive of the effects of mental events as parts of systems with other, directly observable parts. In other words, there was no need for introspection: It was possible to rely entirely on experimental and survey evidence, but at the same time to model the effects of beliefs, attitudes and so on. Psychology could be both "mental" and "scientific." This approach has become dominant in modern academia and therapy, and now extends beyond theories of perception and knowledge to all aspects of social and mental life.

Since the beginning of the twentieth century there has been an alternative tradition, variously called Jungian, humanist or existentialist. Its protagonists thought it more important to capture the profundities of human experience than to rely on verifiable data. Carl Jung, one of its leading figures, was originally an associate of Freud, but whereas Freud saw human culture as a sublimation of more basic drives, Jung studied it to find clues about man’s higher nature. For a quick summary of his work, I recommend Anthony Storr’s Jung(1973). Similar interests drove existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger, who wrote about how human beings deal with death, and later Abraham Maslow (see below under "Motivation and Morale"). Also interesting is Victor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy(1962). Frankl is a psychotherapist who survived the Holocaust and whose approach to therapy was influenced by that experience.

Motivation and Morale

Abraham Maslow, concerned with how man can achieve fulfillment, authored the famous theory of the hierarchy of needs: physiological, security, belonging, esteem and self-esteem, and self actualization. See his Motivation and Personality (1954). A good introduction to Maslow is a collection of his writings called The Maslow Business Reader (ed. Deborah Stephens, 2000), while the ideas he developed toward the end of his life are included in the posthumously published The Farther Reaches of Human Nature (1971).

Douglas McGregor’s The Human Side of Enterprise (1960) famously sets out two theories managers might have of human nature and motivation, theory X and theory Y. Theory X—the conventional manager’s wisdom at the time McGregor wrote—portrays the average worker as lazy and therefore in need of coercion, control and direction if he is to do anything productive. This is less unpleasant than it might sound since, according to the theory, the worker prefers to be told what to do and prefers security to responsibility. Theory Y by contrast holds that work is as natural as play, and that workers can become committed to corporate objectives if suitably treated; if they do, they will direct and control their own work effectively. Under the right conditions many of them will seek responsibility and will exercise creativity and ingenuity—capacities that are much underutilized. Perhaps theory Y is now the conventional manager’s wisdom—at least in theory. Although some of the content is a bit dated, the book is entertainingly written and worth reading—a lot of modern business books are just a rehash of what McGregor wrote.

Edward Deci and Richard Ryan are leading academic theorists of motivation, of which they distinguish five types: extrinsic, in which individuals are motivated by rewards distinct from the work itself; intrinsic, in which individuals are motivated by pure enjoyment of the work; and three intermediate categories in which individuals are motivated by the outcome of the work, even though the work itself may be boring and unrewarding. These three categories are distinguished by the reason that the outcome motivates. First, the individual may give himself a psychic reward for achieving the outcome, perhaps because it is associated with success. This is similar to the role the super-ego plays in Freud’s theory (Deci and Ryan call it "introjection"). Second, the individual may value the outcome because he thinks that is what social values dictate ("identification"). And third, the individual may value the outcome as part of an integrated value system that helps define his personal identity ("integration"). In this last case he does not "simply do what [he] thinks the social values dictate, [he] behaves, feels and thinks in a way that is congruent with the social values because [he] has accepted them as [his] own." Deci and Ryan present a far more sophisticated system than most cognitive psychologists, based on years of empirical work in a variety of settings—educational, work, community—though it is by no means easy reading. The main work is Intrinsic Motivation and Self-determination in Human Behavior (1985), but the work is summarized in their article in Porter, Bigley and Steers (2003)— see below.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (1990) and more recent Creativity (1996) and Good Business (2003) present a sanguine picture of life at work. His identification and popularization of flow has been extremely useful.

For a popular account of the evidence from neurological research on the power of emotion over reason, see Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain (1994).

I can recommend two academic works on commitment and community at work: J. Meyer and N. Allen, Commitment in the Workplace (1997), which offers a good overview of the research in this area; and Michael Hogg and Deborah Terry (eds.), Social Identity Processes in Organizational Contexts (2001), which is a collection of stimulating and relevant papers. Oliver James’s Britain on the Couch (1998) charts the danger of an excessively meritocratic value system. This system creates constant need for approval, not just in work but in all areas of life, so that even successful people feel that they are not quite making it and fall prey to depression. The book is stimulating and challenging, raising important issues for managers as well as politicians.

Kenneth Thomas’s Intrinsic Motivation at Work (2000) is partly based on Deci and Ryan’s theories (see above) and is readable and useful, with practical suggestions on managing motivation.

Paul Lawrence and Nitin Nohria’s Driven (2002) is an attempt to explain human nature in terms of four drives, based on a mixture of published neurological research and an interpretation of evolutionary theory. The four drives are to learn, to acquire, to bond and to defend.

L. Porter, G. Bigley and R Steers, Motivation and Work Behavior (7th edition, 2003) is a good textbook, consisting of a series of reprinted academic papers grouped by theme and an introductory section outlining the history and current state of the subject. Particularly useful articles are Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, "Self-determination Theory and the Facilitation of Intrinsic Motivation, Social Development and Well-Being"; Steven Kerr, "On the Folly of Rewarding A, While Hoping for B"; R. Mowdray and K. Colwell, "Employee Reactions to Unfair Outcomes in the Workplace"; Teresa Amabile, "Motivating Creativity in Organizations: On Doing What You Love and Loving What You Do"; and Christopher Meek, "Ganbatte: Understanding the Japanese Employee."

I note here one absence: adequate databases. I have cited a number of research surveys in chapter 8, and there are plenty of studies measuring, for example, attrition rates or loosely defined forms of morale. However, to the best of my knowledge there are no databases linking Purpose, morale, action and performance. We need a new generation of metrics.

Action and Management

Chester Barnard, author of The Functions of the Executive (1938), was president of New Jersey Bell Telephone Company and was one of the first management writers to discuss morality and purpose as sources of energy for the firm. As he put it, "It is impossible by definition that formal organizations can act without the moral element." His account of purpose, however, was essentially of a manipulative tool, to help implement the rational decisions made by management. His book was and is extremely influential.

There are two classics on how decisions are taken in the firm. In Organizations (1958), J. G. March and H. A. Simon introduced the idea that managers were subject to bounded rationality: They wish to be rational but are hampered by limited information processing capacity, and hence they are more influenced by the practices and assumptions of the organization they work for. In March and Simon’s view, the typical firm limits the range of responses of its managers—what does not fit into the worldview is ignored. R. M. Cyert and J. G. March developed these ideas in A Behavioral Theory of the Firm (1963), presenting a semiformal theory of the firm, based on the problems of decision making March and Simon had begun to describe. The firm is not omniscient but rather is an "adaptively rational system." These books are important because they show that the alternative to decisions influenced by Purpose is not some rational optimization of outcomes, but some other form of internal tradition.

John Hunt’s Managing People at Work (1979, 3rd edition 1992) is an excellent summary of much of the research on people at work, teams, leaders and organizations. Hunt defines leadership as "the capacity to mobilize in competition or conflict a potential need in a follower," although this takes the form of the leader giving "meaning to possibilities" in the follower.

Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton in The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action (1999) present an excellent account of why managers do not act on the knowledge they have—using some vivid examples from well-known companies.

Hugh Davidson, The Committed Enterprise (2002), presents a very straightforward account of how to achieve "the committed enterprise." Its main value is in its quotes from the United Kingdom as well as from U.S. business leaders and its case studies.

Perseus Books, Best Practice (2003), is a collection of articles, some of which contain a lot of management consultant’s sales hype, but there are also some interesting and relevant contributions. These include pieces by Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Tom Brown, Richard Leider, Christopher Bartlett, Ken Murrell, Meredith Belbin, Jean-Claude Larréché, Costas Markides, Allan Kennedy, Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton, Warren Bennis, Jim Kouzes and Annette Simmons.

Innovation

I have not been especially inspired by the innovation literature. There are, however, a few classics.

Joseph Schumpeter is famous for the emphasis he placed on the role of the entrepreneur in driving change and innovation in the economy, and thus re-introducing the human element into the model. The collection Essays on Entrepreneurs, Innovations, Business Cycles and the Evolution of Capitalism, edited by Richard Clemence (1951), gives a good flavor of his work. It is not technical and is highly stimulating. "The Creative Response in Economic History" has become a classic, and his article on "Capitalism" for the Encyclopaedia Britannicais a marvelous if somewhat dated synthesis.

T. Burns and G. Stalker’s The Management of Innovation (1961) remains a key text on innovation. They identified two ideal types of organizations (in a study of small- and medium-sized Scottish firms): the mechanistic and the organic. The mechanistic firm is the traditional bureaucracy. In the perfectly organic firm, by contrast, there is continual redefinition of individual tasks through interaction with others, a network structure of control, based on presumed community of interest, authority attaching more to expertise than to position, lateral communication of advice rather than vertical communication of instructions, and commitment to the firm’s tasks rather than to simple organizational loyalty. They found that organic companies are more successfully innovative than mechanistic ones.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s Change Masters: Innovation and Entrepreneurship in the American Organization(1983) is in effect research and advice on how the large corporation can achieve the "organic" form described by Burns and Stalker in The Management of Innovation(see above). This is not natural for large corporations—and a whole set of additional managerial skills is required.

A readable account of creativity is given in Anthony Storr’s The Dynamics of Creation(1972), although he is principally concerned with the individual artist or scientist, not the team member working in a corporation.

Robert Coram, Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War (2002). Boyd was a pilot who was fascinated by the mental processes necessary to be an effective aviator and innovator. He intuited the two-stage nature of innovation: first, analysis of what we are familiar with into components, and then resynthesis into something new that deals with our situation better.

On creativity, the works of Teresa Amabile are useful. See her article on "Motivating Creativity in Organizations" in Porter, Bigley and Steers (see above on "Motivation and Morale"). For more detail see her Creativity in Context: Update to the Social Psychology of Creativity (1997). She makes the point that creativity involves being able to resist the temptation to jump to an algorithmic approach and often requires a great deal of trial and error.

Strategy and Advantage

Alfred Chandler’s The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (1962) is a massive study of the managerial revolution at the beginning of the twentieth century that created huge and enduring competitive advantages for large American companies. A particular set of technological advances created the conditions in which the classic large company structure became dominant. My argument is that different social forms now underpin advantage—after all, the technological conditions have also changed.

Kenneth Andrews’s The Concept of Corporate Strategy (1971, 3rd edition 1987) is a short classic that I strongly recommend. He argued that a successful, actionable strategy will always fit the preferences of the chief executive and the values of key managers, as well as having some appeal for all employees. The implication is that those making strategic decisions should always consider values: Andrews explicitly makes the case for "the moral component of corporate strategy."

Chris Argyris and Donald Schön’s Organizational Learning (1978) is a must-read book, if somewhat hard going. Building on the work of Simon and March and of Cyert and March (see above), the authors describe three levels of organizational learning. At level one, most managers keep their heads down—and problems are dealt with without any changes to the policies and objectives. At level two, the organization is capable of altering policies and objectives in response to its problems. Most organizations find it difficult to get to level two, which is essentially what Mintzberg describes as the strategy process. At the third level, the organization responds by improving the learning system itself. Argyris was an important influence on Peter Senge (q.v.).

Michael Porter in Competitive Strategy (1980) and Competitive Advantage (1985) has successfully imported microeconomics into management, and I, like many other writers, owe much to him. In addition, his The Competitive Advantage of Nations (1990) is a tremendous account of the value of social capital outside the firm. Perhaps the most lucid exposition of his view of strategy is his Harvard Business Review article, "What is Strategy?" reprinted in On Competition (1998). It is notable that Porter does not discuss people in his books. There is therefore no discussion of Purpose, or any serious discussion of human leadership for that matter. This is to his credit: He does not produce engineering solutions to human problems.

Karl Weick, "Substitutes for Strategy," in D. Teece (ed.), The Competitive Challenge (1987), argues that strategy is primarily a motivational tool. "True believers impose their view on the world and fulfil their own prophecies. Note that this makes strategy more of a motivational problem than a cognitive forecasting problem." He tells the story of the Hungarians lost in the Alps who used a map of the Pyrenees to find their way and thus save their lives. "Strategic plans are a lot like maps. They animate people and they orient people."

Gary Hamel and C. K. Prahalad pointed out in "Strategic Intent," Harvard Business Review (March 1989), that the companies that had risen to global leadership in the 1970s and 1980s had started out with ambitions— "strategic intents"—that were not limited by their current size or "capabilities." They advanced toward these goals by setting intermediate targets around which staff rallied. In "The Core Competencies of the Corporation," Harvard Business Review (May 1990), they argue that the critical success factor in many businesses is the ability to integrate different technologies into a single, distinctive technological "competency" that forms a platform for existing, planned and unforeseen products. This is likely to require integrating resources across the corporation, and it is important that the limited, market-focused horizons of the SBU do not get in the way. In "Strategy as Stretch and Leverage," Harvard Business Review (1993), the authors build on these ideas, emphasizing how the gap between existing resources and aspirations needs to be wide enough to leverage those resources in the most competitive way.

H. Mintzberg, "The Design School," Strategic Management Journal (1990). In this important article, Mintzberg criticizes the "design school" of strategy (Andrews, Bower, Christiansen, Hamermesh) for its apparent insistence that strategy is intentional, rational, done at the top, based on a few simple ideas (since otherwise it cannot be done at the top), explicit, distinctive, fully formed when it emerges and separate from implementation. This works only when the environment is both relatively simple and relatively stable. For most organizations, strategy formulation is learning from action, and if they conceptualize it as something distinct from implementation, they are bound to fail. Mintzberg’s views are set out in greater detail in The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning(1994).

J. Barney in "Firm Resources and Sustained Competitive Advantage," Journal of Management 17 (1991), defines resources as anything the firm controls that allows it to conceive of and implement its strategies. Resources create advantage when they are valuable, rare and difficult to substitute for or imitate (because of history, causal ambiguity and social complexity). To sustain advantage a company must have resources that are immobile and diverse.

John Kay, Foundations of Corporate Success (1993). This is a very good analysis of why successful companies are successful. Kay analyzes the sources of advantage and places them into four categories: "architecture," reputation, innovation and strategic assets. Of these the most significant or fundamental is "architecture"—a network of "relational contracts" in and around the firm. Relational contracts are mutual understandings, or relationships of trust, and are by their nature long term. It is always possible to score short-term gains by undermining relational contracts.

Robert Grant, Contemporary Strategy Analysis (4th edition, 2002) is an excellent textbook for those who want an easy primer on competitive advantage.

Relationships

Erving Goffman is perhaps unique—a sociologist who writes in an entertaining way. He writes about everyday encounters and what is really going on when they take place. From my point of view, the emphasis he places in Encounters (1961) on games as a prototype for much social activity is particularly relevant: Games have boundaries, and anything outside the boundary is irrelevant to the conduct of the game. A good game allows deployment of skill and engagement of emotion, but not encroachment of external anxieties. This creates a kind of "euphoria" that is part of the attraction of games. A shared purpose, I might add, creates the boundary of a game.

Perry Anderson’s Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (1974) is a masterful economic history of ancient and mediaeval Europe. Anderson uses a Marxist conceptual framework, but this supports rather than obscures the subtlety and clarity of his analysis. This book is highly recommended for those interested in how economic advantage was manifest in other eras.

In The Anatomy of Relationships (1985), Michael Argyle and Monika Henderson describe some of the key features of human relationships. For example, they point out that relationships are like games in so far as they have goals (sources of satisfaction, rewards), typical activities, roles, settings and rules. Rewards from relationships themselves, as opposed to their purely instrumental effects, tend to be confined to intimate relations in the West, but extend to work relations in the East, where ritualized exchanges of gifts and reciprocal obligation are formalized. There are many other relevant observations in this book: For example, groups of friends occur spontaneously when networks become very dense; we like people who share our values even if their personality is very different, and above all we like people who like us.

David Landes’s The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (1998) is a historical account of why some countries have become rich and some remained poor. It combines global scope with fascinating detail. One small but typical example: Landes describes how the invention of spectacles boosted the late medieval economy by allowing skilled craftsmen to continue doing detailed work beyond the age of 40. Overall, he reminds us of the importance of geography, and of the interplay between geography and the human spirit, although he refrains from any grand synthesis. It is an excellent source for those wanting a historical perspective on comparative and competitive advantage.

I have also found Michael Jensen, Foundations of Organizational Strategy (2000), useful if only to mark out the opposite of what I believe: It presents with admirable internal consistency a certain kind of economist’s view of organization. The following gives a flavor: "I believe it is productive to define an organization as a legal entity that serves as a nexus for a complex set of contracts (written and unwritten) among disparate individuals. . . the behavior of the organization is like the equilibrium behavior of a market. We do not often characterise the steel market or the wheat market as having preferences and motives or making choices."

D. Cohen and L. Prusak, In Good Company: How Social Capital Makes Organizations Work(2000). This is a lucid account of the importance of social capital in organizations. For a collection of some of the important contributions to the theory of social capital, see E. Lesser (ed.), Knowledge and Social Capital(2000).

Leadership

Henry Kissinger’s A World Restored (1973), describing European diplomacy between 1812 and 1822, is interesting on three levels—as history, as an analysis of the interplay of power and legitimacy and as an insight into the thinking of this famous diplomat. It is the interplay of power and legitimacy that concerns me—since this is required for the effective alignment of strategy and Purpose, and at its most effective creates enduring advantage.

James Kouzes and Barry Posner’s The Leadership Challenge (1987) identifies five elements of leadership—challenging the status quo, inspiring a shared vision, enabling others to act, setting an example and encouragement, through positive feedback and celebration. Challenging the status quo involves taking risks and encouraging others to innovate and take risks. Setting an example is particularly important, and leaders need to make themselves visible—"walk the talk"—and then make a point of interacting in the right way and asking the right questions: These send strong signals about what is valued.

Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline (1990) is a classic that outlines the five disciplines that companies need to maximize learning, and hence be successful. Two of these are relevant to Purpose. First, there is "personal mastery," that is, "approaching one’s life a Posted by Todd S. at December 18, 2006 1:16 PM