Comments on: Improving share-holder capitalism by Adrian Wooldridge https://www.druckerforum.org/blog/?p=203 Mon, 20 Aug 2018 09:56:34 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.9 By: David Hurst https://www.druckerforum.org/blog/?p=203#comment-7033 Thu, 08 Nov 2012 12:59:49 +0000 http://www.druckerforum.org/blog/?p=203#comment-7033 I am not sure that it is that easy. This is what Mary Parker Follett would have called a conservative trade-off rather than an creative integration. Measurement is a means, but to what end? Adrian Wooldridge’s proposed compromise begs the questions; What is an enterprise? What is/are its purposes? How can we know whether it is fulfilling it/them?

Neoclassical economics is fundamentally a static model. Firms (the very name implies structure rather than movement) are seem as entities in equilibrium focused on single purposes that they are capable of maximizing (because there is just one purpose)

But suppose enterprises are complex processes, rather than just complicated systems. What if their purposes emerged, and developed and changed during their life cycles? What if managing a firm was more like managing an ecosystem than a machine? How would you measure the human analog of the Florida Everglades or the Mekong River Delta? How would you manage it?

Unless we start with better questions we are not going to get better answers…

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