During the past 30 years, “maximizing shareholder value” has unquestionably become our dominant economic creed with a vast impact on management practice.   Michael Jensen and William Meckling, authors of the famous 1976 Journal of Financial Economics article “Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior, Agency Cost and Ownership Structure,” can rightly claim that their paper changed the way corporations have operated: how they’ve been governed, how their top executives have been compensated, what strategic priorities they’ve set, and how they’ve dealt with their human resources.   One might argue, in short, that the article has had a transformative effect on a broad scale—so much so that we should ask whether the recent worldwide economic crisis […]