Not only does he know business at a very high level but he seems to have been wherever the action was in computers, IT, strategy, management etc.
I had quit reading the HBR for many years, what they thought was fashion-forward I thought was just fuzzy thinking.
Not so with IW-B.
From Irving Wladawsky-Berger:
Last month I participated in a panel on business-government relations at a conference sponsored by the International Academy of Management, a global forum dedicated to the advancement of the science and art of management. Despite pressures to decrease the size of government, its influence on business continues to increase around the world. So does government’s dependence on business to help address society’s most complex and important problems, including job creation and the development of healthy, sustainable environments.
In capitalist, democratic economies, the private and public sectors have different objectives, one focusing primarily on profits and customer relationship, and the other on improving the quality of life of individuals and societies. The pursuit of these seemingly different objectives have often led to contentious relations. But, given the complex societal challenges we all face in the 21st century, business and government must learn to better collaborate and understand each other. They must realize that we’re all in this together. The implications, I believe, are profound, not only to business and government, but to the very nature of capitalism.
For much of the past century, the essence of capitalism has been embodied in the quote: The Business of Business is Business. The quote is variously attributed to long time GM chairman and CEO Alfred P. Sloan and to University of Chicago economist and Nobel Prize recipient Milton Friedman. In a 1970 NY Times Magazine article, The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits, Professor Friedman wrote:“In a free-enterprise, private-property system, a corporate executive is an employee of the owners of the business. He has direct responsibility to his employers. That responsibility is to conduct the business in accordance with their desires, which generally will be to make as much money as possible while conforming to the basic rules of the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical custom.”Friedman and other neoclassical economists believed that given all relevant information, people and companies will make rational decisions to maximize their utility and profits, and that markets on their own will just about always achieve the right results. They thus advocated a very limited, circumscribed role for government, which was succinctly captured in president Ronald Reagan’s famous phrase from his first inaugural address: “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” Over the next thirty years, this phrase became ingrained in a large segment of our country.
Many believe that the 2008 financial crisis, the worst since the Great Depression, was the direct result of such narrow views of business and government. As a result, we are now asking important questions: How should the private and public sectors work with each other so together they can better address society’s pressing needs? Beyond obeying the law, what societal responsibilities should companies have in a well-functioning, 21st century capitalist economy?
Noteworthy among the efforts addressing these questions is the Creating Shared Value business concept developed by Michael Porter and Mark Kramer in two Harvard Business Review articles: Strategy & Society: The Link between Competitive Advantage and Corporate Social Responsibility, and Creating Shared Value: Redefining Capitalism and the Role of the Corporation in Society, published in 2006 and 2011 respectively.
“The capitalist system is under siege,” notes the latter article in its opening paragraph. “In recent years business increasingly has been viewed as a major cause of social, environmental, and economic problems. Companies are widely perceived to be prospering at the expense of the broader community.”...MORE
