“ONE THING I MISS IS THE TIME AMERICA HAD BIG DREAMS ABOUT THE FUTURE"

The problem has been evident for a long time. Executive compensation, the most evident manifestation of this legal corruption of management, was labelled scandalous by Fortune magazine more than 20 years ago, and repeatedly ever since, to no avail. While America escalated its love affair with leadership, its corporate leaders singled themselves out for increasingly obscene pay packages, all the while extolling the virtues of teamwork and sustainable enterprise.
Alongside this came all that "downsizing": Fail to make the targets, no matter how profitable the company remained, and out the door went thousands of employees, those "human resources." So conveniently called, in fact, because while managers have to be careful about human beings, they can dispose of human resources like any other resources. But at what cost? Rather high, because these people carried out much of the critical knowledge of their companies, as well as those companies' hearts and souls. A robust enterprise is a community of human beings, not a collection of human resources.

Henry Mintzberg
The Globe & Mail
March 16 2009