Read Steve's  Books

There is broad consensus across the political spectrum in the US that monopolistic corporations – particularly Big Tech companies — have grown too powerful, and that we need to revive antitrust to take on the ‘curse of bigness.’ But both the diagnosis and the cure are rooted in an outdated understanding of how the American economy is organized. Information and communication technologies have fundamentally altered the markets for capital, labor, supplies, and distribution in ways that undermine the basic categories we use to understand the economy. Nationality, industry, firm, size, employee, and other fundamental terms are increasingly detached from the operations of the economy. If we want to understand and tame the new sources of economic power, we need a new diagnosis and a new set of tools.

This Element examines the current crisis of capitalism’s legitimacy and concludes that it derives principally from business pursuing an aberration of capitalism known as shareholder capitalism, in which firms sought to maximize shareholder value as reflected in the current share price, at the expense of all other stakeholders and society. Shareholder capitalism began in the 1970s and was renounced by the Business Roundtable in 2019, but continues behind a façade of stakeholder capitalism. Stakeholder capitalism is the most widely cited form of capitalism today, but it is incoherent as a practical guide to action for an entire firm. This Element concludes that a recent evolution of capitalism–customer capitalism–which gives primacy to co-creating value for customers and users, enables firms to master the challenges of the digital age, shower benefits on society, and meet the needs of all the stakeholders.

Twentieth century companies are dying because they hang on to traditional management and cannot cope with the fast speeds of a digital society. Three episodes, illustrate how some of them manage to get themselves to the other shore after deep changes. The problems are uncannily similar.
The Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in Iraq, The Royal Danish Ballet in Copenhagen and Commerce Bank in Missouri, each adopts a new way of communicating and reaching their customers, each finds a way to survive.

Have you ever wondered why the workplace often feels like you’re living in a Dilbert cartoon? Have you ever wondered why only one in five workers is fully engaged in their work? Have you ever wondered why individual management fixes don’t stick? The fixes seem to work for a period, but they don’t take hold: the organization slides back into the old way of doing things, as by the force of gravity?

How do transformational leaders connect and engage with their audiences and inspire enduring enthusiasm for strange new ideas? In his exciting new book, The Secret Language of Leadership: How Leaders Inspire Action Through Narrative, (Jossey-Bass, October 2007, business narrative expert Steve Denning explains why traditional approaches to leadership communication don’t work and reveals the hidden patterns that effective leaders use to spark change. He shows how anyone can inspire enduring enthusiasm for a cause, even in skeptical, cynical or even hostile audiences and provides a comprehensive guide to the nitty-gritty of transformational leadership.