INTRODUCTION--The Big Mad about American Business . . .
"[America's future] will be grimly habitable and our founding fathers' dream of equality, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness will have become a nightmare if the author's many dire warnings come true."
Brumbach spends pages dismissing this 192-page diatribe of "ruminations" by Terry, but he still finds interesting Terry's basic tenet: "He regards [growth-driven capitalism--an established paradigm] as an irrational, self-destructive economic system, the sole purpose of which is to provide goods for consumption, at ever-increasing levels 'dominated by immoral and rapacious corporations, at once out of control and in control of us by driving a widening wedge between us and the social and political ideals of our founding fathers.'"
Brumbach (and Terry) is hardly alone in assessing recent American business leadership with strident terminology. Littleton Maxwell of the Business Information Center at the University of Richmond (VA) has recently reviewed a work by James Moore, a Cambridge (MA) management consultant and author, who "forecasts the death of competition as it is now known and predicts a future of organized chaos." [Emphasis added.] Heller has quoted a 1994 Fortune magazine article, describing a long-time U.S. business star, Proctor & Gamble, as "the ultimate hierarchy--to be unkind, an inwardly pointed pyramid of anal-retentive order-takers loathed by competitors and retail customers alike." Being loathed by competitors is not so bad, but the rest of that, and Terry's polemics and Moore's oxymorons, range between borderline disgusting and mind-boggling.
Why are business analysts so angry with American business, and mostly its leaders? Why are they convinced that (only) radical change will suffice? And why would any analysis, such as this one, attempt to identify the worst problem ("the BIGGEST challenge") for leaders to discover and solve?
THE ST...