Reading a fascinating book written by a Christian who seems the second coming of Don Quixote - he's tilting at the corporate windmills by suggesting that fun, not profit, be the bottom line. And it's not theoretical; he did it for years at his energy company AES.
A sample:
Several years later, when a consultant from McKinsey was giving a presentation about AES, one of our executives asked why he hadn't mentioned our shared values. It turned out that the consultant was enthusiastic about our values - for all the wrong reasons. "They really reduce labor costs," he said. "Employees love these values, and they work harder and more productively because of them."
This is the pragmatic line of thinking about values that I had fought since the early days of the company. It ignores the moral dimension of values and regards them as nothing more than a means to make money. The distinction was articulated by an Oxford professor named John Kay: "There is a real difference between saying to your workers, 'We care about your welfare because we do,' and saying, 'We care about your welfare because that will make you work harder for us.'" Employees can tell when values are genuine and when they're adopted for ulterior purposes.
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