Leaders Eat Last

I'm probably in the audience for this book, but I'm finding it hard to rate it accurately as I'm already familiar with most of the material the author covers. However, I did find two things notable:

1. The author calls out Friedman on the “greed is good” theory of corporate operation, that is, maximizing shareholder value being the sole concern of a corporation. I have never believed this myself, and with “corporate personhood” established by the law, it's no surprise a large amount of corporate behavior is sociopathic at best. We imprison people for taking “me first” to its logical conclusion, incorporating should come with more social responsibility, not less. Friedman got a Nobel prize for this notion. The author takes Friedman to task, and in my opinion rightly so.

2. I feel the author was unduly harsh on Jack Welch. This may be because I'm currently reading Welch's “Winning,” and can see the mismatch between what Welch writes and how it's taken. For example, Welch's description of stack ranking (differentiation) does not square with what I've read about it, nor what I've experienced directly by way of family working for GE during Welch's tenure. Specifically, Welch spends a lot of words advocating for the middle 70%. That part isn't much discussed by the author, or other authors, and certainly not executed on in my experience. The irony is that Welch and the author are much more closely aligned on people development than the author writes.