Karen P. Manz

The Virtuous Organization: Insights from Some of the World's Leading Management Thinkers

This book focuses on a new and emerging, yet as old as recorded history, organizational concern: virtue. Virtue has recently become a topic of serious examination among organizational researchers and progressive companies who are exploring their role in creating new, more holistic, healthy, and humane work environments. With interdisciplinary insights by many of the world’s leading management thinkers, the book includes conceptual treatments, empirical research, and actual cases concerning virtuous behavior and leadership under conditions of crises, and ordinary and exemplary times. Until recently, scholarly research paid scant attention to virtue, especially in organizations. The pursuit of virtue, as opposed to the bottom line, remained outside the acceptable domain of practising managers faced with economic pressures and stakeholder demands. Concepts such as efficiency, return on investment (ROI), and competitive advantage were emphasized over more virtuous concerns such as caring, compassion, integrity and wisdom. The Virtuous Organization fills this void by presenting paradigm-shifting insights of leading scholars that have the potential to change the face of management thinking and practice for both this and future generations.

Shared Entrepreneurship: Toward an Ethical, Dynamic, Empowering, Freedom-Based Process of Collaborative Innovation

Shared entrepreneurship (SE) is becoming recognized as an organizational model that can succeed in a rapidly changing global marketplace where the hierarchical command and control model cannot.1 Hierarchical command and control stifles innovation and often fails to reward those who are responsible for an innovation.2 Innovation, whether product, process, or organizational, is the driver of success. This has always been true, but it is more critical today than ever before because of rapidly changing technological advances and consumer preferences. The academic evidence is sketchy because shared entrepreneurship is an emerging and growing practice although a limited number of organizations have been using it for 50 or more years. Those that do practice shared entrepreneurship appear to have a better chance of survival than those that don’t.3

Equal Exchange: Doing Well by Doing Good

In 1983, Rink Dickinson, Jonathan Rosenthal, and Michael Rozyne were all recent college graduates and working for a food co-op warehouse in the Boston area. They began to question the system: What if food could be traded in a way that is honest and fair, a way that empowers both farmers and consumers? What if trade supported family farms use of organic methods rather than methods that harm the environment? Almost simultaneously they started to hear about groups in Europe who were doing fair trade. The advocates of fair trade wanted to ensure that the producers of products such as coffee, teas, and chocolate would get a better price for their crops while supporting improvement in their environmental, social, and political conditions. Rink, Jonathan, and Michael liked the idea. According to Rink, they “were basically food co-op people, interested in connecting small, local farmers with consumers to change the marketplace.” It was not their intention to found a company at that time. They took the idea to the board of directors of the co-op warehouse. Half of the board supported the idea and half voted against it. It became apparent to them that if they were going to pursue their vision, they were going to have to develop an organization.