More love! At work?

Came across this WSJ Blog post from last year by Gary Hamel, one of the great business writers and thinkers.

http://blogs.wsj.com/management/2010/01/13/the-hole-in-the-soul-of-business/tab/print/

” … there’s nothing wrong with utilitarian values like profit, advantage and efficiency, but they lack nobility. Reflect for a moment on the avarice and irresponsibility that produced the recent banking crisis, and wreaked havoc at Enron, WorldCom, Adelphia and a host of other scandal-plagued companies. If corporate leaders and their acolytes are not slaves to some meritorious social purpose, they run the risk of being enslaved by their own ignoble appetites. An uplifting sense of purpose is more than an impetus for individual accomplishment, it is also a necessary insurance policy against expediency and impropriety.”

It is a little ironic however, that a man so associated with the cold, hard, steely reality of business strategy and analysis should now be writing about bringing more warmth and love into business.

As ever though, as with so many of his writings,  he does so here with such compelling eloquence.