Rebalancing Society ─ Radical Renewal Beyond Left, Right, and Center

Our world is out of balance and the consequences are proving fateful: the degradation of our environment, the demise of our democracies, and the denigration of ourselves, with greed having been raised to some sort of high calling. Legendary management scholar Henry Mintzberg here brings his formidable analytical powers to bear on how we can renew our troubled societies.Mintzberg argues that there are three pillars of a healthy society: the public (government), the private (business), and the plural (nonprofit). Communism collapsed because the public sector overwhelmed the others. Capitalism is in crisis because the private sector has come to dominate, particularly in the United States. Large corporations have attained positions of entitlement, justified by the prevailing economics dogma of our day: that greed is good, property is sacrosanct, markets are sufficient, and governments are suspect.It is in the neglected plural sector Mintzberg believes hope lies. Radical renewal will have to begin on the ground, within communities of people who exhibit the inclination and the independence to tackle difficult problems head on. We may vote in the public sector and consume in the private sector, but we are the plural sector. We are it, and because it is the way forward, we are the way forward. He offers specific steps for increasing the power of the plural sector, curbing the excesses of the private, and restoring the public to its proper role.

Henry Mintzberg is the Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He has won numerous awards from prestigious business, government, and academic institutions and is the author of the bestselling books Simply Managing, The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning, Managers Not MBAs, and Mintzberg on Management.