Answer five questions after reading five articles, the answer is only about 150 words

Q 1

To get you started, here are some takeaways from the Board article:

1. The importance of corporate leaders was emphasized for 30 years, but disappeared as soon as a crisis hit.

2. People talk about the 2008-9 bailouts as being relatively inexpensive, or even profitable, for the government; but people can become embittered if they think that leaders are receiving favorable treatment (p. 270).

3. If you treat leaders as victims of a system, you're conceptualizing them as being more similar to rats or robots than to anything recognizably human.

4. Businesses hire leaders who over-promise and seem authentic; this leads to lots of people who are genuinely blinded by ambition rising to leadership positions.

5. As Arendt argues, authoritarianism thrives when this (item 4, above) kind of ambition is coupled with scientific-sounding one-size-fits-all solutions (systems thinking).

6. Boards of large companies should be more accountable to diverse voices from outside their organization.

Q2

Cialdini and many other scholars of organizational politics argue that political activity (including persuasion) is a "necessary" or inevitable part of organizational life. Do you agree with this assessment? Why or why not? After reading " Science of Persuasion

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 ," do you think that business schools are improving the world by teaching this stuff? Defend your position with evidence...be persuasive ;)

Q3

"Some of the fundamental social philosophical assumptions about human nature and social organization made by political and economic theorists, and embodied in some of our most significant political and economic institutions, are diametrically opposed to some of the assumptions about human nature and social organization made by organization theorists and embodied in a large number of organizational structures."

What is your reaction to this assertion? What evidence does Collins present to defend his assessment? For much of the remainder of the paper, Collins advances the idea that what is true about government should be true about business--if we like democratic governments, we have no reason to prefer autocratic workplaces. To what extent do you agree with Collins' argument? If you agree, can you offer more support to his argument (perhaps from personal experience)? If you disagree, what questions do you have for Collins?

Q4

On p. 501,  Collins

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mentions many participatory management practices proposed by communitarians and alludes to the few proposed by libertarians. Which set of practices appeal to you more? What specific practices would you like to see in an ideal world? Do you think it is possible to see widespread workplace democratization in the United States? Why or why not?

Q5

Christensen's ultimate recommendation is to be deliberate about the "yardstick" you choose to measure your life and to live everyday in accordance with that metric. I think this recommendation is illuminating, but it remains abstract in Christensen's formulation. What are some concrete metrics you might use to measure your life, and how did (or would) you arrive at selecting these yardsticks? Even if you share Christensen's yardstick ("Don't worry about the level of prominence you have achieved; worry about the individuals you have helped become better people"), share how you arrived at this metric and some concrete ways in which you gauge your success.

Read: https://hbr.org/2010/07/how-will-you-measure-your-life