Genuine leadership is inherently moral.
The October Crisis was not just a crisis of the financial sector, but one arising from an ill-informed and erroneous mindset that still infects businesses in general and requires correction.
One fascinating development in recent years is how large companies like Wal-Mart or the major apparel brands are dramatically influencing behavior throughout their supply chains by requiring CSR compliance as a condition of being a supplier.
Genuine leadership is inherently moral. So the values chosen matter tremendously, and they must be values aligned with society (including the most universal statement of human values in history, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as well as clear values of sustainability evidenced in global declarations like the Stockholm and Rio Declarations.
The ultimate cause of the October Crisis was the ideological embrace of Milton Friedman's warped but still dominant view that "the only social responsibility of business is to make a profit for its shareholders," and until that socially and economically counterproductive - and empirically, legally and ethically inaccurate - view is corrected, we will continue to have the increasing and more intense crises of global capitalism that we have seen recur with ever greater frequency over the past forty years. Sadly but clearly, the lessons have still not been learned.
