A Radical Enterprise

Chapter 1

The Four Imperatives of Radical Collaboration

As we saw in the introduction to this book, the world of work is haunted by disengagement, mistrust, and meaninglessness, and it is plagued with the attendant economic consequences of low productivity, performance, and innovation. The source of this plague is widely known yet rarely addressed. Its image is softened and compartmentalized through a number of modern-day corporate euphemisms, including “bureaucracy,” “Taylorism,” “scientific management,” and “command and control.” But lurking behind all of these names is the thing itself: the dominator hierarchy, a term first introduced by world-renowned social scientist Dr. Riane Eisler in her landmark work The Chalice and the Blade.

Within ...