Leadership Matters

Part IIIMeaning

Has Leadership Lost Its Soul?

There appears to be a growing interest in the spiritual dimension of the work-space and a desire to see our daily labor in transcendent, rather than just material and economic, terms. It was the sociologist Max Weber who described mid-twentieth-century bureaucracy as a “ratio-instrumental cage”. He was expressing disenchantment with an overly instrumental society based on what Oscar Wilde described as the measurement of everything and the value of nothing; weights and measures and consumer choice were displacing ideas of depth and belonging. If anything, this lament has gathered more acuity in the current age. We are witnessing strong resistance to the idea that we can exist without community, without ...