Many Facets of Leadership, The

Chapter 6. Fundamentalism and Panaceas

Russell L. Ackoff

The hijacking of commercial airliners by members of the terrorist al Queda group, and the willingness for self-sacrifice by those hijackers to make a point while killing thousands of Americans when they smashed the planes into the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon, gives dramatic and emotional emphasis to the wide gulf between fundamental thinking and what our high-tech world has come to represent to some people.

Bear with me, because I am about to make the big leap of faith here by comparing some of today's executives and their styles with those terrorists because of their fundamental approach to management.

Fundamentalism, a fixed set of beliefs about acceptable ends and means, is ...