A Company of Citizens - Brook Manville and Josiah Ober, A Company of Citizens: What the World's First Democracy Teaches Leaders about Creating Great Organizations

It has long been a paradox of the Western democracies that the organizations that produce the great bulk of their wealth are strikingly non-democratic* If any thing, those businesses, in which so many of their citizens work and which generate the taxes upon which we all rely, are closer in their structures and processes to the totalitarian centrally-planned regimes of the old communist world. That world was brought down by its bureaucratic rigidity and by its inability to harness the energies and enthusiasm of its people in pursuit of its cause. That fate may yet await the corporations of the West unless they can find a way to in volve those who work in them in the governance and man agement of their business. It is timely, therefore to be reminded that two and a half millennia ago there was an organization of some 100,000 people that found a way to do just that. Brook Manville and Josiah Ober, in their interesting and provocative book, A Company of Citizens, outline how some of the structures and processes by which the Athens of classical times was governed could be applied to modern corporations to create companies of citizens. Business books, by and large, are dull stuff and ancient history is read mostly only by historians. It is good news, therefore, to find a book that turns history into relevant theory and provides us with a business case study rippling with drama and personalities as well as clear messages for managers everywhere. The authors and their