Books

Leadership Development in a Post-Crisis World, 2010

If nothing else, the recent meltdown of financial markets and the fall of very powerful and well-established firms have highlighted the need to rethink the essence of business leadership.

Indeed, a report just released in the United States by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission has laid much of the blame for the economic meltdown on massive failures of leadership at the very top of many of the country’s key financial institutions, from the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury to the major credit rating agencies and top banks.

Building Respected Companies

The current financial crisis has deep macroeconomic roots, but the dominant view of the firm has made the crisis deeper and more devastating. Over the past few decades, maximizing shareholder value has become the main objective of the firm. Chief executives have been keen on this objective because their economic incentives have been clearly associated with stock market performance. Unfortunately, this has driven many CEOs to make terrible decisions based on short-termism and greed. In this way, the firm has become the object of anger, criticism and cynicism. In Building Respected Companies, Jordi Canals argues that we must address this problem by developing companies that serve society, not just their shareholders. This requires a new perspective of what a firm is, what the purpose of the firm in society should be and what the role of the board of directors and senior executives should be.

In search of balance, Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2008 (En busca del equilibrio. Consejos de administración y alta dirección en el gobierno de la empresa)

In his latest book, Professor Jordi Canals explains how a company can create corporate governance to better guarantee success. He argues it is not enough to simply reinforce the legal, financial, and regulatory measures that govern a company's administration. Rather, a company must adopt a more integrated approach and revise its policies, systems, institutions, and decision making process, in order to survive and develop as an organization in the long-term.

Managing for Growth, Oxford University Press, 2000 
 
As economic growth in Western countries shows signs of fatigue, companies are battling hard to discover how to generate and sustain corporate growth. The restructuring and reengineering processes of the early 1990s, and the massive lay-offs they brought about, have only given an additional boost to the need for expansion. Corporate efficiency is indispensable, but is not a sufficient condition for corporate survival. Firms need to think about their future growth.