IMPACT WITH LOVE

A debut manual focuses on creating a caring corporate environment.

“While management and leadership are not the same, a good manager needs to be a good leader, and a good leader needs to know how to manage,” writes Harmeyer in his book, pointedly adding, “Structures that facilitate good leadership help us grow faster.” Drawing on his own experiences in the world of corporate ownership, he lays out the schematics of great, caring companies that display the opposite attitude of “MBA sharks cutting deals where less powerful people are taken advantage of.” The author considers long-term thinking to be a hallmark of the kind of business he’s championing, companies that make investments in culture, community, and trust that are designed to look beyond the three-to-five-year horizon for their goals and practices. He ends each of his book’s sections with quick, enumerated summaries of the key points and “Reflection” discussion prompts, such as “Do you set growth expectations with recruits and new hires? Do you provide adequate support structures?” Harmeyer repeatedly stresses that although he’s calling for a more holistic approach to management and corporate culture, he’s by no means discounting the primacy of profit—or, controversially, the virtues of capitalism, which he claims does not cause discrimination, inadequate health care, and poor education. “Poverty is not caused by wealth,” he asserts; “misfortune is not caused by fortune.” This pugnacious spirit fills the whole book; Harmeyer’s prose is terrific to read, even at its most contentious. Occasionally, he lapses into stating the obvious (organizations are made of people, for example). And the kind of all-consuming, organization-as-a-living-entity concept (“an organization is itself an organism”) that he describes will unsettle various readers. Some people just want to be employees, not lymph nodes. But his embrace of a “we’re all in this together” mentality is infectiously optimistic.

A readable, helpful, and humanistic view of building a better company.