Liberal capitalism harbours two dangerous seeds of self-destruction; growing inequality and, as recent events have demonstrated, a tendency for markets to spiral out of control. This book attributes both of them to fundamental flaws in capitalism's main economic agent, the large, CEO-led, limited liability joint stock company. It explains why the flaws developed, describes how they threaten the liberal capitalist consensus and suggests some steps companies could take to reform themselves and improve their adaptation to today's environment.

'Tom Lloyd provides a sparkling explosion of shibboleths and myths about the corporate sector in the course of a coruscating attack on excessive executive remuneration.' - John Kay, economist and author of The Long and the Short of It'

Acknowledgements
Introduction
PART I: What Ails Big Business
What People Want
A Feudal Heritage
The Steam-Age Corporation
The Decadent Corporation
Not So Much Greed
The Myth Of Leadership
PART II: Reforming Big Business
Leaderless Competitors
The Adaptive Challenge
Size And Shape
Corporate Reformation

TOM LLOYD is a management writer and author. He is a former editor of Financial Weekly and Management Today, was founding editor of Gemini Consulting's quarterly management journal Transformation and wrote the 'Working Brief' column in The Sunday Telegraph for several years. He has written five books, including Managing Knowhow, with Karl-Erik Sveiby (Bloomsbury 1987) and The 'nice' company (Bloomsbury 1990). He was also the co-author of the successful A Woman's Place is in the Boardroom and A Woman's Place is in the Boardroom: The Roadmap with Peninah Thomson and Jacey Graham (Palgrave 2005, 2008).