Avoiding failure in the world of corporate business

Management | Zheng Yangpeng

There is no shortage of reflections on the market failure in the West after the 2008 financial crisis, with many observers regarding what Yi Zhihong, dean of the Business School of Renmin University of China, described as "the supremacy of shareholder interest" being the main culprit. But the book Firm Commitment: Why the Corporation is Failing Us and How to Restore Trust in It by Colin Mayer, a professor of management studies at the University of Oxford's Said Business School, is not just another fashionable tome on the topic. Rather, it is a solemn contemplation of the roots of corporations' defects.

You can sense the seriousness of his thoughts in every line. According to him, the book is both a "tribute and a condemnation" of this "remarkable institution that has created more prosperity and misery than could have been imagined".