Ruby Gates

"We weren't stupid and we weren't evil. Nevertheless we managed to produce a generation of managers and business professionals that is deeply mistrusted and despised by a majority of people in our society and around the world. This is a terrible failure,” writes Shoshana Zuboff, a former Harvard business school professor.

That admission, plus the fact that corporations evolved on the backs of the geopolitical stage, has created a corporate landscape that, according to the Financial Trust Index, only 10% of Americans trust. And can you blame them? The corporate structure balances on the legacy building blocks of dominance, hierarchy and politics. In the wake of Enron, the corporate governance process came into tight focus.

But even with the Sarbanes-Oxley Bill mandating processes and procedures for financial transparency, we still had the Wall Street implosion, driven by personal greed, power and absent oversight. How is it that the heartbeat of our economic health literally sabotaged itself and our communities so easily? Did not one person cry into their martini with remorse?

It is obvious that we must remake our corporate governance framework such that ethics, responsibility and integrity become the defining qualities of business—not disproportionate profit margins—and the health of communities and larger economies trump shareholders in the boardroom. Business takes place in a world built solidly upon interdependent relationships, tangling together nations, leaders, consumers, technology, politics, economies and resources in a global pile of pick-up-sticks.

The corporate structure Henry Ford built no longer works. Corporations and leadership must shift to a world where the drive for dominance is replaced by integration, and hierarchy is replaced by collaborative kinds of networks, politics and economics. This means that corporate governance suddenly has a pile of x-factors to address.

Who would have predicted 100 years ago that we would be facing a world where 31 billion searches are conducted on Google every month?  Who would have predicted a world where majors in organic agriculture, e-business, nanotechnology and homeland security are commonplace? Who would have predicted the number of text messages sent everyday would exceed the planet's population? And who would have guessed more than 5 billion minutes per day are spent on Facebook, predominately by people older than 35?