Book Review: Changing Your Company from the Inside Out: A Guide for Social Intrapreneurs
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This book is something of a how-to guide for corporate reformers. It draws inspiration heavily from the study of social movements, which is a natural-enough foundation. Corporate reform has become an increasingly important component of a wide range of social movements in the past few decades, so it stands to reason that the strategies employed by broader social movements should be useful to in-house reformers. To that end the authors draw heavily from social reformers: the idea is to identify the right opportunity for reform, the right individuals to target in making one’s case, the business rationale for reform, and the right “platforms” for organizing around reform. It’s a reasonably good guide, and the “when” section shines most brightly, since it nicely highlights the role that major new initiatives, product lines, and reorganizations play in possibly unrelated reforms.
What’s interesting to me is that the book spends comparatively little energy discussing corporate reform that’s not tied explicitly to larger social and environmental causes. Most of the book is devoted to the problem of adopting green policies, or human rights protections, or the like - and it’s easy enough to see how these kinds of reforms within corporate life can be informed by parallel reforms in political life outside the workplace. What’s far less obvious is the following question: what lessons can social movements teach to those who seek reforms - whether small-scale or grand - in corporate organization and governance? There are a few mentions here and there, such as corporate coups and CEO ousters, but they’re really at the margins of the book, and they’re also the most extreme examples of corporate governance reform. I think the book might have benefited quite a bit from a deeper exploration of corporate governance reform, and a look at the lessons that social reformers may lend to corporate reformers.
This book is a reasonably good high-level overview of the ins and outs of corporate reform, and is certainly a good starting point for those looking to make change.