It’s wrong to look at what we call ‘Enlightenment values’ as some fad of the 18th century. It’s deeply rooted in ancient history.
Category Archive: Matthew Stewart
Like ministers of information, consultants condense the message, smooth out the dissonances, unify the rhetoric, and then repeat and amplify it ad nauseam through the client’s rank and file.
At its best, management theory is part of the democratic promise of America. It aims to replace the despotism of the old bosses with the rule of scientific law. It offers economic power to all who have the talent and energy to attain it.
I’d like the United States to become what it was always meant to be, which is a secular nation – more publicly committed to reason, to improving understanding, and promoting education.
We are all equal not because we partake in some peculiar nature or because we share in the same credo of unreasoned beliefs, but because we take it that no thinking being is incapable of seeing reason.
In the ideal scenario, consultants work for a board, and they’re helping the board check on certain aspects of management. Their work is made public and transparent.
It was 1988, and I was just finishing a D.Phil at Oxford University on the topic of ‘Nietzsche and German Idealism.’
Most religions assume that you find purpose through some agent that sits above or outside the world and imbues it with purpose.
In business, experience is the big teacher.
I don’t have an M.B.A. I have a doctoral degree in philosophy – nineteenth-century German philosophy, to be precise.