Getting inside the minds of top business leaders

BROUGHT TO BOOK: The Mind of the CEO: one-to-one with the world's top business leaders. Jeffrey Garten, Penguin Business, £8.99 (stg)

Once upon a time, heroes were pioneers settling new lands, explorers braving heaving seas and icy wastes to plant their country's flags in virgin wilderness, astronauts boldly going where no man had gone before and cloth-capped footballers who earned little more than those who worshipped them.

Since the 1980s, the whole "masters of the universe" thing has propelled businessmen, especially the multinational chief executive officer, into the public arena. The pre-eminence of the bottom line to politics, allied to the manichean view that all that matters is profit and loss, means the world traditionally inhabited by corporations has become familiar to all.

Our heroes now are millionaire footballers employed by Plcs, Michael O'Leary and his perceived intafada against bureaucracy, Richard Branson flying balloons and trying to get the trains running on time, and Tiger Woods breaking records on the golf course and in the earnings table.

If the media can ask Ronan Keating about his stand on running for president, and Bono can meet and greet the leaders of the first world in Genoa to discuss the relationship between capitalism and third-world debt while protesters are having far more robust meetings with the Carabinieri outside, then getting inside the mind of the world's top business leaders would seem like a good thing.

Garten's list of interviewees is impressive, ranging from Rupert Murdoch to Minoru Makihara of Mitsubishi.

Indeed Mr Garten is a bit of a heavyweight himself, being Dean of the Yale School of Management and a former Clinton Administration member.

However the bulk of those figures featured are American, which skews the conclusions in favour of the US corporate experience. Interviewing, say, Silvio Berlusconi, whose straddling of the interface between business and politics has generated many headlines, would have illuminated somewhat these blurred lines and relationships in Europe - a situation all too familiar to the tribunal watcher.

Indeed the issue of power without accountability is becoming more important as multinationals traverse the increasingly homogenised market-place with a suppleness denied national governments shackled, as they are, by parochial interests and a reluctance to tackle the golden geese.

With increased globalisation and the availability of suitable workers in many locales, rather than in one, means corporations are not subject to the cultural and economic pressures they once were.

Despite Garten's assertion that the modern business leader is conscious of responsibilities to the wider community, in practice this manoeuvrability often allows corporations to dictate the terms of their tenancy to the host nation and workforce.

This tension between the bottom line and what an increasingly large section of society regards as the social responsibility commensurate with the increased power of corporations is something that businessmen and freemarketeers have to acknowledge.

On the evidence of this interesting book, there is movement in this direction.

Whether it is too little, too late, is another day's work.