By Henry Mintzberg

Those unions are at it again. The workers at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport somehow believe they should get a raise every seven years or so. Not long before, Air Canada pilots wanted to be paid like US pilots. Before that, the auto workers at General Motors were creating havoc because they would rather be employed than unemployed.

It’s greed. Just a lot of greed. Now where could they have learned that?

Don’t look too far. They have had a good teacher, those workers. It’s called management – today’s management. This is a management enamoured with "share-holder value," which means ignoring everyone but the shareholders, who must get richer and richer, even if that means workers have to get poorer and poorer.

It’s a management delighted with downsizing, that clever way to raise the price of stocks on the backs of those workers.

Today’s management is also mesmerized with its own compensation, which assumes that if the business makes more profits, it must be because of the boss. How could anyone else possibly contribute, least of all the workers?

Great risk takers, these bosses. They earn fortunes if the stock price goes up, but give up not a penny if the price goes down.

The unions have learned their lesson well, exactly as they did earlier in the century. Back we go again to conflict and divisiveness. But blame the unions only if you choose to ignore the behaviour of the managers.

Shareholder value and executive bonuses are all the rage now. Even the Japanese and the Germans are feeling enormous pressure to adopt these ideas. I hope they do, because otherwise we in North America shall be in trouble, for we shall no longer be able to rely on docile unions in the face of job and wage cuts.

As we regress to our old ways of conflict, pray that the Japanese and Germans drop their old ways of harmony, cooperation and labour peace reinforced by modest executive compensation (incidentally, while the Japanese economy and banking system may be in trouble, the management of many Japanese companies is no less effective than it has been).

Executive bonuses are supposed to tie executive behaviour to corporate performance. I believe they ultimately have the opposite effect. They undermine teamwork and focus attention on short-term gain. Because there is no downside to these bonuses – no basic risk to the executives – this becomes a fundamentally corrupt idea that distorts behaviour. It’s just another version of the old boys’ network at play.

As for shareholder value, this is a one-sided, anti-social concept that has no place in a democratic society. It serves neither social progress nor economic development because societies develop by spreading their benefits, not by concentrating them in the hands of the established wealthy.

That is why the wealthiest societies have always been the most democratic. But voracious managers and dogmatic economists see neither very far ahead nor very clearly, let alone worry about democracy.

There is a lot of talk in the world about a "Third Way" between unrestrained socialism and unbridled capitalism. But aren’t we going right back to the first and second ways – really, the first versus the second?

Will we never learn? Is there no real leadership anywhere?

(Henry Mintzberg holds professorships in management at Montreal’s McGill University and INSEAD in France. He originally wrote this critique of today’s management for the Globe and Mail).