ABSTRACT
A widely prevalent way of thinking about leadership and ethics in relation to today’s corporations is epitomized by a popular film genre. These films narrate the struggle of some heroic individual against a large organization. For example, there is the story of a large utility on the West Coast of the USA. Over a number of years, acids from one of the utility’s plants leaked into the ground water used by adjacent residential communities. Many of the residents developed multiple forms of cancer and some of them claimed that this was due to drinking the polluted water. However, they were completely unsuccessful in their attempts to connect the cancer with the operations of the neighbouring plant. Then, by chance, a young assistant in a law office noticed that there were a number of cancer cases that seemed to be related to the plant, a pattern no one had so far noticed. She took up the cause and in her heroic struggle, as the leader, she united the residents in taking a joint action suit against the corporation. When a former employee supplied her with relevant documents from his basement, they were able to win the case, which turned out to be the largest settlement against an American corporation up to that time. Some of the top executives were found guilty of negligence and the young woman, the heroic leader, received a bonus of two million dollars from her law firm. Typically, after such a film, there is an air of excited triumph in the crowd as people leave the cinema. Someone finally took revenge on one of those big corporations, triumphing against “the system”!
