ABSTRACT
Risk-taking without carefulness leads to recklessness. Participants in commerce are, in particular, assumed to engage in risk-taking and competitive behaviors, to be motivated by individual self-interest, to not pay much attention to social relationships, and to need technical competence to be successful. Among areas of commerce, the financial industry seems to have taken the exaggeration of "masculinity" to an extreme. The masculine image of economies was, in fact, invented by economists. The inventors of neoclassical economics assumed that individual consumers or workers are rational, self-interested, autonomous agents who maximize a mathematical function that represents their levels of satisfaction or utility. In the mechanical economy imaged by neoclassical economics, bravery in pursuing opportunities for innovation and technical competence in reading financial statements might be all that would be necessary for good leadership.
