Could Lao Tzu Be the CEO?
Leadership, Renewal, and the Way of the Living Enterprise
by John Wong
Seventy percent of corporate transformations fail. The usual explanations — bad strategy, poor execution, resistance to change — describe the wreckage, not the cause. This book argues the real failure is deeper and older: we mistake what a company fundamentally is.
We treat the enterprise as a fixed thing to be defended, when it is a living process that survives only by changing shape. Get that wrong, and every later decision inherits the error. Kodak saw the digital future perfectly — it invented the digital camera — and still died, because it could not stop being a film company.
Across sixteen chapters, Could Lao Tzu Be the CEO? moves from why transformations fail, through a new picture of the firm as a living body, to the practical work of governing one: how a board learns to see, whom to trust with a transformation, and how a culture is turned. It reads the modern enterprise through an unlikely lens — the process philosophy of Lao Tzu — not as ancient wisdom dispensed as tips, but as a working theory of the living enterprise.