What businesses can learn from the NFL

ROGER MARTIN is an unlikely revolutionary: he is the dean of the University of Toronto’s business school, sits on blue-chip corporate boards and has worked as a consultant for big traditional companies like P&G and GM.

All in all very much the CV of a pillar of the corporate establishment.

But this month Martin has published a book whose gentle tone belies its seditious content. What is radical about Fixing the Game: Bubbles, Crashes and What Capitalism Can Learn from the NFL, is that instead of asking how businesses can organise themselves to be more effective and profitable for shareholders, Martin wants to figure out how society should organise business to be more effective for all of us.