Henry Mintzberg is Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at McGill University and an author of the recent books "Managing" and "Management? It's not what you think!".

GET it America. The problem with the economy is not economics but enterprises. Accordingly, no manner of economic intervention will put an end to this “recession”. The problem has been created in corporate America, and that is where it will have to be solved

It is the enterprises that play the game of business, while the economists keep score. Too many corporate “leaders” have trashed their enterprises, taking with them America's legendary sense of enterprise. The scorekeepers cannot fix that. To understand the basis for such a sweeping claim, add up the stories you have heard about the goings on in so many of the largest American enterprises. Then you may get it.

Get it, not just about the scandal of executive compensation, but also about its destructive consequences. Any chief executive who accepts a compensation package that so singles him or herself out from everyone else in the company is not a leader. Leadership is about conveying signals that engage other people in the company. How many leaders are left among America's large enterprises? There is an Israeli expression that a fish rots from the head down. So too does an enterprise.

Many economists and journalists see the CEO as the be-all and end-all of corporate success. The worst CEOs believe it. They thus allow themselves to be paid accordingly to “shareholder value”, which is a fancy term for increases in the price of a company's stock.

There are two basic ways to increase the price of the stock: by exploring and by exploiting. Explorer companies achieve this by doing better research, making improved products, and offering superior service. This is hard work, and it takes time. Exploiter companies have it easier: they depreciate the brand, cut investments in research, confuse the customers with bamboozle pricing, and stay as close as possible to the letter of the law while lobbying politicians to reduce its level. These behaviors can raise the price of the stock long enough for the executives to cash in their bonuses and run, as have so many in the large American companies.

Get it about the consequences of favouring heroic leadership over engaged management. America is obsessed with leadership, probably because it gets so little of it. Now it is fashionable in corporate America to dismiss plain old management: leadership is the glamorous stuff.

The problem is that leaders who don't manage―who don't get off their pedestals and into the fray―don‘t know what's going on. Who among the executives of those failed banks and insurance companies knew what was going on when they allowed their enterprises' futures to be bet on mortgages that were such obvious junk?

Get it about the mass firings of “human resources”. If the CEO is the enterprise, then everyone else is a “human resource”, to be “downsized” en masse at the drop of an earnings report. After all, resources are conveniently dispensed with, especially when the wolves of Wall Street are baying at the door, and need to be thrown the bones of some human resources to quiet them down. But why not: the company can carry on, in the short run, at least until the bonuses are doled out. Unfortunately, the short run has now run out for American enterprise.

At what price these firings? The answers are all around us: in overworked, unappreciated, discouraged and burned out workers and middle managers.

A robust enterprise is not a collection of human resources; it is a community of human beings. How many large American corporations can claim that kind of robustness? Effective strategy, for example, is not about a planning process that comes from the “top” so much as a learning process that can come from anywhere in the enterprise. The key to IKEA's successful strategy, to take a pointed example, lies in its provision of unassembled furniture that is easily transported. That idea came from a worker who had to take the legs off a table to get it into his car. He was apparently not downsized or discouraged by the leadership of his company.

Treated decently, respected by a leadership that engages itself to engage others, the people of a corporate community devote themselves to their products, their customers, their company and its strategy. They care. Did the employees of those failed banks and insurance companies care about their businesses any more than their leadership knew about those businesses?

Get it about the unproductiveness of “productivity”. Economic statistics tell us that these firings are productive. After all, the companies go on to produce their products and services with fewer resources. That this takes place on the backs of the workers and middle managers is of no concern to these statistics, nor is the longer term consequences of all this. These things don't count, not to the economists who have been trying in vain to fix the American economy.

Here in Canada, the economists are constantly berating us about our economy not being as productive as that of the United States. This is curious, because our economy has been doing much better. Can our lower productivity be the secret to our success?

Finally, get it that most economists, analysts, and executives have been the source of the problem, while robust enterprises have to be the core of the solution. Enough of the abstract measures and disconnected policies of the economists. Enough of the wolves of Wall Street on the backs of American enterprise. Enough of the mercenaries in the executive suites, and the elites in the board rooms. Americans will have to rebuild their economy with determination and patience, enterprise by enterprise, in order to regain their legendary sense of enterprise.