[Finding clues for what should be the next business management paradigm in an Asian context as the age of shareholder value management is coming to an end.] The life of a business manager is difficult, as it requires making difficult decisions on a daily basis. It is made even more difficult because there is no clear set standard on what makes each decision a great one. The standard changed dramatically and frequently over past ten years making the life of business managers ever more challenging. Society expects corporations to take on different roles as its collective perspective changes and accordingly, corporations and their managers are demanded to deliver different results. Up to the mid-1990’s, Korean society expected Korean corporations to provide their employees jobs for life. It was a time when business leaders were respected for placing the needs of their employees at the top of their list of priorities. However, events changed quickly in 1997 as the IMF imposed massive restructuring on many corporations to gear themselves toward shareholder value maximization as a top priority. From start-up companies to large conglomerates, business managers were evaluated on the change in shareholder value and sometimes almost solely on the rise and fall of a company’s stock price. Managers capable of increasing quarterly profits and stock prices were then respected as the best managers. Starting a few years ago, people began to demand that corporations operate on a more responsible manner. Corprorate leaders need to play a team coach role for good results in the game but its rules keep changing. In this post financial crisis era, business managers are faced with multiple demands all tangled up as some demands conflict with others. In order to maximize short term profits, lay-offs might be necessary. However, a greater investment needs to be made to secure jobs for employees and train them if the corporation considers human resources as an important asset. Similarly, increasing budgets for CSR activities force placing constraints on resources for employee performance bonuses. The same is true for increasing performance bonuses as it inevitably places pressure on budgets for shareholder dividends. Changing times, changing management priorities What should be the top management priorities of companies? Should shareholders come first? Or should the employees? What about customers and social responsibilities? This is an age of confusion. It is difficult to answer the question because there is no clear answer to another question: “Who owns the corporations?” Professor Aoki Masahiko of Stanford University will ask this very question to business managers, investors and policy makers at Asia Future Forum 2010: Evolution of East Asian Enterprise 　 Of course, mainstream economists have a ready-made answer to the first question. They will say corporations are established to deliver maximum shareholder value and business managers are merely agents of the shareholders, who are hired to run businesses to bring maximum profit to the shareholders. In other words, according to mainstream economists, business managers are mere agents who are there to deliver optimal results for shareholders. In this sense, workers are not integral constituents of the company, but mere ‘employees’ hired to generate profit. Such a definition of workers and business managers has become an accepted norm in Korea after the IMF bail-out in the late 1990’s. In 2001, a renowned economist, Professor Henry Hansmann of the Yale Law School published an article, ‘The End of History for Corporate Law,’ which claimed that ‘the debate over ideal corporate governance has ended and ideal corporate governance is the one that places shareholder value as a top priority’. 　 Despite such claims, the world is full of corporations that are thriving even though they do not place maximizing shareholder value as a top management priority. In fact, companies that embrace shareholder value as a top priority have only relatively recently become the mainstream in the UK and the US. Additionally, corporations in Japan and France have always been relatively heavily influenced by the governments. German corporations have regarded workers more importantly than in other countries with labor representatives participating at board level meetings. Naturally, investors, consumers, workers and managers of corporations in different countries have different expectations of each other and business managers had to regard different factors as priorities in their decision making. Changing values, a New Crisis for Business Managers . As emphasis on shareholder value is beginning to diminish, we are beginning to see a much wider variety of business management methods and priorities. Ironically, the investment banks which had been vocal champions of shareholder value were driven to the brink of bankruptcy and barely survived only because of gigantic government bail-out packages. Even the former General Electric Chairman, Jack Welch, a well-known champion of shareholder value, recently confessed that ‘On the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world.’ Such a statement is sure to confuse business managers who have been zealously pursuing maximization of shareholder value. Corporations can become unstable when management priorities become unclear at the top level. Corporate instability leads to increased instability of the economy as a whole. The world economy has come to this state of crisis initially due to the financial bubble. However, from a business manager’s perspective, this is also a crisis of management priorities. Korean corporations, Korean business managers more specifically, are facing the same crisis. What priorities and values should they use as a basis for their decision- making? What is the ideal organizational and governance structure of the future? Need for attention to reciprocal stakeholder relationships. Is it acceptable to unquestioningly embrace the mainstream paradigm that prescribes business managers to only ‘focus on increasing shareholder value, in other words, short-term profits? ‘According to such a view employees are a cost burden and not an asset. Therefore, it does not make sense to ‘investment in people’. If the mainstream prescription is wrong, what could possibly be the alternative? At the ‘Asia Future Forum 2010,’ Professor Aoki Masahiko, who has devoted his life to studying management methods adopted by Japanese business conglomerates and western corporations, will tell us about how we might be able to find some key clues on how to manage businesses for the future corporations by looking at how Asian corporations are managed today. His presentation titled ‘The Age of Asia and A New Framework of Enterprise will be the keynote speech at the Asia Future Forum 2010. 　 Professor Aoki will present a new business management method based on a reciprocal relationship with stakeholders that would help managers avoid the negative sides of the US-style of shareholder value-based management and the typical bottled up Japanese management styles. He firmly believes that time is right for East Asia to come up with a new business management paradigm as it is emerging as the new core of the world economy. Assets no longer consist of real estate and machines only. In the age of knowledge, people are the greater resource. If you are a business manager who aspires to be a proactive leader and creator of corporations and not just a simple agent of the shareholders, you should be interested in managing your business using people and knowledge as the main assets. It is time we ask ourselves, what values, organizational structure, and governance structure is ideal for business managers with such aspirations. LEE, Won-Jae President, Hankyoreh Economic Research Institute