ABSTRACT
The financial crisis has had a fundamental and devastating effect on organizations, societies and global economies. The International Labour Organization (ILO) for example, has projected the total number of unemployed people globally to hit over 207 million in 2013 rising to over 210 million people by 2016 (ILO 2012) – these stark figures put a human cost on the greatest global financial and economic crisis 1 since the Great Depression. The causes of the financial crisis are many and to some degree, highly contested. Unsurprisingly, the commentary both mainstream and academic has pointed to myriad causes of the crisis. Such has been the financial, economic and social impact that establishing its root cause has proven problematic, both for the academic and practitioner community. Nevertheless, prominent streams of inquiry have emerged in the literature to include for example failures of economic and financial theories (Acemoglu 2009, Colander 2011) and associated laissez-faire regulatory enforcement and governance failures (Barth et al. 2012, Stiglitz 2010). Also featuring prominently in discourse has been the failure of well-established management and leadership theories; this line of inquiry has been the basis for more critical management oriented analyses of the crises (e.g. Board 2010, Davies 2010, Stacey 2010) that highlighted a consensus among more iconoclastic commentators that systemic and pervasive instances of human and intellectual failures (Haiss 2010, Kling 2010, Krugman 2012, Mattingly and Kopecki 2012, Munir 2011, Tett 2010, Whittle and Mueller 2012) played a significant role in the crisis. However, despite divergent perspectives regarding the root cause of the crisis, one aspect at the core of the financial crisis unites the multitude of opinions – human failures: that is, failures of people, intellect and knowledge .
