What Were They Thinking?

C H A P T E R 3

Making Companies More Like Communities

IN THE SPRING of 2006, just about the same time that the film version of The Da Vinci Code was hitting movie theaters, I was spending three weeks at a business school in Barcelona. While there, I discovered some of the management secrets of Opus Dei, the Catholic society at the center of the book and movie’s byzantine plot and the subject of a cover story in Time magazine. No, I did not see any albino monks, cilices, or dead bodies. Instead, during my time at IESE, a leading Spanish business school founded by Opus Dei in 1958 as part of the University of Navarra, what I mostly observed was great management. In 2006, the Financial Times ranked IESE as number four in the world in executive ...