 court decree, in the mid-1970s-someone suggested re- versing the order to "we serve to earn" to justify eliminating some of Practice Ambidextrous Leadership the "gold plating" that made the company less competitive. It was more than a semantic difference; it was a confusion of means and ends. When "we earn to serve" was the corporate motto, earnings were a necessary by-product of serving customers. We can provide phone service, the company said, perhaps a bit defensively, only if we can earn a fair return on the investment required to keep this whole thing running. Under "we serve to earn," customers are a means of generating profits, a sometimes inconvenient, troublesome path to what we're really in business to produce: fat returns for our share- owners. But business philosopher Charles Handy sees it differently. "The principal purpose of a corporation," he writes in The Age of Paradox, "is not to make a profit. Full stop. It is to make a profit in order to do things or make things and to do SO ever better and more abundantly." Handy suggests that this confusion of means and ends is, by defini- tion, self-defeating. Someone who lives to eat, rather than eats to live, he reminds us, will be distorted in more ways than one. When a shareowner's greatest return comes from a rising share price that bears no relation to the performance of the underlying busi- ness, things really get perverse. But as my friend Ed Block says, great CEOs keep their eye on the store, not just the ticker. And truly great companies operate in the public interest, manage for the long run, and make customer satisfaction their top priority. PR Misconceived Serious scholars, like Columbia University's Louis Lowenstein, have suggested that the "Voice of the paparazzi" has become a powerful new factor in corporate governance, "transforming how boards and managers [see] themselves." And that brings us to the role of public relations in corporate governance. Many business executives, understanding the power of the papa- razzi, define public relati