Abstract
Frank Dobbin and Dirk Zorn have admirably summed up what we know about how large U.S. corporations have been governed in the past 20 years. As such, I do not have many quibbles with their story. Instead, I would like to argue that the era of shareholder value has now come to a close. This is for two reasons. First, and most importantly, the methods and practices of financial engineering Dobbin and Zorn describe have reached an endpoint in their ability to make corporations more profitable. The recent stock market crash is at least in part a result of investors becoming convinced that firms could not sustain the upward profit path.