Strategic Lessons in Corporate Governance from the Inca Empire

One of the most powerful cultural influences in the past 500 years in South America has been the legacy of the Inca Empire. Many of the management techniques, business ideologies, and organizational systems that thrive today in South America, particularly in the Andean region that stretches from Colombia to Chile, have strong undertones of the prevalent indigenous values that dominated during the reign of the Incas. In this paper core managerial principles of the Incas are identified and explored based on an examination of the guiding organizational ideology that led this civilization to its zenith of greatness just prior to the arrival of Europeans to the Americas. The state of these values in organizational thinking today in Andean South America is assessed, examined, and discussed. Implications for the relevance of Inca principles to foreign firms, thus those not based in Andean South America, are also discussed and future research directions are identified.