An Un-American Business: The Rise of the New European Enterprise.

An Un-American Business: The Rise of the New European Enterprise. By Donald Kalff. Kogan Page US, 220 pages. $35.

The American business story of recent years isn't just about corporate blowups like Enron, Adelphia and Tyco, nor about the regulatory vise imposed by Sarbanes-Oxley. To Donald Kalff, a management professor in the Netherlands, it's much more fundamental: a shareholder-targeted business model that puts all the focus on one objective: share price gains in the shortest time frame possible.

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To Kalff, a European who has 30 years of experience working in the U.S. and Europe and has a Ph.D. from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, this single-minded pursuit of stock gains "acts as a permanent drain on the development of new business concepts, large-scale investments and partnerships. The choice also puts a premium on cost savings, outsourcing and pursuing mergers to reduce overhead."

Yet the European "stakeholder" model, he writes, is almost equally flawed. By calling for the "concurrent pursuit of shareholder, employee, supplier and customer interests, plus the interest of the community at large," companies can tie themselves in knots.

So, what to do? Kalff rejects any hybrid model that tries to pick the best from the two. He appears to have permanently soured on the American model, writing that "U.S. companies cannot escape the web of expectations that are spun around their listing[s]." He opts, instead, for a kind of reconstituted European model that relies more on outside structures such as partnerships and foundations to provide needed capital.

This is a thoughtful and soundly argued book, but it tends to dismiss overall U.S. corporate success at the expense of ostensibly weaker European results. And Kalff's "third way"--which he says borrows elements from successful German companies like Porsche and Bertelsmann AG--isn't persuasively drawn. His conclusion that only a European solution will save the world economy sounds more like that of a European Union cheerleader than a disinterested observer.