This is a book about corporate political design, and, in particular, about the differentiation and integration of the roles played in executive committees, CEO offices, and boards of directors. Our principal argument is that productive interpersonal relationships based on personal and professional trust are the key to the integration of these structures. Such role integration is particularly visible in what we call small numbers at the top as a mixture of role separation, role combination, and role-sharing among a reduced number of executives – usually between two and four.

There are few incumbents at the corporate apex in the majority of organizations (Mintzberg, 1980). Corporate power, like social power, is always a phenomenon of small numbers. Sometimes the pinnacle of the organization takes the form of dominant coalitions, as noted by Cyert and March in their A Behavioral Theory of the Firm (1963) and by Thompson in Organizations in Action (1967), or of upper echelons, as in Hambrick and Mason's (1984) influential piece; sometimes it is an inner core group, as in Kleiner's (2003) text for practitioners.

Although, as Khurana (2002) reminds us, individualism is assumed in most concepts of corporate power, rarely does one individual exercise great power in complex organizations. Yet performance is often attributed to the individual at the top. There are, however, numerous practices that do not fit that individualist assumption.