If the business history of the past two hundred years is a reliable guide, the current frenzy of enthusiasm for cooperation and employee self-management will subside. It will erode under the accumulated pressure of a thousand disappointments and betrayals; it will be stifled by increasing competitive pressures and squelched by the rising militancy of employees responding to coercive managerial tactics such as those described in chapter 13. Yet this near-inevitability does not warrant a retreat from cooperation as a covenantal ideal. A covenantal ethic has all the more reason to seize the moment and articulate a durable foundation for cooperation, by spelling out what might be termed the "deep" value of cooperation which underlies its sheer economic utility. The basic claim elaborated in this chapter is that the enduring value of cooperation is a function of its costliness. Efforts to elicit cooperation are good because they mirror, however distantly, the nature of God's struggle with God's very human people. Such initiatives serve to uplift and intensify relationships defined by coercion or compliance. From a covenantal perspective, cooperation is a moral achievement, more than nature's own arrangement. It is created through struggle, not through spontaneous, effortless transactions of reciprocal interest. Cooperation, as defined in the previous chapter, is the coordination of self-managed effort as sustained by the mutual entrustment of contingent wills. To generate and sustain such willing coordination involves struggling against centripetal and entropic pressures of many kinds, but principally-according to a covenantal ethic-those generated by managerial and employee fears of the irascible human contingency in each other. The value of cooperation turns not only upon how great a profit it returns, but in a deeper and more important sense, upon what it does to those who participate. As such, cooperation has an intrinsic theological value altogether different than the mutual economic utility that draws management and employees together.         This chapter will illustrate the "deeper" covenantal value of cooperation not with another success story, but with the story of a failure: the rise and fall of cooperation at the Caterpillar Corporation during the 1980s and 1990s. This tale poignantly sketches how great is the loss, in covenantal terms, when a successful partnership is purposefully destroyed.