 Letter from London |
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By the Business World |
 "They remained stuck in a 1950s warp, and now we see them on the flickering screens of CNBC and CNN, all dolled up like creatures from Doris Day movies." |
How can such smart people
behave like such real idiots?
of TheColumnists.com
One of the paradoxes that has followed me around throughout
my adult life is the often undeserved bad rap that business gets
from the thinking people of the world.
Without big business, we would all be bored to death and hopelessly
impoverished.
So why do I have trouble coming up with the name of any creative people--the only friends worth our time--willing to defend the practices of the business world or the people who manage large corporations?
Although I have made my living as a hanger-on to the London, Paris and New York business communities for 30 years, I have not always been at ease. I admit to being seriously conflicted, and more so lately.
To rationalize away my own vocation as a business writer, I like to invoke the French expression: “Coeur a gauche, portefeuille a droit” (“Heart on the left, pocketbook on the right”), a line that the Parisians usually deliver while slapping the chest left and right.
I got close to the workings of business by covering it for major publications (Business Week, International Management, The AP). It was a quote from Bill Agee (later disgraced) of Bendix that got me excited. “Business turns me on,” he told the Fortune scribe, and somehow I saw what he meant.
But eventually I got tired of doing what a friend at The Economist calls “sniffing around the edges of the executive washroom”, and I went in deeper, into what we call “corporate communications”. There I began to understand the business mind and sometimes to admire the wide range of skills the top people need for their jobs.
But today I’m troubled again by serious misgivings. It comes in cycles, this twist in the gut. I had it when I started this business specialty back in the 1970s, and with each new multinational misdeed the pain comes back.
In college, all my friends were anti-business. The rattling old Journalism Building at San Jose State was a hothouse for ambitious would-be writers and critics, several of whom are gravitating to this website in their mature years, thanks to the hairy embrace of Editor Ron Miller. We were like-minded then and remain so.
Business Administration
majors were different. Usually the campus jocks or just dull-witted
boys who had flunked out of better schools, they were the short-haired,
well-groomed specimens who seemed to be fresh off a flying saucer.
We were from different worlds, and not to be seen in each other’s
company.
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corporate team to assemble in the board room right now. He needs our help finding his butt." |
When these burgeoning businessmen grew up, they remained stuck in a 1950s warp, and now we see them on the flickering screens of CNBC and CNN all dolled up like creatures from Doris Day movies. Same clothes, same haircuts. And they are just as dull as they used to be. (I’ll be gentle for once, and not bring up their lime green trousers on the golf course.)
Watching them today, there is something off-putting about those starched white shirts, the $100 neckties, the shiny suits, the uptight body language and especially the thoroughly lawyered lingo.
The news on the business pages is going through one of those gut-wrenching cycles again, you may have noticed, and this time it’s about ethics. The best of our business leaders, a reasonably accomplished group of individuals, display an uncanny accuracy for shooting themselves in the foot.
Consider these questions:
How can the likes of Jeff Skilling and Kenneth Lay of Enron or the geniuses at Arthur Andersen run their companies into the ground, then go public so poorly prepared, stumbling and mumbling under the scrutiny of U.S. Senators?
How can a smart guy like Bill Gates think he can benefit from a soft-focus makeover in his new fuzzy sweaters, grinning like a cobra at the camera? A few years ago he told me in an interview that he had no fear of the Feds. His people had supplied them with so much paper in their court submissions, he said with a cockeyed grin, that non-specialists would never get through it, or it they did, they would never understand it. He found out differ’nt, as we say in Indiana.
How can “Mr. Clean,” Jack Welch, until recently CEO of General Electric, allow his Johnson to rule his brain when dealing with a female journalist named Suzy Wetlaufer of the equally starchy Harvard Business Review? Those two horizontal? No, no, the mind boggles.
How can Europe’s most respected industrialist, the Swede Percy Barnevik, formerly of ABB, make a sub rosa separation payoff deal to himself worth $100 million, only to be forced to return half of it when it was discovered by his horrified successors years later as ABB ran short of money?
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division manager, Jim, but, frankly, your book on corporate leadership wasn't quite as good as the corporate leadership books the other candidates wrote." |
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I use words like “smart” and “accomplished” advisedly. And this is where things get complicated. The more I dealt with senior executives in my early days, the more impressed I was by the scope of expertise demanded of them all day every day.
First, they need thorough knowledge of their business. A key rule of management is that you must perform a given task--whatever it is--better than any of your employees. No one follows a boss who can’t find his own butt.
Second, they have to read balance sheets and understand financial engineering. This requires serious math. Some of these men even did calculus. I once knew a former engineer who understood quantum mechanics. And I knew a publisher who worked out all new business ventures as an algebraic equation.
Third, they must have charismatic leadership qualities. This is the magic ingredient concocted of self-confidence, acting skills, business acumen and powers of persuasion. Go into Amazon and check out the books on leadership. It’s a growth industry because no one can quite define it but thousands are willing to try. You know it when you see it.
Fourth, they need basic knowledge of the law. They are all better than me at focusing on the articles of incorporation or the procedures of Chapter 11. I call this my attention span deficit. I would never have survived a semester at Harvard Law. Far too boring.
Fifth, there is general erudition. Granted this is more a Continental phenomenon than American or British. Both those business cultures rely on drive rather than depth. The best educated business people seem to have gathered in France. A marketing director I knew in Paris liked to describe difficult conundrums as Corneillian situations, after the 18th century French playwright Corneille who specialized in knotty problems. Yet another used to quote Virgil in the original Latin.
These men and a few women clawed their way to the top, only to find when they got there that two-thirds of their life was gone, their children had left home hardly knowing their name, and now the SEC was all over them. They sought the top job for different reasons--power, greed or vanity, or a little of each, but it was mostly an empty victory. By the time they made big money their sensibilities had been worked out of them and they can’t go outside without a coat and tie.
A friend at the consultancy Accenture says he felt lobotomized when he returned from six weeks of indoctrination at the company’s “university” outside of Chicago. Many companies do the same, forcing their promising young talent to surrender their personalities.
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Living by your own rules just doesn’t work in the arch-conservative business world. I’m reminded of the line in “Thelma and Louise” when the husband of the Geena Davis character, Darryl (Christopher McDonald), justifies his neglect of her by shouting something like, “But … but … I’m the regional general manager!” Thelma took off.
In fact the only business leader I ever knew who had a decent explanation for his executive drive was H. Ross Perot, who said in an interview with me, “There is no higher calling than providing employment for others.” A bit sanctimonious, but that’s Ross.
As I try to work out my bottom line in this complex of good and evil, I have to come down on the side of the business professionals, whatever their shortcomings as people. No other “calling” demands so much of a person. No other calling chews up and spits out hard-working individuals like the competitive struggles of business. No other calling gives so many men and women premature heart disease.
At times like these, I try to focus on the people who make businesses perform within the law, and I can only regret that the process destroys much of the originality they started with. Maybe there is no other way.
© 2002 by Michael
Johnson. The illustrations are from IMSI's Master Clips Collection,
1895 Francisco Blvd. E., San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA.
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