In the capitalist cycle, consumers plays a small but noticeable role: through their purchasing patterns, they determine what is developed for sale, its location and means of assembly & distribution, where it is sold, its method of use, and how it is disposed when obsolete. This customer-focused cycle began with the Age of Marketing and it dawned when someone asked, "why don't we listen to the buyer for a change?"
The marketing concept worked very well for many years. Manufacturers listening to the focus-group mob psychology of the customer is why we pay less for better products. But something happened along the way. Instead of making purchases based on a calculus of quality and price, i.e. healthy competition leading to improved value, the overriding factor became price and price alone.
As a result, we have perceptually raised the standard of living through purchasing power while keeping real wages at 1980 levels - in effect, we are erasing the middle class yet everyone can still afford a houseful of stuff. The monster that was created got a will of its own, and shoppers were transformed into voracious, conveyor-belt consumers.
Consumer demands for ever cheaper stuff - and their concomitant loss of manufacturing jobs, tax revenues, and the 10X economic multiplier effect - are a key driver leading to a greater separation of wealth in the U.S., as determined by the Gini coefficient. From a figure of 40.3 in 1980 to 46.6 in 2008, this number indicates that the spread between the Haves and the Never Will Haves is widening like the Las Vegas odds of St. Louis winning the Super Bowl in 2010.
The rich, particularly Wall Street gamblers, are handy scapegoats, but ironically it is consumers and their insatiable desire to own stuff that is the root cause. The obvious question is "why would someone sell out their neighbor, town, or state just to own stuff? And what is this 'stuff' anyway?" Psychologists will certainly posit human-behavior theories, but I believe that this is a matter of high energy physics.
Ever since Einstein figured out that the fabric of space-time could be ripped like a cheap prom dress in the back seat of a rusted Buick, physicists have been working feverishly to find a theory that unifies all forces in the universe, what they call the Grand Unified Theory (GUT). The Large Hadron Collider at CERN is coming up to speed with the express purpose of finding the Higgs boson, the gravity or "God" particle that will supposedly explain why we have mass. And I thought it was because of high fructose corn syrup, saturated fat, and 500 cable TV channels.
In contrast to the real scientists, I have a theory that renders the GUT as useless as that term paper I just sold student #472-14-4916 titled "Probabilistic Outcomes Of Imbibed Fermented Agricultural Products and Coital Activity." But first, what are these forces?
The strong force is akin to being trapped in a mosh pit with experimental chickens, each equipped with a stainless steel beak and fed nothing but human growth hormone, anabolic steroids and espresso. Not much reach, but up close those psychotic little buggers can pack a wallop.
The weak force is like trying to get a drink at a biker bar when the Hawaiian Tropic tour bus breaks down. You can yell from across the room, but the only thing that is going to materialize is a fist with “L-O-V-E” tattooed across its knuckles.
Electro-magnetic forces are why your iPod can recreate the Metallica-Kiss Battle of the Bands concert, causing your blood-soaked ear buds to cake permanently in your auditory canals.
And gravity is why Pamela Anderson will join the circus freak show in a few years.
But how can we unite these forces and, more importantly, why do they result in the downfall of the American Empire? The current theories - relativity, quantum and string - are all off track. The force that unifies all, the ultimate common denominator, is crap. Also known by its Greek name 'quark,' crap is the underlying structure that binds everything ever produced by human beings. You start with basic crap, and if you apply enough energy, you get stuff. When stuff is exposed to an intense intellectual and capital investment beam, you get quality goods regardless of their origin. But without the added energy factors, all you have is crap.
Some factories in China churn out crap on giant assembly lines, where, interestingly enough, the workers are also paid crap. Flea markets, antique malls, garage sales and eBay ensure that crap never dies. But the black hole of crap, the giant vortex from whose event horizon no pre-consumer debris can escape, is WalMart. From the zombie greeter, kept alive with Jolt cola, energy bars and a bug zapper, to the Happy Face, leveling whole towns with a destructive force that makes a D-T fusion reaction look benign, WalMart has compressed crap to neutron-star density and created new forms of life in the process. Having achieved the super-symmetry that eludes high-energy physicists in the laboratory, consumers pay squat for crap, workers get paid crap for selling squat, and in Bentonville, Arkansas, crap runs squat and vice versa.
There are those who say this is chaos, but chaos theory is predicated on the model of deterministic non-linearity, where there is a constant and dynamic change in life. Chaos says a butterfly flaps its wings in Beijing and the weather changes in New York. Crap theory, on the other hand, operates under the assumption that everything, no matter how beautiful and unique, can eventually be turned into crap. Kill the butterfly, encase it in plastic, and sell it for $2.99, Aisle Six, next to the talking Jesus dolls that say, “Your blood shall boil and your eyes will melt, non-believer. Let’s play a game!”
Friday, January 22, 2010
And The Meek Shall Rule
We are deemed to be in an age of specialization, one in which even the venerable MBA is viewed as being too general. Consultancies and corporations are now seeking Masters in Management, Finance, Marketing, or Accounting because they are seeking people who know more about less. Not only is this contrary to the very notion of innovation, I will argue that the MBA is not general enough to bring maximum value in a rapidly changing world. In business school, we are taught to study Jack Welch as the epitome of management, but William Shakespeare knew just as much about strategy, management, and human nature. Business ethics courses invariably examine Enron as the ultimate violator, but MBA students would be better served to begin with Machiavelli. And who could teach more about goal obsession than Herman Melville? What follows is my essay calling for more liberal arts education, not less, in the process of crafting the modern, global businessperson.
Even while engineering schools are working overtime to churn out massively protruding left hemispheres with withered frontal lobes, the Information Age is winding down faster than Cher’s latest Botox treatment. When business schools talk about “thinking outside the box” they envision a bigger box, but marketing says, “blue with white racing stripes this time.” Mass communications schools are cranking out talking heads that sound like HAL singing “Daisy” when they are unplugged from the media conglomerate mother ship. Pure science still plays an important role, but let’s face it, they make me nervous with all this chatter about restructuring DNA. We’ll scribble Fermat’s Last Theorem on a box of Girl Scout cookies, throw it into the Biosphere, and communicate over the videophone for the next hundred years or so. And let’s not even discuss the lawyers.
Who will lead this mutant army into the 21st century? What creature can rise from the pit of ignorance and harness the skills that will define society in the next Age? We shall call them “Hew-Men” and they shall be carved from the trunk of a classic liberal arts education. Built on a foundation of arts, literature, philosophy, language, history, political science, and other humanities, they shall define what we are becoming because they know where we have been. Like Newton, they will see further into the future by standing on the shoulders of giants. But what will this brave new world hold for Hew-Man (and his publicist)?
The Information Age will join the Industrial Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment in the annals of history and none too soon. Our overwhelming specializations have triggered a wave of outsourcing, to the point where a twelve-year-old Romanian orphan has replaced Data and is now running the Starship Enterprise. Thank you very much geeks, we now have computers and the Internet; everything after that will be incremental: “See, if you move the mouse over her sweater, it disappears!” After twenty years of remission, I can almost feel my acne swelling to the surface. Faster processors, bigger hard drives and more bandwidth just means that porn will be broadcast in 3D SenSurround. Business majors will ogle at the development and lay out viral marketing product placement subscription-based models that never need to make a profit, as long as the accountants play ball. 2D faces will chatter about its greatness, failing to mention that their parent company holds a 30% stake. And the lawyers will press their best “perp-walk” suits in anticipation of the whole thing going nuclear. All the while, the world is emerging from its chrysalis and a new age is almost upon us. Unlike the stranglehold that logic has held over us ever since Brattain and Bardeen were poking each other with cat’s whiskers, the next evolution will be conceptual, driven by pure right brain creativity.
The upcoming Age of Abstraction demands pedal-to-the-metal transcendental understanding of the Big Picture and only a broad-based education in the classics will prepare our feeble minds to see the enormity of What Can Be. This new period of social development offers more than simple opportunity for those pursuing arts and humanities, it is a rock-solid guarantee against outsourcing and having to move to the Black Hole of Calcutta to keep your job. Unless you want to move to the Black Hole of Calcutta, in which case your liberal arts education, particularly the philosophy of Camus, will come in quite handy on a daily basis.
The days of the left brain are numbered and rightly so. Let’s face it – massive left brain trauma can now be repaired with a 2 GHz Xeon processor, an iPod and car battery. However, the right brain isn’t quite so simple – not even Deep Blue can comprehend that the Meaning of Everything is 42. When armed with a liberal arts background steeped in the classics, you don’t just think outside the box, you realize that there wasn’t a box to begin with. Try and get a machine to do that! This is not to say that we shall all lounge in a state of perpetual daydream, wearing togas and spouting profundities like a bulemic at the Golden Corral.
Internet-time has sped everything up to a techno-frazzle pace. We don’t have the luxury of whittling a round disk from a block of stone and proclaiming, “I shall call it ‘Wheel.’” There have been a few useful developments in humanity over the last 14,000 years and, to keep us from repeating the past, they can only be instilled with a liberal arts education. Once that knowledge is acquired, the future can be envisioned and attained because the student ingrained in classic liberal arts has also been taught how to think. Autonomously and without umbilical cords. O.K., not exactly independent thought because we are all carrying a lot of psychological baggage, but our student has been taught how to examine their familial Samsonite and deal with it.
Globalization is turning the world into a melting pot that will positively overwhelm anyone that is not culturally literate. If you turn Billy Bob loose at the Jakarta office, soon enough he’ll be naked prey, running through the jungles of Java with Borneo headhunters on his tail. Without cultural literacy, he’ll become Darwinian road kill. Liberal arts gives us the patience to engage in exotic rituals beyond the ceremonial StarbuxMochaFrappuchino. Education in the humanities provides the wisdom to know when you’ve had too much cachasa, and the understanding that she’s either too young, too expensive, or both.
As our society becomes ever more complex, the maintenance of language and linguistics is crucial to our definition of reality. Is he speaking in Ebonics or does he have Ebola? Is reality TV really reality, really? Answers to these age-old riddles can only be approached with a solid background in liberal arts. Remember, whoever defines our culture will control it.
In his polemical 1886 work, “Beyond Good and Evil,” Nietzsche defined the uber-mensch, a superman that will transcend traditional dualisms and exercise his will to power. Only those with a liberal arts education know that Nietzsche went barking mad, like a rat in a tin outhouse on a hot, summer day. The rest will kneel before the icon of Liberal Arts and bow to its ascendancy. At the very least, we’ll make good conversation at the water cooler.
Even while engineering schools are working overtime to churn out massively protruding left hemispheres with withered frontal lobes, the Information Age is winding down faster than Cher’s latest Botox treatment. When business schools talk about “thinking outside the box” they envision a bigger box, but marketing says, “blue with white racing stripes this time.” Mass communications schools are cranking out talking heads that sound like HAL singing “Daisy” when they are unplugged from the media conglomerate mother ship. Pure science still plays an important role, but let’s face it, they make me nervous with all this chatter about restructuring DNA. We’ll scribble Fermat’s Last Theorem on a box of Girl Scout cookies, throw it into the Biosphere, and communicate over the videophone for the next hundred years or so. And let’s not even discuss the lawyers.
Who will lead this mutant army into the 21st century? What creature can rise from the pit of ignorance and harness the skills that will define society in the next Age? We shall call them “Hew-Men” and they shall be carved from the trunk of a classic liberal arts education. Built on a foundation of arts, literature, philosophy, language, history, political science, and other humanities, they shall define what we are becoming because they know where we have been. Like Newton, they will see further into the future by standing on the shoulders of giants. But what will this brave new world hold for Hew-Man (and his publicist)?
The Information Age will join the Industrial Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment in the annals of history and none too soon. Our overwhelming specializations have triggered a wave of outsourcing, to the point where a twelve-year-old Romanian orphan has replaced Data and is now running the Starship Enterprise. Thank you very much geeks, we now have computers and the Internet; everything after that will be incremental: “See, if you move the mouse over her sweater, it disappears!” After twenty years of remission, I can almost feel my acne swelling to the surface. Faster processors, bigger hard drives and more bandwidth just means that porn will be broadcast in 3D SenSurround. Business majors will ogle at the development and lay out viral marketing product placement subscription-based models that never need to make a profit, as long as the accountants play ball. 2D faces will chatter about its greatness, failing to mention that their parent company holds a 30% stake. And the lawyers will press their best “perp-walk” suits in anticipation of the whole thing going nuclear. All the while, the world is emerging from its chrysalis and a new age is almost upon us. Unlike the stranglehold that logic has held over us ever since Brattain and Bardeen were poking each other with cat’s whiskers, the next evolution will be conceptual, driven by pure right brain creativity.
The upcoming Age of Abstraction demands pedal-to-the-metal transcendental understanding of the Big Picture and only a broad-based education in the classics will prepare our feeble minds to see the enormity of What Can Be. This new period of social development offers more than simple opportunity for those pursuing arts and humanities, it is a rock-solid guarantee against outsourcing and having to move to the Black Hole of Calcutta to keep your job. Unless you want to move to the Black Hole of Calcutta, in which case your liberal arts education, particularly the philosophy of Camus, will come in quite handy on a daily basis.
The days of the left brain are numbered and rightly so. Let’s face it – massive left brain trauma can now be repaired with a 2 GHz Xeon processor, an iPod and car battery. However, the right brain isn’t quite so simple – not even Deep Blue can comprehend that the Meaning of Everything is 42. When armed with a liberal arts background steeped in the classics, you don’t just think outside the box, you realize that there wasn’t a box to begin with. Try and get a machine to do that! This is not to say that we shall all lounge in a state of perpetual daydream, wearing togas and spouting profundities like a bulemic at the Golden Corral.
Internet-time has sped everything up to a techno-frazzle pace. We don’t have the luxury of whittling a round disk from a block of stone and proclaiming, “I shall call it ‘Wheel.’” There have been a few useful developments in humanity over the last 14,000 years and, to keep us from repeating the past, they can only be instilled with a liberal arts education. Once that knowledge is acquired, the future can be envisioned and attained because the student ingrained in classic liberal arts has also been taught how to think. Autonomously and without umbilical cords. O.K., not exactly independent thought because we are all carrying a lot of psychological baggage, but our student has been taught how to examine their familial Samsonite and deal with it.
Globalization is turning the world into a melting pot that will positively overwhelm anyone that is not culturally literate. If you turn Billy Bob loose at the Jakarta office, soon enough he’ll be naked prey, running through the jungles of Java with Borneo headhunters on his tail. Without cultural literacy, he’ll become Darwinian road kill. Liberal arts gives us the patience to engage in exotic rituals beyond the ceremonial StarbuxMochaFrappuchino. Education in the humanities provides the wisdom to know when you’ve had too much cachasa, and the understanding that she’s either too young, too expensive, or both.
As our society becomes ever more complex, the maintenance of language and linguistics is crucial to our definition of reality. Is he speaking in Ebonics or does he have Ebola? Is reality TV really reality, really? Answers to these age-old riddles can only be approached with a solid background in liberal arts. Remember, whoever defines our culture will control it.
In his polemical 1886 work, “Beyond Good and Evil,” Nietzsche defined the uber-mensch, a superman that will transcend traditional dualisms and exercise his will to power. Only those with a liberal arts education know that Nietzsche went barking mad, like a rat in a tin outhouse on a hot, summer day. The rest will kneel before the icon of Liberal Arts and bow to its ascendancy. At the very least, we’ll make good conversation at the water cooler.
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Social Responsibility and Goldman Sachs
Refreshingly serendipitous to my recent post about social responsibility is the Goldman Sachs earnings announcement today, in which Blankfein and his metaphorically obese band of sus financica agreed to back away from the compensation trough and give the leftover, a respectable $519 million, to their donor-advised charity, Goldman Sachs Gives.
Sure, it took the threat of being burned alive, dragged over barbed wire, and disemboweled in a prime-time public spectacle hosted by Simon Cowell to evoke such generosity, but this may be yet another indication of the advancement of civilization through corporate action. Time, in the form of 10-Qs and 10-Ks, will tell.
Sure, it took the threat of being burned alive, dragged over barbed wire, and disemboweled in a prime-time public spectacle hosted by Simon Cowell to evoke such generosity, but this may be yet another indication of the advancement of civilization through corporate action. Time, in the form of 10-Qs and 10-Ks, will tell.
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
The Social Responsibility of Corporations
There is no shortage of MBA professors who decry the corporate use of profits, no matter how insignificant, as contributions to the welfare of society or protection of the planet. They cling to the belief that profits are the province of shareholders, and that shareholders alone should decide where and how their money is to be spent. This view of capitalism is easily embraced by fundamentalists who view Change the way the Amish view the Consumer Electronics Show, and it is as defunct as a teetotaler at the Tailhook convention.
The rhetorical question usually posed is, "why should corporate entities assist society at all? Don't they exist strictly to generate shareholder wealth?" Actually, first and foremost, corporations exist to absolve management and shareholders from the fallout of products like asbestos, Vioxx, and the July Fourth Spectacular known as the Ford Pinto. Any wealth that is ultimately distributed to shareholders is an afterthought; that is, after management thought of taking its cut first.
The real question is, "why should corporations be exempt from the societal evolution that has taken us on a journey from being short-lived sole proprietors trying to poke a rat with a sharpened stick to a global web of connections and exchanges, separated at most by only six degrees of relatedness?" Organisms and organizations alike either evolve or they die, and capitalism is on the cusp of the next wave, the understanding that it is a part of a changing society and must act as a responsible citizen or it will be regulated into oblivion. This is the super-heated core of the partisan divide in our country right now. The fundamentalists want neither responsibility nor regulation, but a choice will have to be made. Regulation can only set off a complex game of hide-and-seek or pass-the-buck, with all manner of deleterious yet unintended consequences. Responsible behavior requires that you simply walk toward the light in spite of your damaged ego and inflamed mortal desires.
Social welfare can be broadly divided into two jukebox selections: 1) Nickelback, and 2) George Harrison. If Everyone Cared is when you either dive onto a hand grenade to save your buddies, jump onto a subway platform to rescue a complete stranger, clean up an oil-soaked bird, or donate funds to provide food, shelter, and security to strangers in need. Compassion is the guiding principle; the only difference between these events is the amount of danger you experience in the assist. But why help strangers at all, let alone risk your own life in the process? Joseph Campbell, renowned professor of mythology, told Bill Moyers in a 1987 interview that the heroic moment is achieved because the rescuer realizes that we are all from the same source - to save the life of a stranger is to save your own life, and by extension, the lives of all humankind. By "source," Campbell was not referring to genetic material, that ever-weakening tractor beam emitted by our simian ancestors, but to that miracle known as the spark of life, eternal self, soul, or the vibrational energy of a "string," depending on metaphysicality of your viewpoint. Simultaneously, we are each unique and yet bound together like custom embroidery in the same silk jacket that says "When I Die I'll Go to Heaven, Because I Spent My Time In Hell Getting An MBA." Certain individuals throughout history understood this (Jesus, Gandhi, and Mary Baker Eddy, to name a few), people clearly ahead of their time.
Nowadays, these acts of individual heroism are becoming more commonplace, indicating a shift from "every man for himself" toward "we are the world and the world is us." This is not to disparage the power of competition in the marketplace, but to reinforce the notion that competition should be based on turning your customers into a horde of Grateful Dead fans while you are holding tickets to the "Jerry Garcia - Back from the Dead" tour instead of invoking the negative BusinessSpeak of psuedo-military or sports conquest. Stop reading Sun Tzu, because unlike gladiatorial competition, exceeding customer expectations is not a zero-sum game; all can do it in their own way.
The rhetorical question usually posed is, "why should corporate entities assist society at all? Don't they exist strictly to generate shareholder wealth?" Actually, first and foremost, corporations exist to absolve management and shareholders from the fallout of products like asbestos, Vioxx, and the July Fourth Spectacular known as the Ford Pinto. Any wealth that is ultimately distributed to shareholders is an afterthought; that is, after management thought of taking its cut first.
The real question is, "why should corporations be exempt from the societal evolution that has taken us on a journey from being short-lived sole proprietors trying to poke a rat with a sharpened stick to a global web of connections and exchanges, separated at most by only six degrees of relatedness?" Organisms and organizations alike either evolve or they die, and capitalism is on the cusp of the next wave, the understanding that it is a part of a changing society and must act as a responsible citizen or it will be regulated into oblivion. This is the super-heated core of the partisan divide in our country right now. The fundamentalists want neither responsibility nor regulation, but a choice will have to be made. Regulation can only set off a complex game of hide-and-seek or pass-the-buck, with all manner of deleterious yet unintended consequences. Responsible behavior requires that you simply walk toward the light in spite of your damaged ego and inflamed mortal desires.
Social welfare can be broadly divided into two jukebox selections: 1) Nickelback, and 2) George Harrison. If Everyone Cared is when you either dive onto a hand grenade to save your buddies, jump onto a subway platform to rescue a complete stranger, clean up an oil-soaked bird, or donate funds to provide food, shelter, and security to strangers in need. Compassion is the guiding principle; the only difference between these events is the amount of danger you experience in the assist. But why help strangers at all, let alone risk your own life in the process? Joseph Campbell, renowned professor of mythology, told Bill Moyers in a 1987 interview that the heroic moment is achieved because the rescuer realizes that we are all from the same source - to save the life of a stranger is to save your own life, and by extension, the lives of all humankind. By "source," Campbell was not referring to genetic material, that ever-weakening tractor beam emitted by our simian ancestors, but to that miracle known as the spark of life, eternal self, soul, or the vibrational energy of a "string," depending on metaphysicality of your viewpoint. Simultaneously, we are each unique and yet bound together like custom embroidery in the same silk jacket that says "When I Die I'll Go to Heaven, Because I Spent My Time In Hell Getting An MBA." Certain individuals throughout history understood this (Jesus, Gandhi, and Mary Baker Eddy, to name a few), people clearly ahead of their time.
Nowadays, these acts of individual heroism are becoming more commonplace, indicating a shift from "every man for himself" toward "we are the world and the world is us." This is not to disparage the power of competition in the marketplace, but to reinforce the notion that competition should be based on turning your customers into a horde of Grateful Dead fans while you are holding tickets to the "Jerry Garcia - Back from the Dead" tour instead of invoking the negative BusinessSpeak of psuedo-military or sports conquest. Stop reading Sun Tzu, because unlike gladiatorial competition, exceeding customer expectations is not a zero-sum game; all can do it in their own way.
Further, corporations, recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court as having the full protective rights of individuals, should also bear the responsibilities of citizenship as well. As the preamble of the U.S. Constitution reminds us:
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
There are those who argue that forming a more perfect union, establishing justice, and promoting the general welfare, which scholars interpret the founders' meaning to signify health and happiness, is taken care of through taxation. But taxes don't support branding; this tag line just doesn't work: "Acme Corporation - Making Your World Better Because We Pay Taxes." Besides, fiscal responsibility demands that each company dictate where and how its social capital is spent instead of by politicians with personal agendas and backroom tradeoffs.
A quick trip around the constellation of opinion pundits inhabiting mass media would indicate that humans are generally pleased with living in the savage past. But this hypocrisy is only natural because evolutionary change inspires vociferous resistance from the previous generation, an impedance that is 100% correlated with cash. The Salem witch trials were a reaction of the Puritan ethos losing power to a frontier lifestyle. Joseph McCarthy's HUAC hearings were a reaction to the progressive movement of the entertainment industry. Glen Beck is a reaction of the moneyed elite losing ground to a zeitgeist that proclaims, "citizens should have equal access to good health, education, and opportunity," which would be a realization of the values found in the Preamble. Screaming like lambs to the slaughter, fundamentalists cannot stop the future and the future will surely silence them. Anyone for some fava beans with their mutton?
Tomorrow's ground has already been broken and construction is progressing. Recognizing and acting on their duties as privileged citizens, The Body Shop, Ben & Jerry's, and Patagonia - all labeled as left-wing crypto-pinko corporations - started the surge. Today, Kroger, Bristol-Myers-Squibb, Best Buy, and even WalMart are on the list of the most philanthropic companies (by percentage of revenue no less!). From rare to de rigueur, more and more companies are diving onto the tracks to save perfect strangers. Even if they couldn't find an altruistic bone with a CAT scan, it's what their customers expect of them and it's good business. After all, a life saved today will become a loyal customer tomorrow.
Helping someone to exist demonstrates an advanced understanding of the human condition, but it only maintains the status quo. Put another quarter in the jukebox; Got My Mind Set On You is when you teach someone to read, give them a book, and then watch them advance quantum theory by a generation. It is the means to break the inter-generational cycle of ignorance and its foundation is the belief that everyone should be enabled to realize their potential.
There was a street hustler in Cleveland who would have found a cure for cancer, but a bus hit her before she received a chance. There was a boy living at the Cabrini-Green housing development in Chicago who was shot before he could win the Nobel Prize in Economics. This is not some parallel universe, but the here-now reality. Poverty, with its concomitant lack of opportunity and increased violence, is not just misery for those wearing its cloak - it is a waste of valuable productive resources. For those of you still wandering the halls while looking for the Department of Eugenics, please read carefully. Intelligence and productivity are not correlated with race, ethnicity, gender, age, sexual orientation, or the least of all, inbred wealth. This idea is reflected by the paraphrased words of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor in her opinion regarding Grutter v. Bollinger:
"In order to cultivate a set of leaders with legitimacy in the eyes of the citizenry, it is necessary that the path to leadership be visibly open to talented and qualified individuals of every race and ethnicity. All members of our heterogeneous society must have confidence in the openness and integrity of the educational institutions that provide this training ... Access to education must be inclusive of talented and qualified individuals of every race and ethnicity, so that all members of our heterogeneous society may participate in the educational institutions that provide the training and education necessary to succeed in America."
Corporations have an obligation to cultivate those resources and apply them to achieve new products, markets, and maximum profitability; when the person succeeds, so does the firm. Many companies now have scholarship funds, realizing that wisely spending cash on educating the inner city youth, the legal immigrant, the rural poor, or the once-middle class is not a charitable donation. It is a capital investment with a long-term time horizon. As with any investment, the payback is a risk. Some will achieve their potential in low-level service jobs and the internal rate of return may come in under the cost of capital, but that's not such a bad thing. A bad thing would be to invest billions in collaterized debt obligations, lose the whole bundle, and crash the economy.
This is not just some squabble over ideological differences. This is a battle for the future of our species and our planet. For either bad or good, corporations will play a critical role. I propose that corporate citizens must use a portion of their resources to defend humanity, not destroy it. It's only good business.
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