Tag Archives: power

Why MBA students should study Political Economy

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Green Mountain Socialist senator Bernie Sanders puts it very plainly in a recent CNN interview with Wolf Blitzer: any talk of “free enterprise” or “the market economy” when it comes to the largest Wall Street banks and many other large corporations/industries is empty rhetoric.  In this realm of political-commercial oligarchy, decisions about leadership, investment, products and services, organizational development, etc. are not made under the logic of market competition but instead through complex relational jockeying among top executives and investors aimed at expanding and perpetuating their oligarchy, especially via their influence over politicians, regulatory agencies, and the courts.

They have captured their regulators (in institutional economic terms) and, in the interests of both American democracy and our long-term economic prosperity as a people, need to be busted up and re-regulated.

Thank you, Bernie, for your clear articulation of this.  (Goes to show what remaining independent does for one’s ability to speak honestly and frankly about the affairs of the nation.)

There’s nothing especially noteworthy about this situation – China runs this way, Russia runs this way, the Vatican runs this way, Machiavelli lived and breathed this logic, and so did the senate and consuls in ancient Rome – but America remains committed (last time I checked) to popular, representative democracy as the way to secure the general Welfare and the Blessings of Liberty (preamble to the US Constitution).  As long as this commitment stands, circumstances such as those of the present simply cannot be allowed.  Look at what happens.

Next week, Sanders will be introducing legislation to force a breakup of the six largest banks in the US.

By the way, if the concentration of influence, capture of government, and failure of both markets and democracy is a problem in the financial sector, what about other industries?  On Tuesday, in his coolly received lunchtime keynote at the VBSR conference in Burlington, Vermont, Seventh Generation CEO John Replogle marveled at the fact that Wal-Mart’s economy was now as large as the GDPs of the poorest 161 nations combined.  Um, concentrated much?  Where is that going to lead…?

MBA students of the world, ask yourselves: is it your lot to do the bidding of the few, the influential, and the democratically unaccountable – and hope a few crumbs fall from their table that put you slightly ahead of every other laboring schmuck in the disintegrating middle class – or should you be able to freely take risks and throw your energy, creativity, and skills into the ring with others like you and create the good society and the sustainable prosperity that you and your community deserve?  Think about that question.  Get involved.  Study political economy.  Because Sanders is quite accurate in both his diagnosis and his proposed treatment, and whether he succeeds or not, you need to understand why, for the sake of your own humanity.

Saturday follow-up to “Truth or Duh” – “Americans for Prosperity” Revealed for What they Are

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Thanks to Gary Flomenhoft at Vermont Commons for the link to this article, “Koch Political Group Brags About Bullying GOP Lawmakers Into Denying Climate Science.”

Here, Koch Brothers-financed Americans for Prosperity president Tim Phillips boasts about AFP’s successes in driving Washington politicians away from support for climate change mitigation and green energy, and into the sleazy embrace of climate change denial. This proves a key point of my blog post yesterday: a dominant majority of politicians, economic policy makers, and (MBA-bedecked) financial industry people are currently standing in the way of reasonable federal energy policy, support for progressive state energy policy, and private investment to develop a post-fossil economy. There is so much money and influence at stake that these puppets are selling their own integrity, scientific truth, country, and children’s futures down the river.

Really, it’s that simple now. For such an outrageous betrayal of their credibility, respected positions in society, education, the public communication spectrum, and civic duty, the likes of Tim Phillips and others named in the above article should not be surprised if mobs demand that they be dragged out of their fancy offices, tarred, feathered, and set out in stocks in the locations recently vacated by occupationists in major cities, and have eggs, rotten vegetables, excrement, and other appropriate matter thrown at them, because what they are inflicting on this nation is no better.

There is no other “theory” that works here.  It’s purely and simply:

Huge Power + Threats to Huge Power = Huge Efforts at All Costs to Preserve Power

Unfortunately for us, this huge power derives from the fossil fuel complex, which is bad for all of us in balance.

Don’t they teach them that stuff in MBA programs?

OccupyMBA!

Narcissism, fragmentation, loneliness, and death

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The culture of the Master of Business Administration is the culture of narcissism, fragmentation, loneliness, and death… unless it’s tethered by an active, caring commitment to community, to stakeholders, and to a reverence for the great natural and human systems in which we all live.  To say anything less harsh is to succumb to moral passivity, to write yourself a ticket to stand by and not do enough, whatever good you’re doing.

Less unsustainability is not more sustainability, and modern business is starting from a pretty deep level of “un-“, despite a few bright green lights here and there.

It took me three long weeks to summon the clarity and resolve to write the above (after knowing for more than a quarter-century that it had to be written).

Why the tortured hesitation?  All I had done was put out “OccupyMBA” in the warm Occupy Wall Street spirit of early November, with a clever teaser about the arch pokes I would soon be making at conventional MBA programs.  The next move was supposed to be easy.  Directing an MBA program is my job, and ours is a deliberate breakaway from the conventional.  We’re actually doing caring, committed, reverent B-school in an authentic fashion on a routine basis now, four years after our launch.  It’s never perfect, but it’s getting better and better, and it’s no scam.

Where the torture lay was in the hideous emergence of the oppressive whole from a set of seemingly innocuous parts.  There’s no doubt that the dominant global MBA paradigm is fully aligned with the swollen financial sector, each new financial bubble, corporatism, money-tainted politics, consumerism, climate change denial, neocolonialism, and other strands of the rope strangling our world.

Do you see B-school deans out sleeping with the occupationists, or their students getting pepper-sprayed as they protest the future-debasing nature of discounted cash flow analysis?  I haven’t.

Yet, charge a business school academic with the perpetuation of unsustainability and one is likely to hear the defiant scoff that business administration consists of concepts, tools, and practices that are value-neutral, to be evaluated based on how they are used, by whom, to what ends.  One person might put their finance to work developing derivatives that understate risk and cheat investors out of millions.  A classmate might use the same knowledge to build microcredit programs for poor communities.  We’re just honest vendors of neutral knowledge, say the conventional B-schools – research-based “best” practices – and what the world does with it is as diverse and morally ambiguous as the world itself.  Throwing in an ethics course might bias graduates toward the right choices, come to think of it!  Or even an MBA Oath!

That’s nonsense.  It’s worse than that.  It’s evil.

A perceptual challenge with dominant paradigms is that they truly are synergistic and emergent, and vanish from detection at the level of their parts, which are usually human beings and small groups, with their human personalities, warmth, humor, sympathetic non-verbal communication, apparent decency, vulnerability, mortality, and (usually) naïve unawareness of their role in the reproduction and maintenance of the paradigm.  Look too closely, and you see nothing.  When I visit my alma MBA-mater, Wharton, I see comfortable study spaces, friendly faces, stimulating conversations, and nice nooks for a coffee and laptop session under a leafy ficus tree.  I don’t see a system of oppression slowly grinding down the Earth’s life-support systems and moving wealth across the planet from the many poor to the few very rich.  But let’s face it: that’s exactly what’s happening, and Wharton is one of many places where they/we train.

That’s the truth we need to hold on tight to, and speak to power.  There are solutions.  Just because truths vanish upon close inspection doesn’t mean that they will not re-emerge when we pull back.  That is one of the most joyous, heart-rending, tragic, awfully righteous contributions of the OWS movement.  The macro-obvious lack of economic justice and economic democracy is pointed out, transcending all the traps that would suck you down below the level where you know or care.  OWS is a drumbeat now.  I hope it doesn’t falter, because we need to stay aware of the larger truth, even as we devote ourselves to practical change in the local and the micro and the immediate.

OccupyMBA.