At First Glance Archive
Welcome to At First Glance. Here you will find quick takes by the CLAL faculty on new books, articles and movies, new music and fashions and on cultural trends more generally. Here we will keep you abreast of what we, in our journeys around the country, find most interesting and notable in Jewish and general culture. And, in just a few sentences, we will try to indicate why. Every other week you will find something new on this page.
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Sympathy for the Devil?
A Review of Jeffrey E. Garten's The Mind of the CEO
(New York: Basic Books, 2001)
By Robert Rabinowitz
The list of places associated with anti-globalization protests, often
violent, continues to grow: first Seattle, then Prague, Washington D.C., Davos and Quebec
among others, and now Genoa. The
violence– and the barricades and exclusion zones designed to insulate negotiators
from anti-globalization protesters that are the violence’s corollary– are
eloquent testaments to mutual fear. Business
people and government officials are anxious that the protesters threaten the prosperity
that globalization is creating. Protesters,
by contrast, are alarmed by a process that seems to license corporations, especially
trans-national corporations, to profit from the eradication of cultural diversity, the
liquidation of natural resources and the erosion of workers’ rights. At its most simplistic and Manichean, the objects
of the protesters’ rebukes are the “evil” and “greedy”
corporations and business-people who – along with their lackeys in government –
use their power relentlessly to pursue private interests at the cost of the increasingly
disenfranchised masses. But what if there is
no such clear locus of power at the heart of globalization? What ethical implications would that have for the
protesters’ strategies?
These provocative questions are raised by Jeffrey Garten’s
perceptive book, The Mind of the C.E.O. Garten – former investment banker, trade
official in the first Clinton administration and now Dean of the Yale School of Management
– interviewed 40 CEOs of major trans-national corporations to discover whether they
“are leading the third industrial revolution, being carried by it or being consumed
by it” (p. 38).
According to Garten, there are two intertwined trends that explain why CEOs are in danger of “being consumed”. The rise of the Internet is forcing companies to construct and dismantle complex supply chains with great speed and accuracy in response to shifting demand, blurring firms’ boundaries and making them ever more interdependent. This requires exhaustive attention to building relationships, to ensuring efficiency all the way through the supply chain and to very careful monitoring of the vicissitudes and vagaries of demand. Failure can very quickly leave a company high and dry. Globalization is also forcing companies to struggle with the implications of becoming truly multi-national. Trans-national corporations need to create unified corporate cultures within their immense organizations so that they can effectively service global customers and employ their competitive advantage of size and reach. At the same time, however, they need to create the genuinely multi-cultural and decentralized ethos necessary to increase their responsiveness to the demands of consumers in diverse markets.
These new, unprecedented and complex trends are unfolding in a time when the pace of change is mounting and markets are becoming increasingly fierce in punishing failure to meet expectations. (Three of the CEOs interviewed lost their jobs before publication and the position of several more is currently in jeopardy.) It is therefore no surprise that CEOs might be concerned exclusively with the economic survival of their companies rather than taking broader societal leadership roles in response to globalization. Garten sees this failure as the CEOs’ “biggest blind spot”.
Garten gives several reasons why CEOs should take on broader leadership roles. These include maximizing prospects for finding and keeping customers and employees, and the need to supplement the efforts of governments and international bodies that lack the talent and resources to fill the “regulatory vacuum” at the international level. But perhaps the key reason why CEOs should take on broader leadership roles is that unless “CEOs play a leading role in fashioning sensible pro-market arrangements, there will either be increasing chaos in world markets or ill-conceived government regulations– or, most likely, some combination of both… [and] they and their companies risk becoming targets of resentment for groups and citizens who see globalization as a negative trend” (The Mind of the CEO, pp. 192-3).
Garten does not discuss the role of business in undermining the resources and the self-confidence of public sectors to address major social issues. Nor does he suggest that corporations’ social responsibility follows from the profit they derive from the public and social goods on which they depend. Garten makes his case from a more pragmatic perspective. Nevertheless, the list does carry some hints to a broader sense of moral obligation, distinguishing Garten from another prominent commentator on globalization, George Soros. Soros claims that financial markets render irrelevant the morality of their participants and that corporate employees are duty-bound to serve only corporate financial interests (Tikkun March/April 2001, p. 72). Garten cannot accept Soros’ distinction between personal and professional moral responsibility. This becomes clear when he discusses the sort of leadership roles that CEOs might play. He challenges them to go beyond philanthropy, public relations campaigns and lobbying for self-interest.
“I am proposing something more far-reaching: CEOs ought to think more broadly about what true business leadership means today. Of course they need to run their companies well, but they ought also to realize that they should take more responsibility for shaping the environment in which they and everyone else can prosper. They should be corporate chief executives, but also business statesmen. The wider mission… includes helping to define the role big corporations ought to play in solving many of our social problems before they become too severe to handle and before multinational companies become scapegoats for causing the problems in the first place” (The Mind of the CEO, p. 17).
Garten found limited evidence, however, of sustained thought from CEOs about playing such roles and little enthusiasm for going beyond what they were already doing. “[T]hey seem uncomfortable with the growing pressures for global corporations to go where governments now tread. They argue that they have enough concerns in running their companies; they do not want to be held accountable for policies they may not be able to implement and goals they may not be able to achieve. Nor do they want to be caught in the crosshairs of political controversy” (p. 192).
Garten’s research has significant implications for those who wish to fulfill their religious obligation of “speaking truth to power” on the issue of globalization. The Biblical mandate for protest comes from the command, “You shall not hate your neighbor in your heart, you shall surely rebuke your neighbor, and not suffer sin on his behalf”(Leviticus 19: 17). One Talmudic opinion understands the repetition of the Hebrew verb for rebuke as underscoring the necessity of reproof of one’s fellow “even a hundred times” (Baba Metzia 31a) and even if he or she does not accept the reproof (Arachin 16b). Another opinion, however, takes the repetition to imply that one should rebuke only where rebuke will be effective (Yevamoth 65b). This beautiful exegesis implies that rebuke involves a delicate balancing act. On the one hand, not to rebuke one’s fellow human being is equivalent to hating him or her in one’s heart. It marks a lack of concern about the person’s moral and spiritual well-being and about the impact of his or her actions. Failure to rebuke thus brings complicity, i.e. “suffering” sin on one’s neighbor’s behalf. But to rebuke without caring whether one’s rebuke is effective is just as self-serving and brings equal complicity. The message is clear, although incredibly difficult to act upon: Rebuke should always be an expression of relationship, not a means to walk away from it or break it down.
Garten’s analysis suggests that a strategy of protest alone does not fulfill the Talmud’s definition of rebuke. A broader strategy is required that understands the economic and psychological realities of the global business leaders. This is not to minimize the vast disparities in power between trans-national corporations and the vast majority of people in our society, let alone people from developing countries. As John Browne, CEO of B.P. Amoco put it at the 1998 Davos conference, “People often overstate how much power [global companies have]. But we cannot pretend we have none at all” (p. 221). The real question facing people worried about the pernicious effects of globalization is: How can we simultaneously hold business (or any other) leaders fully responsible for the power they do have while being respectful of their own perceptions of themselves as lacking much of the power that others ascribe to them?
Protest is indeed a part of the answer to this question. Powerful people do need reminders “even a hundred times” that they are being held accountable for the way they exercise their power. The content and tone of protests, however, needs careful consideration. Garten’s analysis suggests the necessity of recognizing that just because activists lack as much control over the direction of globalization as they might desire, that does not mean that there are any other people or institutions that have such control. It also highlights the difficulty of engendering cooperation in a market system that derives its very vitality from competition. A useful distinction for protesters to make, therefore, is between the larger business interests currently driving globalization and the interests of individual CEOs and corporations who are constrained by powerful forces from fully addressing issues of social responsibility. Protest is unlikely to be effective if people feel that they are being attacked and held responsible for things beyond their power.
The second element of a broader strategy of rebuke is to engage in mutually respectful conversations about power and responsibility across the literal and metaphorical barriers that separate business leaders from environmental and social activists. A precondition of the success of such conversations is that their aim is not to persuade other people about how best to use their power. There should be no presumption that one group has a lock on the single most ethical way for all people to use their power. Instead, there must be collective reflection on how each participant can most responsibly use the power that he or she has. This requires activists to acknowledge their significant political power and their own role – as voters, consumers and investors – in driving the macro-forces that constrain corporate social responsibility. They should also acknowledge that business leaders are no different from anybody else in their reluctance to take full responsibility for their power. In fact, the degree of their reluctance is likely to be proportionate to their power. This calls for more, not less, understanding from activists. While we may not usually think of respectful conversation as a form of rebuke, it generates the mutual trust necessary for people to hold themselves and each other responsible for their power.
Of course, someone sympathetic to the views of the protesters could refuse to engage with the complex and messy economic and psychological realities of the world of CEOs, preferring to hold fast to utopian prescriptions for an environmentally sustainable world free of exploitation. This may have its own gratification, leaving intact a picture in which power is neatly divided between the haves and have-nots and making the target of protest very clear. From a pragmatic perspective, however, what is the point of speaking truth to a power that may not exist? Spiritually, such an attitude also misses the point of true rebuke, which cannot take place outside the context of relationship.
The Talmud was alive to the fact that many people do not heed the justified rebuke of their neighbors. But it never issued an exemption from developing an empathetic understanding of the people one wishes to rebuke. “It was taught: R. Tarfon said, I wonder whether there is any one in this generation who accepts reproof, for if one says to him: Remove the mote from between your eyes, he would answer: Remove the beam from between your eyes! R. Eleazar b. Azariah said: I wonder if there is one in this generation who knows how to reprove!” (Arachin 16b). Garten’s thoughtful and authoritative book, at least, gives us some of the information we need to reprove with strength, respect and, hopefully, success.
Have you seen, or read, or listened to a movie, an article or a piece of music mentioned here? What is your quick take? Are there other cultural items that have caught your eye that you would like to call to the attention of others in the CLAL on line community?
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