At Business Conference, Ideology Served along with Catered Lunch

by Tim Hambourger

This is my account of the events of Sunday, November 21st at the Business Today conference.

For me, what the conference made most clear was that many elites in the business world really believe the standard free market, capitalist rhetoric. While theoretically this should be easy to accept, it is still quite a shock to see so many people in one room unquestioningly swallow statements which to me seem like the most utter bullshit.

I will give a few examples. Speaking at the 1:00 PM Keynote Address, Chairman and CEO of RCN David McCourt argued that the government should regulate business as little as possible. This was certainly to be expected. However, McCourt went so far as to argue that people who spend their entire career in a bureaucratic government job cannot be creative or innovative – no creative or innovative person would want to be in government when they could go into the private sector and make more money off their ideas. Throughout his talk, McCourt used imagery that associated government with monopoly. He seemed to believe that less government regulation of business would be the only way to prevent monopoly. I find it incredible that anyone can even believe such an argument.

During the after-lunch executive seminar (20 to 30 attendees together with a single executive for an hour and fifteen minutes) I attended with Peter Georgescu, Chairman Emeritus of the advertising firm Young and Rubicam, Georgescu made such wild statements as “Natural resources are no longer a constraint” and “You know what, there is no shortage oil.” He made obviously and demonstrably false claims about the free availability of capital to everyone. He even went so far as to say, “For 15,000 years the people who owned the means of production had the power,” whereas today consumers have the control. This was not Georgescu’s only attempt to co-opt Marxist language in support of “free” markets. He also claimed that capitalism was dead: “Capitalism died because capital is now readily available and it is cheap!” This echoes Marxian theory which asserts that the accumulation of capital is the fundamental driving force of capitalism. If this accumulation ever ceases, capitalism will die. However Georgescu believes that instead of a socialist utopia, a free-market utopia has replaced capitalism. (Do not ask me to explain how free-market economics is not just one form of capitalism. Georgescu never felt like clarifying this little point). Here we see a form of ideology so advanced that it can co-opt directly contradictory theories without trouble, reusing and misusing socialist language and ideas in ways no socialist ever imagined with the effect of undermining the socialist project and defending capitalism (under the mantel of the free market).

Georgescu’s talk (the seminar was not really a seminar so much as a lecture) was also shocking for his overt racism and ethnocentrism. Speaking on the reasons for China’s economic success, Georgescu stated of the Chinese people that they have “a will and a drive that is palpable” and “a DNA that historically says, ‘We’ve done this forever.’” Later, he continued with this cultural essentialism. “There are many countries that have had no natural resources – look at Holland.” The example of Holland, he argued, shows that the main determinant of a country’s wealth is the creativeness of its people. More explicitly, “Everything else is a commodity; creativity is the differentiator.” Georgescu’s wild assertions about the natural creativity and work ethic of the Chinese (apparently they just love working long hours in sweat shop conditions) sound like arguments from 100 or even 200 years ago. How can such ideas still have currency today?

I would look towards Georgescu’s emphasis on creativity as the sole means of differentiating oneself from one’s competitors (whether we are thinking on the level of rival individuals, rival companies, or rival nations). At first glance, it sounds like Georgescu might just be arguing for creativity as a personal ethic that the future business leaders of the world should strive for. A “skill set of creativity” along with “analytical competencies” and “values – personal values” is one of Georgescu’s “three basic skills to succeed” in business. But this emphasis on creativity goes along with a theoretical framework which denies the importance of history and social structures in determining a person’s or country’s wealth: only creativity matters.

How do these two aspects of the concept of creativity intersect? After the seminar I spoke with Brij Khurana, a member of the Business Today staff who attended the seminar. He said the he liked the emphasis on creativity. He thought it was good advice for the participants (who were told repeatedly that they were the future leaders of the business world) and he agreed that “creativity is the force” driving national economies and that “creativity is what distinguishes products.” It seems to me that Khurana quickly accepted the motto of creativity as a personal ethic, and then came to accept the empirical assertion that creativity equals success after this.

Tim may be reached via e-mail at thambour@princeton.edu