A Song in the Night (20 page)

To keep my sense of perspective, I tried, with uneven success, to maintain a regular discipline of daily prayer and Bible readings. And I tried to talk about what I was learning, though this proved difficult. Even the most well-intentioned business school student had trouble understanding my commitment to the parish, and most of the parishioners found it bizarre that I was spending any time at all in a business school. Over time it became apparent that underlying many of the discussions and decisions at the business school lay a philosophy of life that was shared but rarely discussed. The first article of faith in HBS doctrine was an unquestioning conviction of the economic and moral superiority of corporate capitalism. The basic justice and integrity of current economic arrangements were never publicly challenged.

More deeply, there was a belief that the free market always resolved any apparent disputes in a manner that benefited the most people. This powerful utilitarian idea is usually traced to the early economists Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham, who preferred to identify themselves as moral philosophers. Smith’s passing remark in
The Wealth of Nations
that the actions of individuals in the marketplace seeking to maximize
their own advantage lead to benefits for everyone is one of the most misused texts in modern life. As Smith wrote, “[The businessman] intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was not part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.”

To begin, Smith meant this process to be understood within an entire system of compassion, which he referred to as “empathy,” which is the topic of his earlier, similarly massive, yet never quoted book,
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
. Of equal interest is the changing nature of the concept of the “invisible hand” itself, which, as the economist Albert O. Hirschman points out in his book
The Rhetoric of Reaction
, began as a theological idea.

Human beings noticed all through history that events sometimes unfolded positively and sometimes negatively. One minute people were prospering, and the next they were carried off into exile by an invader. What was the deciding factor? they wondered. For many it was the hand of God, the powerful yet ultimately unknowable creator who organized human history according to an inscrutable logic. Later, in the eighteenth century, it became fashionable to talk less about a personal creator guiding history and more about the nature of “Providence.” This was one of the preferred forms that George Washington and other founders used in referring to what they perceived to be the hidden power behind the unfolding
American Revolution and the establishment of the United States. Within another generation, the “invisible hand” came into widespread use. As a social concept it remains powerful, because it relieves society—and particularly its leaders—from responsibility when things are apparently going poorly. Does it look as though an economy is damaging prosperity, people, and the planet? Then we should not trust that evidence! The truth, argue the proponents, is that no matter how poorly things may seem to be going, the overall trend must, by definition, be positive, through the power of the conveniently invisible hand. For those who are prospering, the evidence is self-evident, and for those who are suffering—well, they need to keep the faith that it will all work out for them in the end. The strange result is that while the doctrine of the invisible hand seems to encourage individual action—surely a good thing—it also seems to free our collective structures from blame if things do not achieve our collectively desired ends.

When taken up by a small but virulent group within the business community—and among some of the students—the consequences of this old and misapplied idea became an acetylene torch for a particular version of conservatism, one that later morphed into some of the core beliefs of the Tea Party movement. Government is always inefficient and something to be reduced, controlled, and mocked. Monopolies are bad if you are on the buying end but good if you can achieve them in your own industries (this is called building market share). American workers are fat, slow, and inefficient, and labor unions are a destructive force. Poverty and unemployment are the result
of inefficiency and are primarily the fault of the poor and the unemployed. Almost any marketing or promotional campaign can be justified on the grounds that if a consumer actually buys the product, it must fulfill some sort of “need.” Individual greed always aggregates to a larger good; therefore the rabid pursuit of materialism is without question a good thing. And if Americans didn’t read the fine print on their purchases and got themselves in trouble on their homes, their credit cards, their loans, well, it was their own damn fault.

Eventually I got up the nerve to visit different professors to inquire about the curriculum and about their feelings on ethics in business. Many of them were eager to talk about the profound moral and philosophical problems of modern business. I even detected a certain frustration with some of the students’ narrow focus. The more I talked to the professors and listened to their comments in class, the more it seemed that they had a definite mission they were seeking to fulfill through the design of the curriculum. Not only did they intend to turn out well-rounded general managers, but many of them also hoped by doing so to arrest or reverse America’s decline as a manufacturing nation and world competitor. At the time—more than twenty years ago—the great anxiety was that Japanese firms had outperformed American firms because they had designed marketing programs that were more responsive to consumers, organizations that were more sensitive to employees, and factories that took seriously the contributions to quality and production offered by workers. The message to us was direct and simple: American managers must become more attentive
listeners, more humble, more interested in the long term than the short term, and more devoted to the success of their companies than to their own careers. At the same time, in the same school, other faculty members were devising the systems of stock options and securitized debt that would soon pump the economy into a series of bubbles: first junk bonds, then technology, and finally subprime mortgages.

Although cooperation and long-term management were what the
curriculum
stressed, the
culture
at the business school emphasized the reverse. Students were graded on a forced bell curve, which rewarded people with prior training and work experience and automatically failed the bottom 10 to 15 percent in each class. The stereotype most admired by student culture was that of the “tough hands-on manager,” someone who justifies his or her high pay by being the crisis solver, the problem fixer, the head basher.

In those days no one was more admired than the CEO of General Electric, Jack Welch. A graduate of the University of Massachusetts, Welch had risen through the ranks of GE as a tough, take-no-prisoners manager who demanded that the businesses under his supervision become first or second in their markets or they would be sold. When he became the CEO of GE, he fired so many people that he became known as “Neutron Jack,” a reference to the atomic weapon that killed humans but left the buildings standing.

On one occasion Welch came to the Harvard Business School campus to address the eight hundred first-year students in Burden Hall. He gave a rousing speech about leadership and toughness, and he was rewarded with a huge wave
of applause. All the faculty who had a relationship with GE, or who hoped to be permitted to write business school cases about its decisions, sat in the front row and beamed. Then came time for questions. Several people asked him versions of the same question: How did it feel to be the greatest business leader in the United States—or possibly ever? Welch took the questions with blustery self-confidence, sharing his platitudes about the need to be a fierce competitor.

Then I raised my hand and he called on me.

“Mr. Welch,” I said, “last week a coalition of major religious organizations known as the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility held a press conference identifying the twelve companies that have played the most significant roles in supporting the South African government through loans and strategic goods and services. General Electric was near the top of that list. What are General Electric’s plans for the future of its relationship with the government of South Africa?”

I knew Welch wouldn’t like it, but I had designed the question to be as fair as possible. What surprised me was the reaction of the other students. As soon as I said the words “South Africa,” a large number of students in the hall began to hiss at me. Their hissing intensified as I completed the question. They were clearly outraged at this breach in courtesy; how dare I ask such a question of the greatest executive in America after he had done us the honor of visiting the school?

Welch shifted his weight forward like a fighter and actually stepped closer to the bottom of the section where I was standing. He then launched into a long, largely incoherent explanation: of course GE opposed South African racism and
its leaders weren’t really supporting it that much; in fact, they had put some practices into place that would ultimately help their black workers; and besides, the company couldn’t get into judging how its products were actually used. His statement was full of factual inaccuracies, and I was gearing up for a follow-up question that would force a little more honesty out of him. But when he finished, I could sense the hostility surrounding me. So I let his flimsy answer stand, and I sat down.

Over my years at Christ Church and Harvard Business School, Dana and I settled into an evenly paced life in a small apartment on the edge of Boston. She completed her dissertation, became an assistant professor at the Boston University School of Theology, and taught some of the most popular courses at the school. As she rose in her field and I came nearer to finishing my degree, we faced a major decision: whether to have children. We had held back for more than four years because of uncertainty about my precise HIV status. During that time we scoured the country for more information, and we designed a detailed process of counseling, heart-to-heart conversations, and spiritual reflection to decide whether this was something we would pursue. Doctors really couldn’t advise us, except to suggest that in their best judgment, as long as I seemed so healthy, the risk was likely to be small. I was strong and my immune system was completely intact. We decided, after a process of reflection and prayer, to go ahead. We had two sons, Sam and John, in quick succession, in 1987 and 1989, and everyone tested fine. Dana and the boys were completely
healthy. We rejoiced and decided to stop there. Though my own long-term fate remained uncertain, I settled into a period of deep contentment that I had been blessed with such interesting work and such a beautiful family.

At no time is the emphasis on individual success and achievement more evident than in the frenzied winter mating season when recruiters arrive at the business school. During that period I occasionally went to the business school in a suit because I had appointments in town immediately after class, and each time my section mates playfully inquired if I had “given in” and decided to interview with McKinsey or Goldman Sachs. “Come on, Bob,” one good friend of mine said. “Those consulting jobs look pretty good, don’t they? Wouldn’t it be fun to tell other companies what to do? Wouldn’t you like to make thousands of dollars a week for a summer job?”