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A faith-lift for business
Doing Virtuous Business: The Remarkable Success
of Spiritual Enterprise. By Theodore Roosevelt Malloch (Thomas Nelson, 2008, 169 pp. $21.99 U.S.)
Was business an invention God saved for the eighth day of creation? One might think so from Theodore Malloch’s spirited defence of free enterprise and the moral scaffolding that makes it work.
To counter persistent attacks on business and globalization, Malloch paints a glowing picture of what business should be – a force for good in the world. If corporations are greedy and malicious (and he doesn’t dispute that some are), they have betrayed the true nature of business and its ability to generate well-being and social progress.
Business, done right, makes the world a better place, writes Malloch, a Yale University research professor, CEO of his own strategy firm and former United Nations diplomat. Moreover, virtuous enterprise actually enhances the prospect of success and profitability.
Such virtue, he insists, has strong spiritual roots. Business can best do its job of creating economic well-being “when we employ skills and talents given by God.” Faith “changes business for the better, just as it changes lives.”
The path to real success is paved with virtues that faithful businesspeople can acquire — “dispositions that help us to take risks, to make decisions, to take responsibility for our actions, and to accept wise advice.”
The creation of wealth, whether in North America or in an impoverished country, is not a solitary, selfish enterprise, he says. “Wealth creation in its truest form is a collective process, one in which people freely pool their energies and resources.”
Profit, meanwhile, is a good thing — “a reliable sign that a product or service is socially useful.” But it is not the only thing. Aiming solely for profit is not only bad ethics, Malloch writes, it’s also bad business. “[T]he firm that puts profit at the top of its agenda, making found your ecological niche and can flourish there by doing your own valuable thing,” says Malloch.
He extols “soft virtues” (justice, forgiveness, compassion, humility, gratitude) as part of proper business behavior. “Not only is capitalism comfortable with the soft virtues, but it actually requires them.” They “make their own often surprising contribution to business success.... Compassion may have looked like a weakness to Nietzsche, but a society without it will sooner or later founder on the reef of its own heartlessness.”
He points out that many successful corporations have done more social good than is often acknowledged. He cites J. Irwin Miller, founder of Cummins Engine Company, who closed his factory in South Africa when the country would not permit him to integrate his workplace.
Virtuous conduct goes well beyond Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), which is often nothing more than a “grafted-on public relations exercise,” according to Malloch. He groans at big business media bromides purporting to show concern for people and/ or the environment. As practiced by companies like Enron, for example, CSR “is simply a kind of protection racket whereby a corporation buys off the busybodies among the NGOs, wraps itself in a veil of political correctness, and gets on with the business of profit taking. It is only superficially related to the ethical heart of a business and may indeed
all else subordinate, very soon begins to lose its competitive edge.... I strongly believe that profit-only companies are, in fact, parasitic, and that they damage the economy at large with their limited and selffocused view of their role in the marketplace.”
Making profit the only goal can actually weaken the conditions on which profitability depends, he says. It can alienate the workforce and local community, destroy incentive, undermine the workplace as a forum for communal life, and lock a company into “old and once profitable ways long after the competition has made them unprofitable.”
Success “does not come because you aim at it; success comes because you have be nothing more than a systematic deception.”
His depiction of the true nature of business can put a spring in the step of practitioners. It is in business, he says, where “you expose yourself to criticism, take risks, acquire heavy debts of responsibility and accountability, and are thrust into moral relation with others, in ways that demand a far more robust and serious morality than is needed to survive in some cushioned state bureaucracy or in a comfortable academic chair.”
Business, according to Malloch, is “the real test of the moral life.” — Wally Kroeker
Attention U.S. farmers
You can give from your harvest to help the poor increase their harvest.
In the U.S., farm commodities such as wheat, corn and soybeans can be donated and turned into a cash gift to support a global MEDA project of your choice.
To find out how, call MEDA’s U.S. office (717560-6546) and ask for Marlin Hershey or Mike Miller.
