Book of the week THE TIMID CORPORATION
For hundreds of thousands of years men watched the sun and the moon cross the skies, unaware that they were really seeing the rotation of the Earth they were standing on. Financial journalist Benjamin Hunt's fine book, The Timid Corporation, dispels a similar confusion about modern capitalism. Hunt shows that the overwhelming perception that financial markets are 'out of control' or that runaway capitalism is locked into an 'irrational exuberance' of uncontrolled growth is wrong. Hunt makes a more telling criticism: the present-day corporation is retreating from growth, timidly submitting to unjustified constraints and a destructive regime of self-regulation.
Based not just on a surprisingly eclectic range of written sources, but also on some excellent interviews with CEOs and other insiders, Hunt's book explains our misunderstanding of contemporary business arises from changed expectations of our own, expectations that are influenced by those of industry leaders. It is, he explains, the overwhelming caution that has overtaken business that exacerbates the climate of suspicion we have towards business. Industry's desire to forestall criticisms, arising from an inflated fear of them, only serves to aggravate public distrust.
Hunt explains how events like the Enron collapse add to the overwhelming perception that business is out of control, even when this is not so. In fact, he says, it is the avoidance of risk, exemplified in attempts to insure against loss, or to tie customers into the 'comfort zone' of brands, that is characteristic of economics today. The treatment of the issues behind such buzzwords as Corporate Responsibility, Shareholder Value and Risk Management is a real advance on our understanding of contemporary capitalism.
Benjamin Hunt, The Timid Corporation: Why Business Is Afraid of Taking Risk, John Wiley, Chichester 2003
VIVE LA FRANCE?
In the mouth of Ahmed Ben Bella at London's mass anti-war demonstration in February, the words 'Vive La France!' had a special resonance. Ben Bella was one of the leaders of the Algerian revolution detained while tens of thousands of his countrymen were killed fighting to free themselves from French rule. During the Iraq conflict French president Jacques Chirac positioned himself as a friend of the Arab and Islamic world, breaking ranks with the American 'hyper-power'.
Just how tolerant a friend of Islam France is was revealed when the fundamentalist Union of Islamic Organisations (UIO) in France won 14 of 41 seats on the new National Council of Muslims. Interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy had hoped to create an 'official Islam for France' through the council. But the poor showing of the favoured Paris Mosque, which won just six seats against the fundamentalists' success provoked Sarkozy to threaten deportations: 'Any prayer leader whose views run contrary to the values of the republic will be expelled.'
SARS HYSTERIA
One hundred and fifty students at prestigious English boarding-schools have been quarantined on the Isle of Wight on their return from south-east Asia, after Eton and Winchester school joined 30 others in barring boys coming from China, Singapore or Hong Kong. In Toronto, health officials demanded people showing symptoms stay indoors, while the New York Times reports that 'In US, Fear Is Spreading Faster than SARS' (17 April).
Sever Acute Respiratory Syndrome, associated with a virus close to the common cold has killed 181 people, and has led to the near paralysis of Hong Kong, and severely disrupted much of East Asia. With 14 fatalities in Canada (where 10 per cent of the population is of Chinese origin) and extensive rumours of epidemics on the West Coast of America, the panic fixes on the 'foreign' invasion.
So far nobody in the USA has died, and the estimates of 199 cases had to be scaled back to 30 after a less all-encompassing definition of the disease was adopted by health officials. Nonetheless, fear of SARS is potentially much more destructive than the disease itself: social paralysis and disruption can do more harm than any disease.
WAR TRAUMA
Despite the thousands of Iraqis killed in the theatre of conflict, Britons are preoccupied with their own personal suffering. Last week the Samaritans reported that the war in Iraq was the greatest single cause of stress among those it surveyed. British Prime Minister Tony Blair poured his heart out to the Sun newspaper about the difficult choices he had to make, as if the point of the war was to test his leadership skills. The big drama, apparently, was that 10 days into the war he told his civil servants to prepare for his resignation. But the war was right because it was 'something he really believed in'.
-- James Heartfield
http://www.heartfield.demon.co.uk/james1.htm