Batuhan: Nobody’s business

ACCORDING to Wessels Living History Farm, the most important events that happened to the world in 1974 were the following:

-The House Judiciary Committee indicts President Richard Nixon for impeachment over the Watergate Scandal. In August, Nixon resigns his office, the first president to do so. Vice President Gerald Ford is sworn in as 38th president. In September, Ford grants Nixon a “full, free and absolute pardon.”

-Patricia Hearst, the 19-year-old daughter of publisher Randolph Herst, is kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army. Later she is photographed robbing a bank with her captors.

-All the President’s Men is published by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein detailing events of Watergate.

-Beverly Johnson becomes the first black model on the cover of Vogue or any other major fashion magazine.

In that year, politics hogged most of the major news cycles. After all, this was the year that President Richard Nixon resigned from office, the first president to do so after becoming in danger of being removed from his post. Clearly, the scale of the scandal was unprecedented, and in all the years since, the world has perhaps never seen an event as powerfully seismic as that. No wonder politics is all that the world remembers from that year.

The year 1974, however, was also the year that the eminent management thinker Peter F. Drucker published his path-breaking work, “Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices.” It is in this publication that he first articulated the notion of management legitimacy, and why organizations and managers have a responsible place in modern society.

Even to this day, the world of business has always had a checkered track record. Hewn from Adam Smith’s invisible hand, corporations became the embodiment of the conscience-less “laissez faire” principle of capitalism – which was, that greed is what makes the world go ‘round.

And yet, there was something that bothered people about this lack of corporate accountability and social responsibility. After all, companies like United Fruit, Dow Chemical and Monsanto were being accused of lots of anti-social behavior, which included the toppling of foreign governments, and making weapons of mass destruction for the US military. And yet they seemed to be acting with impunity, accountable to no one but themselves.

Drucker made the astute observation about the foundation of their legitimacy. Think about every other group of human beings that ever existed throughout history, and each one will have a defined and socially-beneficial purpose. All, it seemed, except business organization.

Think about religious groups, for instance. In many parts of the world, they were the keepers of literary tradition, even during the bleakest years of the Dark Ages.

Christian monasteries, for example, kept ancient books and manuscripts from being destroyed by pillaging barbarians. So too did libraries in the major Islamic centers like Alexandria and Constantinople.

But what about business? Do they have any socially-redeeming value to speak of?

(To be continued)

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