Which one are you? The one who gets his own hide to safety and comfort first and foremost, or the one who risks himself and all that he’s achieved to help a weaker person get there too?
Now I see the importance of history
Why my people be in the mess that they be
Many journeys to freedom made in vain
By brothers on the corner playin’ ghetto games
I ask you Lord why You enlighten me, without the enlightenment of all my folks
- ‘Tennessee,’ Arrested Development, 1992
Would you hire a black person to fill an important position at your company if there were white people who had better qualifications? Would black managers and white managers answer this question the same way? If the answer is obvious to you, i.e. “of COURSE I wouldn’t hire a less-qualified person, unless there was an Affirmative Action implication involved,” then maybe you should read the work of M.I.T. professor Thomas Malone.
While addressing “sustainability” and environmental issues that face businesses today, Malone points out a potential path for the corporate world that would truly change the landscape of how and why businesses could exist in the future (and right now). His foundation-shaking idea is this:
…that often leads you to think of sustainability as a constraint rather than an objective. In this way of thinking, the goal of business is to ‘maximize profits subject to the constraint of fulfilling your obligations to society.’
But what I’m saying here is that you can flip that around. You can say there’s no reason at all why a business cannot maximize its contribution to society subject to the constraint of producing a reasonable financial return.
These profound words can be found at the end of an interview in the most recent MIT Sloan Management Review, and his ideas are more fully explained in his book The Future of Work: How the New Order of Business Will Shape Your Organization, Your Management Style, and Your Life (Harvard Business School Press, 2004).
Back to the original question, with a different application: who is President Obama? Is he the one who makes it out of the jungle himself and then looks back (down) on all of his brothers and sisters who did not, thinking to himself, “I got here all by myself without any help, I’m not going to give preferential treatment to those people who haven’t pulled hard enough on their own bootstraps, and even if I wanted to I couldn’t because I might not make it back again,” or is he going to realize that the goal of an individual shouldn’t always be about advancing as far as he or she possibly can as an individual, and that the purpose of America isn’t always to make as much profit as possible, that as long as the nation is prosperous enough, it can afford to right some past wrongs, take some short-term hits, in return for advancing the long-term harmony and prosperity of a nation that currently operates with at LEAST one arm tied behind its back? And that even if it ISN’T prosperous enough, it needs to do so anyway?
If he takes the 100-year future view rather than the 3-year election cycle view, he’ll do some right things in this arena. He won’t hold up his own personal achievement as proof that anything is possible in America, that nothing further needs to be done, that the discussion is over, that there is no longer a problem.
But judging by the color of his cabinet so far, I wouldn’t bet on it.
p.s. Is Flavor Flav’s clock in that attic?
