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A Good Friday Meditation on Employers — Peter Robinson
Earlier this week, I posted an excerpt from remarks that theologian Michael Novak delivered not long ago at the Catholic University business school, and Ricochet member K.C. Mulville soon added a comment that has stayed with me:
In Catholic teaching, there’s a lot said about the virtue of work. But we’re only now beginning to grasp the virtue of the other side of the work-equation, that of employers. If it’s virtuous to earn a living for yourself and your family, it only stands to reason that creating a place to work must also be virtuous.
You see, I too, have only begun to grasp the virtue of the other side of the work-equation, the virtue of offering employment.
Which brings me to something of a confession.
Although conservative all my working life, I’ve always operated on what might be called the Bohemian end of things, working among journalists, writers, and academics; people who tend to employ only one or two research assistants apiece, and who—and this is my point—quite often look down upon business in practice even as they champion business in theory. In politics, think tanks, and academia of all kinds, there is a word for business people: donors. No one of us would ever put it this crudely, but the thought is ambient—in the air, so to speak—that God in His ineffable wisdom put business people on earth to fund the activities of us, the people who work with words and ideas.
We conservatives never entirely succumb to that view, I think it’s fair to say—unlike liberals, after all, we really do believe in business, at least in theory—and yet I have to admit that this way of seeing business has colored my thinking—more, perhaps, than I sometimes realized.
What has snapped me out of it, enabling me to begin to grasp—really to grasp—the virtue in the practice of business? A couple of things, the first of which is my children. The three oldest, two of whom are in college and one of whom has graduated, have reached the age at which they need jobs—real jobs. Lifeguarding at the neighborhood pool won’t cut it anymore.
To whom have my children turned for advice, for interviews, and for jobs themselves? Not to people like me or those among whom I have always worked myself—we don’t exactly represent a growth industry. My children have turned, of course, to businesspeople—to people who know how to make payroll, market products, hire engineers and developers and sales forces, and, somehow, to create that critical, magical factor: growth. The very people to whom I’ve spent much of my working life inwardly condescending—these are the very people able to offer something utterly basic to my own offspring that I and my kind are utterly helpless to provide: employment.
The second factor? Getting to know some entrepreneurs here in Silicon Valley.
I think, for instance, of Ricochet’s own Dr. George Savage, a co-founder of Proteus Digital Health. Since I got to know George in business school almost a quarter of a century ago, he’s represented one of the hardest-working men I’ve known—for that matter, George, already an M.D., worked his way through business school by taking the night shift in the emergency room at the Stanford Medical Center.
I’ve known George as he started what must by now number half a dozen medical companies, working endless hours, traveling constantly, and somehow absorbing in his own person all the anxiety attendant upon feeling responsible for employees. More than once George has mentioned that he had only a period of weeks to complete a new round of financing or lose his company, then put the thought out of his mind to remain cheerful for the rest of our conversation.
What George Savage does—what all the business people I’ve come to know do—requires intelligence, persistence, determination, and—an appropriate thought on Good Friday—a certain basic self-giving. Here at Ricochet, for that matter, if you keep your eye on Blue Yeti for a day or two you’ll see how much simple sheer hard work is involved even in holding together an operation as little as ours.
Just as K.C. Mulville reminded us, the practice of business requires virtue.
Published in General
Peter, what was Yer first job?
My summer jobs included flipping hamburgers in a fast-food joint and carting film projectors from one conference room to another at an IBM plant, but my first full-time position was Speechwriter to the Vice President of the United States.
Stop laughing.
Did You “look down upon” the fast-food joint Owner while You were employed? Or did You not start looking down upon business Owners until after college (that would explain a lot)?
I sympathize, Peter. As an artist by nature, though not by career, my best works are often due more to inspiration than to perspiration. Many of my jobs have involved manual labor. I’ve spent entire days mixing concrete, carrying lumber, throwing heavy boxes around a storage room, and so on. But those efforts were never in pursuit of my own projects. I have never been an entrepreneur, and can only admire in wonder those who strive so fervently to create and maintain complex businesses for themselves and for employees.
The Virtue of Businessmen is only one: Providing Goods or Services that their Customers want, at a price their Customers are willing to pay. Free Exchange is Virtuous by its very nature.
I can certainly relate to the observation above but am somewhat perplexed by this:
As for Blue Yeti, I’d say he works hard to keep an eye on us and all of our concerns and complaints. Many thanks for minding the store!
Happy Birthday Peter.
You stole my post, you rat …
It’s funny because I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the subject of employment, lately. Your original post just happened to come while I’ve been cultivating a number of ideas.
But from a personal perspective, it really starts with remembering what happens when I didn’t have a job. I’m lucky right now, and my job is relatively secure. But I keenly remember what not having a job means. And, realizing that for all the welfare and social programs, the best way to help someone is to hire them. Not to give them money, but to establish a chance for them to take care of themselves.
The foundational Catholic text on work was Rerum Novarum. It was focused on the right of workers because workers were in such danger at the time. While it does contain some important teachings about employers (as does subsequent teachings from later popes), I’d say that Rerum Novarum needs a contemporary counterpart; one that not only discusses the moral pitfalls of being an employer, but which also praises and celebrates that role.
If work is about human dignity, so is providing work.
The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker…it takes all kinds of people with all kinds of interests and skills to make our world work.
And, if your life of working with ideas and words created Ricochet, I’d say we can all be grateful that “It Takes All Kinds to Make a World.”
ps…Happy Birthday.
Good for you to speak so honestly, not sparing your dignity in the process. Takes courage.
I, myself, get to work for a wonderful company doing highly intellectual work (science) and get paid handsomely while able to engage in my life’s passion. All this because some thirty some years ago one scientist betook himself to found our company (Science Applications International Corporation – SAIC). There is not a week goes by that I don’t give silent thanks to our founder (J. Robert Beyster), and his boon companions in business who set so many up for success in life. This is my personal testimony of gratitude to he and his like who make Free Societies flourish.
Lying awake last night — the unavoidable wages of jet travel across eleven time zones on Thursday — I was reading Peter’s post on my iPad, agreeing as always with his logic but mentally chiding him for being too self-deprecating, when I was startled to run into my own name. While I do not feel worthy of the accolades (and for the record, during my time at the Graduate School of Business I worked as an ER doc for Kaiser Permanente, not Stanford), Peter makes an important point about the essential ingredients for job creation, one that deserves broadening. Yes, you need the entrepreneur — the guy or gal who simply is not grounded enough to accept the low probability of success and give up — but you also need the investor, landlord, and early employee willing to trade security to support a risky new enterprise. The creative endeavor that is a new company takes coordinated activity by many in order to succeed.
For example, in 1991 my business partner and I made the rounds of Silicon Valley venture capitalists pursuing funding for the first start-up we intended to run ourselves — we had spent the past two years working for a venture fund helping others start medical companies. The trouble was that we had to that point “never run a lemonade stand,” as one prospective investor caustically but accurately put it. The logjam was broken by BJ Cassin, a wealthy individual investor with impeccable credentials who, writing a personal check for $500,000 — serious money in those pre-Internet days — agreed to become chairman of our board. This signaled to the venture community that it was okay to invest in George and Andy’s Big Adventure, and we were able to create a new treatment for cardiac arrhythmias and a lot of jobs in the process.
I often wonder what would have become of me and my career if tax rates were sufficiently onerous for BJ to heed his wife’s urging to give up his Sand Hill Road office and retire to Lake Tahoe to focus on tennis and family activities. He would, after all, still be rich, while my colleagues and I, and possibly hundreds of others, would be without the opportunity to advance, to make progress, to better our condition and that of other members of our community.
Life is primarily about service and relationships; the workplace is an important place where this takes place. But every contributor is essential to the end result.
Well, every contributor is essential unless they are not, and everyone is dispensable in the long run (even the owner). I don’t mean this in a bad way, but it is true and it’s good to realize before bad economic times hit.
But what I was going to say is if business is looked down on by some, sales is positively the bottom of the heap- even by the CEO’s in said business. However I always like suggesting to disgruntled ‘millenials’ that if they want to make real money they should go into sales. Crickets, and I chuckle.
So, that’s what’s wrong with me?
Philosophically, the first step in understanding “business” is that it’s inherently social. That is, it’s inherently some form of free cooperation. It’s something you can’t do alone (you need at least a buyer). And, it’s something that requires others to act freely. After all, if you force people to work for your interests, that isn’t business, that’s slavery. And if you force people to buy your goods without their consent, that isn’t business, it’s robbery.
It’s the free cooperation that makes it transcendent.
Transcendence is crucial, theologically. When multiple individuals create something that neither of them can achieve individually, they become part of something greater. It adds a dimension to their lives, beyond their individuality, for which they need others’ cooperation. Transcendence is how you make your soul more than what it is; it’s how you grow, spiritually.
Business and family are the ordinary, daily ways in which we cooperate with others. They should be the rock solid institutions that we protect zealously.
Yeah. We need to do better.
I have a funny feeling that you are young, Jimmy Carter, and I know that you are a Texan. It would be hard for one who was not there to imagine how thoroughly the idea that business was inferior permeated the atmosphere of colleges and universities in those days. I am a little younger than Peter, but old enough to have been similarly influenced in my youth.
Edited to say that I meant to write, “northeastern colleges and universities. “
I purposely went counter to the prevailing wisdom. I think I was quoted in the school paper as wanting “conservatism to run rampant on campus” when I ran for the student senate. I got elected anyway.
I had a pretty decent relationship with the professor of my senior seminar (in math), until he asked me what I planned to do after graduation. When I told him that I had secured a job as an actuary at an insurance company, he turned his back to me and walked away in a huff. I got the feeling he wouldn’t deign to spit on me.
I am often amazed at the number and quality of people that seem to look down on, even hate, corporations and business people. It seems that they view corporations as evil and management as villains. All the while working for and depending on these things to provide a livelyhood for them. What confuses me is how what would seem to be intelligent people can not see the link between their lifestyle and capitalism.
I am of a couple minds on this.
1.) God did put businesspeople on earth to “fund us.” God wants music, art, philosophy. happiness, and flourishing (this has always struck me as the more holistic meaning of “Be fruitful and multiply). The Bible includes three books of poetry, many other poems besides, and songs -instructions for music and dancing, too -Paul mentions that teachers and thinkers are an important calling -and that those who through their teaching lead others astray will face a special judgment. On the more general point, a civilization of pure business would be dull.
2.) Knowing this, it would never have occurred to me to condescend to businesspeople. Being a teacher is a different calling than being a businessperson, and I am very thankful for all the businesspeople who have funded not only my teaching, but my own education as well. Without them, life would still be quite dull. Dickens was right about this when he had Bob Cratchet call Scrooge “the founder of the feast.” And equally right to chastise Scrooge when he horded his money in gloom. The spirits, after all, visited for Scrooges welfare -not Bob Cratchet’s.
I think that our opinions of employers will also change when we become familiar with that side of the equation. We’ll see them less as stingy men who sparingly hand out benefits and more like real people who are also trying to deal with the pressures of running a business with little guarantee of success. The education that George McGovern received from starting his own business is a great example of Peter’s point.
I think my epiphany came as I started to think about what kind of life I wanted to build. Being an entrepreneur means knowing a level of freedom that most people won’t ever experience. It means thinking in terms of what I can provide to others. I think it makes us more generous, charitable, and conscious of other people and their desires.
Guess what? Art is a business. Many artists are entrepreneurs. Others work for corporations to produce artwork for magazines or books or design your cellphone or its cover so it looks just like you want it. That doesn’t mean many artists don’t look down on “business,” but they sure are out displaying their works in galleries with a price tag. (One of my businesses was art related.)
Libraries started as private clubs or businesses as subscription services. Teaching and schools were not always publicly funded and for everyone. They started out as private commercial institutions.
I remember looking at actuarial jobs when I was studying math. I had really planned being a math professor but decided the students would drive me crazy.
I enjoyed your overall comment BK, but feel compelled to dispel the myth of knowing unusual “freedom” in any entrepreneurial undertaking; one is always beholden to the consumer in a far more direct manner than if one works for others. I would tell you my experiences in the corporate world were far less stressful!
Point taken. It’s certainly not without its constraints. My cousin, who’s a realtor, put up a funny post on facebook: entrepreneurs are the only people who will work 80 hours a week to avoid a 40-hr work week.
Agree. What’s the saying? “Nothing happens until you sell something.” A CEO who undervalues his sales force is called an ex-CEO.