WHY ARE BUSINESS PEOPLE SO NASTY?

It’s the sort of question that a grandson might ask having listened – having nothing better to do – to Ed Miliband’ s speech at the Brighton Labour Conference.  There the small and unsuccessful were lauded but the bigger and makers of more “p….”

(hiss the word quietly my dear for it’s a word that cannot be said) more “profit” …. were to a man – mostly men – because there are very few women at the top of business – rotters.

John Cleese put it like this:
“I find it easy to portray businessmen. Being bland, rather cruel and incompetent comes naturally to me.”

Businessmen have been typified by Messrs Goodwin, Diamond, Sugar, Green and a yo-ho-heave-ho of Russian pirates…all, were we to imagine them as alumni of Hogwarts, members of Slytherin – rather sleazy and slick and sarcastic.

But isn’t that a little disingenuous and unfair?

The media just don’t like business although they are discovering, to their liberal chagrin, that Generations Y and Z do. Research by You Guv shows “they take more pride in British business than the Welfare State and give Google, Apple and O2 credit for improving their lives”. (The Times 18/9/13)

Applications from them to advertising agencies are flourishing. The likelihood of these young people going on an anti-capitalist march is low. Enterprise and entrepreneurship are actually sexier than they’ve been for some time.  It’s the word “businessman” that, in its old fashioned way, summons up images of pinstripe, furled umbrellas and middle class white men. Think ideas, think dirty hands, think midnight oil, think trial and error, think global excellence …that’s the new world of business.

Bland?  Certainly not.
Cruel? No more than competition ever is.
Incompetent? Just try doing it yourself, John. You’ll find it isn’t that funny when the alarm rings at 4.00am, your flight leaves at 6.30 and you have a day’s work to do on top of pitching an idea to a German who is likely to say “no”.

Business is seldom about chatting over lunch in the Savile Club for Generation Y. It’s a Starbucks in a paper cup and a bagel.

Lunch? Lunch is for wimps.

But what some may find antipathetic is that business now works to global rules.
And this applies to ethics too. (Incidentally I heard one of the church commissioners talking about their 10% stake in the new “Ethical Bank” that’s being constructed out of RBS. The history of the church has not exactly been brimming over with ethical concerns itself and isn’t the concept of an ethical bank a little like that of a compassionate abattoir?)

Overall you can’t regulate innovation. Business has to find its own level and  markets have to be allowed to work.

We should stop trying to herd cats and we should avoid business clichés.

The more I see of young people in business the better I feel about the new tougher breed of competitor.
As many of them are women as men and nearly all of them deft and hard-working.

Nasty?

Now you should see the politicians. Kevin Spacey in House of Cards is nothing….