ADMINISTERING THE UNIVERSITY OF THE FUTURE
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of trying to be what we quaintly call "good corporate citizens"-Ford in
Detroit, Motorola in Chicago, Coca-Cola in Atlanta, Levi-Straus in San
Francisco. Ironically, the more enlightened companies are, the more they
contribute to public confusion. For example, our best companies do aspire
to be teaching organizations in their own realm, investing as much as 2 or
3 percent of their payroll in training and retraining employees. They invest
more than many universities in leading technologies. They aim to attract
talent with excellent wellness and childcare benefits. They institute pro–
gran1s that encourage employees to speak their minds. They institute profit
sharing and stock-purchase programs.
No wonder that people outside of our best corporations get the idea
that businesses are social institutions devised to further the intellectual and
spiritual development of employees. From a certain naive angle, companies
look like introverted welfare mini-states which need only to be forced to
share their wealth with the rest of us.
However, companies were never designed to be engines of social good.
Rather, competi tion among companies was designed to do that. The man–
date of any business is to survive, and this is becoming harder and harder
as the market boundaries between companies and countries blur.
I am not being mean-spirited. Yes, now and then, companies can spare
some funds for public purposes-public broadcas ting, local schools. But we
have to acknowledge that the managers of businesses have done what they
have done, cut what they have cut, reengineered when they could, and
taught what they have taught simply to remain viable. Even CEOs who
emphasize "corporate values" are really speaking of what it takes to make
the company more competitive; when they speak of in-house freedom of
speech they really mean something like what Mr. Gorbachev meant by
glasnost. Greed, too, is beside the point here. But survival is what most
managers mean by self-interest. And nobody would want their pension
funds invested in companies that act like social agencies. I'm sure that's true
of everyone in this room.
What, then, can be done about the chronically unemployable? What
can businesses do? I would say that a new social compact is not really nec–
essary as some have suggested, but a determination to remember the old
one, and to think about it more precisely and more intelligently. The old
compact had always assumed that companies would self-interestedly sup–
port certain government actions to enforce the rules of competition.
Government would police property rights, establish the courts to punish
criminals and settle judicial disputes, build roads and bridges, defend bor–
ders and so forth. The mutual obligations of companies and governments
were specified from the start in The
Wealth
if
Nations
and haven't really
