[Dialogue] Save the Internet

[John Epps]

Hello George and other colleagues who are welcome in on this dialogue.

It's a real treat to be able to clarify some thinking with you. So here goes:

For some time, I've been working with "big businesses." It has come to gall 
me when I hear people whom I respect and whose values I share speaking as 
if "big business" were the demonic force causing all the pain we all 
experience. I'd be the last to claim that business organizations are 
blame-free, and, to be sure, some are indeed demonic. They are, however, 
the clear minority. Most are well-intentioned, honest endeavors to make 
life more liveable.

A clear misunderstanding, which I am opposing in the graduate business 
course I'm teaching, is that the purpose of business is to make money. That 
is not true.  Despite the opinions of Milton Friedman, that view is a 
definite minority among business scholars (yes, there are some). The 
purpose of business is to create value (i.e.,to provide goods or services 
that people value enough to pay for), and the measure of its success is 
profit. As Peter Drucker, Charles Handy, and others say, claiming the 
purpose of business is to make money is like saying the purpose of life is 
to eat. We must eat to live, but eating is not the purpose of life. It 
enables us to pursue a more valuable purpose. We find that helping people 
clarify the real purpose of their business is very motivating, and touches 
the desire most of us have to make a difference with our work.

Business organizations, just like religious organizations, are finite, 
fallible, and clearly imperfect -- just like the best of us. They're 
neither more nor less to blame for social ills than anyone else. It's just 
that waiting for the perfect organization to come along would entail a VERY 
long wait. We make do with what we have, and, as H. R. Neibuhr suggests, we 
attempt to be the sensitive and responsive part of that organization, 
working for its continual transformation.

The comment about the institution of slavery is absolutely correct: it was 
evil. But calling it an institution is pretty abstract, sort of like 
calling Christianity an institution. It is, in some way of talking, but 
that doesn't provide anything concrete enough to get a handle on. Anyway, I 
was talking about organizations, not institutions in that sense. There is a 
difference.

I totally share your views on the Religious Right and their perversions of 
morality. I'm not suggesting that morality is simply an individual matter. 
In fact, business ethics (not quite a contradiction in terms) is an 
important topic coming more to the forefront after Enron, etc.

So I hope we can put some energy into making good use of "big business" as 
an ally rather than as an enemy. A useful metaphor comes from the Chinese, 
"Lure the tiger out of the mountains" as a stratagem. It's built on the 
insight that when you go tiger hunting, you don't do it in the turf of the 
tiger. That's the way to get eaten. You "lure the tiger out of the 
mountains" so that you have a fair chance. In an abstract sense, that means 
for strategy, if you don't have the advantage, your only agenda is to get 
the advantage. Anything else is a prescription for failure.

We translate that to mean getting the opponent to become an ally. A silly 
example is the department staff that wanted to buy an expensive piece of 
equipment, but were opposed by the finance officer. They had the 
demonstrator model installed in the office of the opponent, who experienced 
the benefit and quickly became an advocate. What do you suppose it would 
take for "big business" to perceive the value of continuing the free 
Internet? Maybe it would not be the telecom companies that would be the 
ally, but they could certainly be "outvoted" by other industries that 
routinely use the Internet for normal everyday operations.

These are just some ruminations, and I'd welcome response.

Thanks

John Epps

At 08:34 AM 4/29/2006 -0500, you wrote:
>Perhaps you are right, however I have noticed that small people, of which 
>I am one, can act very immorally in mobs, something they would not do on 
>their own, and that in 1884 a Federal District judge in the U.S. made 
>corporations individuals in law.  Also, there appears to me to be evil 
>conveyed in and through institutions, e.g. the institution of slavery, 
>which speaking ethically, goes far beyond what a small person can 
>contribute and the practices, images, understandings can be perpetuated 
>far beyond that small person for generations.  The right wing religious in 
>the U.S. have tried to put the whole of morality on individual 
>responsibility, which is aptly applied in specific instances, but they 
>readily ignore these principles as a group when it comes to issues of 
>poverty and the distribution of wealth and taxes.
>
>Having attempted to work through the political process at the state level, 
>it occurs to me that all the people I meet are good and decent folks as 
>people, but when vote time comes their decisions are made on the basis of 
>corporate interests, which they even admit sometimes in private not the 
>best thing to do.
>
>–george
>
>
>On Apr 29, 2006, at 4:55 PM, John Epps wrote:
>
>>George:
>>
>>The villains aren't large companies, but small people.
>>
>>At 07:17 AM 4/28/2006 -0500, you wrote:
>>>The following article highlights an upcoming threat to our communication 
>>>abilities and the first in a series of moves by the large companies to 
>>>use congress to control the flow of information and make much more money 
>>>off the internet.  We've had extensive battles in the Texas legislature 
>>>to prevent the major telecom and cable companies from inserting laws on 
>>>the books forbidding cities from putting up wireless networks, which 
>>>have become necessary for small towns to retain their assembly plants 
>>>and warehouses, since the majors won't serve them.
>>>–george holcombe
>>>
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LENS International (M) Sdn Bhd
5th Fl, Tower 1 Wisma MCIS
Jalan Barat
46200 Petaling Jaya, Selangor
Malaysia
on the web at <www.lensinternational.com>
email: <jlepps at pc.jaring.my>  
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