A tip of the hat to Stephen Colbert for coining the word truthiness; a wag of the finger at businesspeople who settle for predigested business thinking. Truthiness is a surrogate for reality, unencumbered by all those pesky facts.
Truthiness fits our zeitgeist – the spirit of our age. And nowhere better than the world of commerce. Most of the businesspeople I know are impatient for direct, specific, practical solutions:
I have a bias for action. Just tell me what to do. I don’t want to know how it works; just make it go. Take me to the bottom line. How can I profit? How much should I live on? How much should I save? How much should I give away…and to whom? What is the best investment today? How much should I leave as an inheritance?
So it’s no surprise that armies of accountants, lawyers and gurus circle the walls of any company with money, all selling plug and play answers. No muss, no fuss, no thought required.
Mr. Skilling agrees to take the Enron job only if he can install mark to market accounting and Mr. Lay later claims he didn’t know what he agreed to. The two of them sanction Mr. Fastow’s dummied-up corporations so they can kite funds (I use the term loosely) and later defend themselves with the Hey, I’m not an accountant! plea.
Who ever thought what Skilling and Fastow were up to sounded like a good idea? Well, in addition to Kenneth Lay and Arthur Andersen, that would be two dozen of America’s top financial institutions, all perfectly willing to say Enron’s black box process was good enough for them (because boy did it sound like there was a lot of money on the bottom line). Balance sheets? Balance sheets are for chumps.
In 1936, Lord Keynes wrote:
the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood….Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.+
The worldviews we embrace from economists, philosophers, politicos and prophets – whether on purpose or not – govern our marketplace behavior. When, like fish who simply lack the context to comprehend how wet they are, we embrace a worldview without really engaging the ideas – really thinking the thoughts – the results may be disastrous. Or they be spectacular. One way or the other, we won’t know why – it might as well be magic. "This column’s chief goal is to supply you with a worldview – a mental operating system – that will be as good 30 years from now as it is today," writes a leading business thinker. "Hurray!" his readers presumably shout. "At last! Someone to show us the way!"
And right there is the rub: That childish belief that someone will do our thinking for us. Why do smart people have such difficulty figuring out the right thing to do in business and economics? It’s not because most of us are incapable of understanding; it’s because we are too busy, too distracted, too trusting, and maybe too lazy to do our own thinking. What a shame.
Maybe Roy Disney had it right when he said, "We’ve always tried to manage by our values because, when you know what your values are, decision-making is easier."++
The trouble is on other side of that coin: Decision-making is very difficult when we don’t know what our values are. Decision-making is difficult if our values are loosely held…or borrowed from someone else. The illusion of a disintegration between the material and the spiritual – as if they were different worlds – is an article of faith that informs day-to-day business practices in our culture. Some of us make an uneasy peace by trying to ignore one dimension or the other. Others live schizophrenic, compartmentalized lives; expending substantial effort to separate the material from the spiritual, with mixed results. The bitterest pill comes to those who somehow succeed at keeping those two selves from meeting. The deadliest words a Christian can utter just may be: "This is business." At that point, it’s not the world of spirit and work that disintegrate but we ourselves, splintered beyond recognition. Is this not part of what requires so many of us to start second families with people who don’t know how far we’ve strayed? Of course it’s more complicated than that…but not much.
This is all the stuff of worldviews and, honestly, every one of us has to cobble together his own and the sooner the better. We’ve always known this…haven’t we? No less a junkie than the brilliant and broken Billie Holiday saw it through her druggy haze:
Rich relations give
Crust of bread and such
You can help yourself
But don’t take too much
Mama may have, papa may have
But God bless the child that’s got his own
That’s got his own
You have a bias for action? Fair enough. The most practical thing any businessperson can do is become more aware of her own thinking, to surface and examine and understand the worldview that drives her economic behavior. And then tackle the hard work of developing a more biblical worldview. A lifelong quest, certainly, but eminently practical.
It’s worth mentioning that the biblical narrative does not fully endorse any modern economic system. What’s there instead opens the way to a spiritual mind and heart equipped to integrate economic thinking and living. The biblical core gives anyone, regardless of current economic circumstances or geographical location, an opportunity to move toward the goal of maturity and purpose as a citizen in God’s kingdom.
As we experience closer alignment between our worldviews and how God sees the world, we begin moving beyond truthiness to engage the height and breadth and depth of God’s purpose for our lives in the marketplace.
+ The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, John Maynard Keynes, Harcourt, Brace, New York, 1936, page 383.
++ Think Out of the Box, Mike Vance + Diane Deacon, Career Press, 1995, page 180
