BGA | BUSINESS IMPACT
T he cultural gulf between business and politics remains wide and persistent. ‘Business is business and politics is politics and never between shall meet,’ according to American journalist, Suzy Welch. Yet this perspective is not only outdated, it has also never been true. disciplines that have been brought to bear on business education have not included politics. Harvard academic and management guru, Tom Peters, explained in a 2021 Financial Times article how he was ‘angry, disgusted and sickened’ at how McKinsey & Co., his first employer, and its army of clever MBAs ended up paying nearly $600 million USD for their part in the US opioid scandal: ‘Business Schools typically emphasise marketing, Traditionally, Business Schools have operated in disciplinary silos and the finance and quantitative rules. The “people stuff” and “culture stuff” gets short shrift in virtually all cases.’ Politics is what people stuff and culture stuff is all about, yet many Business Schools continue to have a kind of blind spot about the close interrelationship between business and politics. This blind spot carries through when students embark on their business careers. One chair of a major multinational company had just come from a meeting with fellow chairs when we met for a coffee and a chat. He told me: ‘We were discussing politics. We came to the conclusion that politics operates to a totally different logic from business. And, quite honestly, we don’t understand it.’ This put me in mind of CP Snow’s renowned 1959 Rede Lecture on the divide between art and science [as published in the 1961 book, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution ]: ‘I felt I was moving among two groups – comparable in intelligence… who in intellectual, moral and psychological climate had so little in common that instead of going from Burlington House or South Kensington to Chelsea, one might have crossed an ocean
… They have a curious distorted image of each other. Their attitudes are so different that, even at the level of emotion, they can’t find much common ground.’ Why does this gulf exist? Is Welch right that business and politics should never meet? Or, by ignoring political issues, are Business Schools leaving a huge and important gap in fulfilling their educational duties? To explore these questions further, we need to understand what we mean by ‘politics’ and what we mean by ‘business’, and their roles in our societies. What is politics? It is often thought that ‘political’ equates to partisan politics, the increasingly grubby nature of political campaigning, or the shady world of lobbying for self-interest. Yet politics is not that. Politics is the mechanism by which we decide collectively the kind of society in which we wish to live. That is something in which every one of us has an interest and about which we have views – often visceral and strongly held. Politics is ‘a great and civilising human activity,’ as Bernard Crick put it in his seminal work, In Defence of Politics . Crick argues that establishing a functioning political order that recognises different views, different preferences and even different truths, marks the birth, or recognition, of freedom. Politics is about people’s belief systems. ‘Politics is a battle of ideas, in which participants attempt to control the narrative through tapping deep-rooted values and beliefs, rather than invoking objective self-interest,’ says University of Edinburgh Professor, Christina Boswell, in a 2020 blog for the British Academy. In this reading, politics is primarily about identity and culture. People develop political views and allegiances based on their own visions of themselves – much as they choose some brands in an attempt to make a statement about who they are rather than for the brand’s functional value. Taking these definitions and perspectives, it is clear we all have political interests. We
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‘The role of business is, like all other institutions, to participate in the process of creating a better society’
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