In the past couple of months, the American news media has spent a lot of time covering the party primaries in several states and two of the big names mentioned during that coverage were Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina. If you don’t know who they are, they’re two women running for office in California and both are former CEOs of major corporations (Whitman – eBay; Fiorina – HP). As I thought about the coverage of these two CEOs, I started thinking about other politicians who started off their careers in business, like Mit Romney and Dick Cheney, and wondered what it was about these folks that motivated them to make the switch. I’d wanted to research the topic and make a blog post about it for a while, but I’ve been too busy to do so. Then, Alvina hit me up and the rest is history. I hope you guys enjoy her article.
By the way, I apologize to any members who had trouble accessing the site earlier this week. I ran into some “site access issues” (followers of my Twitter feed know what i’m referring to) and I just got things totally working again yesterday morning. I think that some user accounts that were started on Monday and Tuesday were deleted as a result of the fix. My apologies go out to anyone who had to register to the site a second time.
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Title: A Precarious Undertaking: The Business of Transferring Business Smarts to Public Office
Author: Alvina Lopez
The domain of public office has traditionally been doled out to the lawyer subspecies of our wonderfully pluralistic society. This logic follows a certain fixed line of reasoning–because lawyers study the ins an outs of our judicial system, somehow they are far better equipped to run a country.
While of course, there is some solid credibility in the fact that lawyers accrue very specific skills that transfer to government administration, businessmen and women learn skills that are just as translatable. What exactly, are these skills, and how can you maximize their utility in a bid for office?
Recently, the Atlantic Monthly published an article in response to three former businesswomen now running for public office–Carly Fiorina, Meg Whitman, and Linda McMahon. The article’s author, Mickey Edwards, criticizes the three women’s respective campaigns because the women predicate their credentials on their business backgrounds.
While the Atlantic article brings up some good points, it rests on one fatal flaw. Edwards assumes that the profit motive is intrinsically inimical to running government simply because the job of a public official is to help others, to provide the populace with security. Edwards says:
“In business, the non-productive are cut loose; in government, the non-productive are cut checks. That is because the society as a whole, with the full support of Republicans and Democrats alike, believes widows, orphans, the mentally or physically infirm deserve sustenance and protection. Men and women whose careers are in business may, in fact probably do, share that belief, but it flies directly in the face of a belief in maximizing profit and winning bonuses but cutting loose the deadwood.”
However, Edwards fails to recognize that business is not necessarily solely driven by fiscal profit. It is. of course, driven by efficiency, but social capital is very much part and parcel of efficiency. Edwards plays on outdated conceptions of the staunch, Fordist model of economic development. Now, the successful running of business requires an emphatically people-centered approach.
Fiorina and her contemporaries come straight to politics from this more modern approach to business. In fact, Fiorina herself had civic aspirations long before she even decided to attend business school. In an excerpt from her memoir, Tough Choices, Fiorina explains her early academic career after dropping out of law school:
“In 1976, a history and philosophy major wasn’t exactly employable…In all the time from childhood to the day I dropped out of law school, I had never considered the world of business as a career. My parents had no experience with it, and I don’t even remember hearing the term business until I was in college.”
In this way, Fiorina demonstrates that business isn’t necessarily purely driven by money. Fiorina came to business from history and philosophy precisely because she knew that business is about problem solving. The people skills learned in business are invaluable, and the problem-solving knowledge lead by intuition and a concern for others is just as applicable to business as it is to politics. Fiorina later says, after her first post-law school drop out business experience:
“Most of all, I loved the people of business. I loved working with them; I loved collaborating with them and negotiating with them. I learned for the first time that some people in business are driven by facts and numbers, some are driven by judgment and intuition, and most are driven by both. And some are driven by emotion and ego more than others. I loved the camaraderie of working hard and then winning, or losing, together. I even found the politics of office life interesting, because I was often asked to intervene to help people find common ground.”
Here, in a nutshell, Fiorina describes the business-politics transfer of skills perfectly. In fact, what else could be more conducive to running for public office than “…interven[ing] to help people find common ground”? While Edwards is right in that the hard facts of business can sometimes clash with civic ideals, if you are a business person with a civic bent, then you are more than prepared to take the business-politics leap. Don’t let all the lawyers tell you otherwise.
By-line:
This guest post is contributed by Alvina Lopez, who writes on the topics of accredited online colleges. She welcomes your comments at her email Id: alvina.lopez@gmail.com.
