Bottom Line Becomes a Bad American Ethic

The societal disease of our time, I am convinced, is America’s obsession with short-term success, its fixation with the proverbial bottom line. “Give me a profit statement this quarter larger than the last, and everything else be damned!” It took root in the business community, but has since spread beyond business and insinuated itself into the rest of our culture.

Short-term thinking, corrosive individualism, fixating on “economic man” at the expense of the human spirit, has taken an alarming toll. If the church was the focal point for personal values and public mores in medieval times, that role in our time has been assumed, unwittingly perhaps, by the modern corporation.

For better or worse, traditional institutions are no longer as influential in molding moral-cultural values as business. Mythologist Joseph Campbell has said that in medieval times, when one approached a city, one saw the cathedral and the castle. Now one sees the soaring towers of commerce. People build their lives around these towers.

Never before has the business of business been such a cultural preoccupation. If media attention is any indication of popular interest--and it is--today there is unprecedented interest in business affairs. Americans once found heroes in Congress, or in entertainment or sports; now more and more people find them in business: Lee Iacocca or Carl C. Icahn; until 10 minutes ago, Ivan F. Boesky, and until a moment ago, Martin A. Siegel.

If you grant the possibility that American business is the pre-eminent force in shaping our culture and its values, what example are its leaders setting?

The Wall Street Journal recently took an overview of the American corporation and concluded: “Gone is talk of balanced, long-term growth; impatient shareholders and well-heeled corporate raiders have seen to that. Now anxious executives . . . are focusing their efforts on trimming operations and shuffling assets to improve near-term profits.”

There are no two-legged villains in this atmosphere, only victims. The villain is the climate caused by this bottom-line mentality. Daniel Bell has argued that in promoting an ethic of of “materialistic hedonism,” the free-enterprise system tends to subvert the very values that help to sustain it--such values as social conscience, pride in one’s work, commitment to community, loyalty to company--in short, a sense of the commonweal.

This ethic breeds in a climate where leadership everywhere--in business, government, labor, universities--refuses, through greed or myopia or weakness, to make provisions for the future. And in this climate we have been raising generations of children to believe that there is nothing between winning and losing.

America has become a game show. Winning is all that matters. Get-rich-quick. Take a look at the game board. It’s not unlike the Monopoly board--but instead of real estate, just about every major American corporation represented is up for grabs. Owens Corning, NBC, Texaco and TWA are off the board now--but there are many more on the way. Just roll the dice, issue the junk bonds and watch the raiding and merging and acquisition. We’ve turned the old commonweal into the Common Wheel of Fortune. What fun.

The game produced 14 new billionaires last year--not to mention what it’s done for foreign investors who, with their yens and marks, have caught on to our national lack of concern for the future. We are now selling them America about as cheaply as the Indians sold us Manhattan. On the surface, we seem to have accepted the selling of America just as we seem to have accepted the fact that we no longer make the best automobiles, best radios, stereos or TV sets.

It’s easy to follow the escalation of the short-term obsession in recent years by looking at my industry, television, which happens to have the highest profile of all U.S. businesses. What other business has its performance rated half-hour by half-hour, seven days a week?

When I first got into television in the 1950s, the networks used to order 39 segments of a new program and a new entertainment series had nine full months to attract an audience; during the 13 weeks of summer, the networks would run “replacement” shows in order to experiment with new talent and innovative program ideas.

Slowly, over the years, as a way to increase profit margins, the networks began to pare back their commitment to innovation. In 1984, when we went on the air with the first show to feature a large Latino family, we were given four weeks to succeed.

More and more the name of the game for the networks became: “How do I win Tuesday night at 8 o’clock?” The substance of a program became almost incidental. We know the result now. The networks’ share of prime-time audience has slipped from 92% in 1978 to less than 78% today. ABC has been acquired by Capital Cities and is still in trouble. NBC has been acquired by General Electric. And the once pre-eminent CBS, even after laying off hundreds, acts as if it is struggling to keep its head above water.

I would suggest that the fate of the networks befell another Big Three many years before--the Big Three auto makers. They, too, failed to heed the handwriting on the wall and refused to innovate, refused to sacrifice a current quarterly profit statement to invest in the future. There is the ailing steel industry that refused to modernize and invest in its future. There are the labor unions that fought only for added wages and benefits--and not for protecting members’ jobs in the long term. There is the consumer electronics industry that surrendered the compact disc technology to Japan and Holland--where firms were willing to make long-term investments.

We worship at the altar of the numerical bitch-goddesses: Nielsen ratings; Dow Jones index and opinion polls. Politicians give more credence to polls than their own gut instincts. Students surrender self-image to SAT scores.

Despite our reliance on this imperium of numbers, we too easily forget that no numerical scale can truly represent the values that are most important: The spirit that makes a worker give his or her best. The altruism that yearns to be used.

There is a hurt and confusion in this nation to which attention must be paid. There is fear, resentment and anxiety among our fellow-citizens, making them ripe for extremists who offer promises of easy salvation. Many Americans are losing, or have lost, faith in institutions and in their leaders; there is little in the culture to satisfy the needs of the soul.

Robert Louis Stevenson said, “To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.” We think we arrive with each moment of success--the high rating or the improved profit statement--and we ignore the human values, the meaning of traveling hopefully.

Conservative columnist Michael Novak has said: “A commercial system needs taming and correction by a moral-cultural system independent of commerce.” I believe that. But what we have today is a commercial system that is, itself, the dominant force; its influence and impact is largely responsible for the moral-cultural system. Then how can we reclaim the commonweal from the mindless game show it has become?

We can start by recognizing that government has a major responsibility. I am a product of the free-enterprise system and cherish it. I am also a human being and cherish my humanity. But everything I know about human nature tells me we are innately selfish. When we, the people, must care for things that are ours --our water, our air, our safety, our protection from myriad harmful things we reasonable, good people are capable of doing to each other--we have to rely on government. Through government, we provide for the common welfare.

Business nurtures the conceit that its behavior is purely private--but take one look at the largess it receives from government: It once accounted for 29% of federal tax revenues, now down to 6%. Take a look, too, at corporate funding in the political process and it is clear why government must play a more influential role in protecting the commonweal.

As individuals, all of us need to rehabilitate the idea of public service, to set new ethical standards for business, to harness the natural idealism of young people and to encourage leadership everywhere to assume a greater burden of responsibility to lead. As I said, the villain is the climate. It needs changing.