![]() The competition Carr prefers by analogy is poker. ![]() ![]() Rather than a lawless realm where all is permitted, business is a contest of sorts with rules of its own beyond those of the public square. ![]() The spirit of that approach is well captured by the title of the book from which Carr adapted his essay, Business as a Game. He never wavers from what, for him, is essentially a commonplace: to be successful in business, one needs a liberal approach to truth telling. In this respect, the contrast with Carr is refreshing. If these papers are assembled from the sturdier timber of academic argument, it’s notable that they never really challenge the principal observation and tenable opinion of Carr’s essay: “All sensible businessmen prefer to be truthful, but they seldom feel inclined to tell the whole truth.” Instead, these scholarly works merely gussy up the sentiment so that it becomes a sanction for anything other than lying. It’s the type of popular work prim-faced PhDs routinely disregard as the specious currency of common sense, which is one reason it is a little surprising the essay became a touchstone for an ongoing debate in scholarly journals about the moral permissibility of lying in business. The view is capacious and colorful, but the sagging is evident, the stakes untethered, and the overall impression it makes is of something not entirely stable. Cold-blooded cost cutting, lobbying practices that corrupt the common good, price gouging, industrial espionage, self-dealing, anticompetitive practices, and planned obsolescence all make the list, in addition, of course, to the wide variety of deceptions involved in everyday business.Īssessing the integrity of Carr’s argument is something akin to standing under a circus tent after a torrential storm. Importantly for Carr, the term bluffing is a catchall for a wide variety of commercial conduct that is unseemly and venial if not necessarily felonious. In January 1968, just a few years before Carr’s death, Harvard Business Review published “Is Business Bluffing Ethical?” a lengthy essay that would become Carr’s most durable contribution to public discourse. Rockefeller’s Secret Weapon, Juggernaut: The Path of Dictatorship-that seem better suited to his occasional forays into pulp fiction. He was also a promiscuous wordsmith, whose works of business history and biography feature salacious titles- John D. This testimony belongs to Albert Carr, an economist and journeyman consultant whose eccentric collection of clients included paper mills and American presidents. Take, for instance, the conventional wisdom of another authority on commercial conduct, writing decades after Veblen: But I also suspect that for most people today, an affirmative fidelity to the truth seems a better fit for Boy Scouts than business executives. Whatever one might make of it, few, I imagine, are willing to dismiss this commitment outright. A commitment to this principle, we might say, entails precision in assertion, transparency in motive and means, and a fervor for telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. To abandon any hint of exaggeration, strategic omission, or any other tactic that might be classified as vaguely deceptive could be said to be consistent with the principle of an affirmative fidelity to the truth. Set aside for now the question of whether the everyday deceptions familiar to marketing, sales, negotiations, and other elements of business come “at the cost of the community.” Consider, instead, what it might be to practice business without them. “he arts of business are the arts of bargaining, effrontery, salesmanship, make believe,” he wrote in his final book, Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise in Recent Times, “and are directed to the gain of the business man at the cost of the community, at large and in detail.” The most consequential economist at the University of Chicago at the turn of the 20th century, Veblen regarded lying as an essential cultural practice of American capitalism, a lubricant, if you will, for what he called the “arts of business.” That hardly made the practice blameless to Veblen, much less beneficial. They limit the friction of social life, and keep things moving smoothly.īusiness executives find far more occasion for lying, or so it seemed to Thorstein Veblen. On the contrary, we might call the insincere responses they elicit “little white lies,” implying not only that the lies themselves are trivial, but that they are largely blameless, even beneficial. How’s your day going?” “What do you think of this dress?” “Would you like to read my poems?” These are all questions that invite dishonesty, though certainly not of a rank or abject sort.
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