Words May Indeed Hurt Us

I’ve been receiving e-mails in the vein of this one: “Dear Mr. Balzar. You complain all the time. How about some solutions?”

Fair enough.

And as it happens, I have one.

Our subject is the woeful state of American business and, by modest extension, the current state of American values.

In this instance, I’ll limit myself to that part of the problem in which I consider myself not just an observer, or a fellow victim, but a journeyman expert, more or less. That is, the language we use, and the power that words have to misshape our thoughts.

How do we get things back on track?

Stop glorifying aggression and risk.

We have talked ourselves into deep trouble by assigning false virtues and granting respect to these two characteristics when it comes to the pursuit of money.

In most aspects of our lives, aggression is cause for dread, and for understandable reasons. We don’t want it in our children, in our pet dogs, in rattlesnakes under the porch, in our encounters with strangers and in our dealings with citizens of nations around the world.

Likewise, risk.

In our travels, at the lunch counter, in parking lots at night, we strive to minimize, or at least control, risk. We wear seat belts. We limit our fat intake. We park near light poles. Our good lives depend on it.

Somewhere along the line, business was granted an exemption from this norm.

I suspect it began in modern times with that strangest of businesses, big-money athletics.

At first, aggression was used interchangeably and harmlessly with hustle. But then it left hustle behind and came to signify real aggression.

We supplemented and embellished aggression with other words that normally are meant as criticism but no longer are so in the free-market context, like intimidation.

Risk was once a synonym for daring and innovation. Then it too came to signify far more: risking everything to win.

It wasn’t enough to prosper. You had to dominate. In electricity purveyance, as in football, our language now drips with metaphors of anger, hostility and war.

The characteristics that we wouldn’t want in a neighbor are what we expect in commerce. You have to annihilate the opponent.

Business plans pay vague lip service to the interest of customers, but the hearts of many -- the most aggressive and risky ones -- seek to seize control of the market and, ultimately, hold the customer captive. As in the case of Enron.

Yes, I’m mindful that American entrepreneurship has always attracted the cutthroat, and often brought out the worst in them. Gilded Age railroad tycoon Collis Huntington remarked: “Whatever is not nailed down is mine. Whatever I can pry loose is not nailed down.”

But in our better moments -- and isn’t that the point of progress, better moments? -- the vocabulary of business, and not incidentally athletics, also allowed glory for finesse, for grace, for integrity. How you won was important too.

You don’t have to stand back very far to see that among the bubbles that sorely need popping in our free-enterprise system is the language of aggressiveness.

One way to achieve that is to restore stigma to a couple of words that richly deserve it. An aggressive accountant should be regarded with the same intolerance as an aggressive third-grader.

We need less risk too. We can still have plenty of fun with capitalism without putting everybody’s job on the line in the next go-for-broke, deregulatory market IPO merger scheme.

Unchaining human enterprise and creativity need not also deprive us of those qualities that give us dignity.

Need we note, again, that the brunt of the losses on these aggressive, risky deals has been borne by workers and investors, not those who roll the dice or set the policies?

Folks who sing from hymnals of risk and aggression should not be admired but cross-examined.

But, you say, globalism requires that we devour the world or the world will devour us. In that case, globalism will impoverish everyone.

If unrestrained trade is just another way to unleash our aggressiveness, another form of war instead of a process to advance civilization, then we are overdue for a peace conference.

Twenty years back, a chic book on the reading lists in business schools was Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War.” Written more than 2,000 years ago, this was the first known collection of aphorisms about the precepts and theories of getting ahead of the competition.

Sun Tzu’s students have assumed leadership in our corporations. It might be a good time for them to revisit this classic study. In particular, Item 6 in Chapter 2, which states: “There has never been a protracted war from which a country has benefited.... War is like unto fire; those who will not put aside weapons are themselves consumed by them.”