Robert Fromberg
Editor-in-Chief, HFMA
My father asked Buckminster Fuller, “Do you consider yourself a liberal or a conservative?”
I was about 10 years old, and architect and inventor Buckminster Fuller was having dinner at our home before giving a lecture in town. It was the late 1960s, a time of political unrest, which is probably why my father asked Fuller the liberal-conservative question. Fuller responded, “I’m a conservative; I believe in conserving things.”
I have always appreciated the way Fuller leapfrogged the either-or in my father’s question, landing at a more central truth: if we don’t conserve, political liberals and conservatives will be in an identical predicament.
Perhaps this experience accounts for my resistance to either-or choices. They seem inherently unfair, even immoral. Why should we have to choose between Democrat and Republican, labor and management, Coke and Pepsi, dogs and cats, managing as a business and managing as a community benefit? (Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups have taught us that you don’t have to choose between chocolate and peanut butter.)
In the upcoming August issue of hfm, Jim Collins, author of From Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…and Others Don’t, grapples with the potential either-or scenario of leading for-profit versus not-for-profit organizations. Collins is clear about the distinctions between the two types of organizations, including that in not-for-profits, money “is only an input, and not a measure of greatness” and that leaders of not-for-profits have less absolute control than leaders of for-profit companies. However, Collins avoids the either-or trap by emphasizing the commonalities of great leadership: “Greatness is not primarily a function of circumstance; it is a function first and foremost of conscious choice and discipline.”
As if to put a ribbon around these thoughts, a friend recently sent me an article from the July-August Harvard Business Review titled “Productivity Is Killing American Enterprise” by Henry Mintzberg, who among other things is director of the McGill University International Masters for Health Leadership program.
Mintzberg argues that productivity--thought to be a core competency of American business--“may be destroying its legendary enterprise and many of its powerful enterprises.” To Mintzberg, improving businesses’ productivity too often has meant “trading away their future health for short-term results” by “firing operating workers and middle managers left and right to cut costs” and “finding all kinds of other ways to cash in the goodwill that accountants and economists have trouble measuring.”
This article reinforces that managing either as a business or as a community benefit is a false choice--if the word “business” denotes a focus on productivity to the exclusion of everything else.
What Mintzberg advocates in for-profit corporations sounds like a central tenet of not-for-profit management: a focus on long-term benefits and on relationships based on trust and respect. Perhaps we need to focus not on either managing for profit or managing for community benefit, but on managing--quoting Mintzberg--“[f]or the sake of American society, as well as the American economy.”
