Business, stop having a tantrum and grow up
Ihave enjoyed reading the commonplace argument against learning te reo Ma¯ ori through an appeal to rationality and the sober realism of the marketplace. Some people say there’s no plausible economic benefit in learning a dying language, so we should learn the likes of Spanish or Mandarin as a second language.
Business people are, after all, a beacon of rationality, much like a burning koala falling through the windscreen of your ute is a ‘‘beacon’’ of a bushfire in some parts of the world.
The words ‘‘sober’’, ‘‘realism’’ and ‘‘marketplace’’ don’t necessarily go together. Sometimes the business community has the sobriety of a paint huffer snapping a bleary, Top Gun thumbs-up to the world.
This all comes up because the business community appears to be in the throes of a phantom war with itself – and us by extension – with plunging confidence. The main cause seems to be grumpiness at the new(ish) coalition Government. Last week the prime minister even had a business breakfast to stop the country’s imminent death-by-perception. Yep, our businesses could be crushed under the weight of their own magnificent hissy-fit.
There’s no better demonstration of the wackiness of this business world than the regular surveys that give us these confidence results. They express an emotional state, which might or might not have a relationship to reality. (To be fair, the latest ANZ business outlook survey discusses the debate over whether the results actually matter for the economic outlook.)
So economists have worked over the gristle of the results, and tell us that these sad business folks might actually act on their feelings by cutting investment or doing other bad things. It all has an incontinence-in-your-own-car sensibility about it.
Did any economy ever collapse because of an undersupply of the emotion of confidence? Presumably business confidence was high during the glory days before the last global financial crisis, and the one before that, and the one before that.
The business world treats confidence like a virtue, when in fact it’s more like a virus. They should do half-yearly caution surveys instead.
Arrogant overconfidence seems to be the style of the upper echelons of the business world. Life predicated on personal greed and personal success. They seem to make play at being perfect models of Darwinism, but they wouldn’t even make it as toast crumbs in the great man’s beard.
Sometimes the titans of business seem more like a bunch of emotional idiots guided by moral incompetents. And these are the people who rule a world they largely inherited from their dads.
That some businesses are able to temper the callousness of capitalism with a moral compass and some simple decency just shows how bizarrely heartless the rest of them are. Especially when there are so many people who inherited nothing, or lost so much. In the end, everything seems to collapse down to these matters of class and colonisation – wealth co-existing in a chilly multiverse with runny noses, black mould on the wallpaper, hand-me-down shoes and food banks.
Despite this, some of the business people sitting atop the heap seem to have become ever-more emotional. Aggrieved men and women – mostly men, though – moaning. This is the age of endless complaints. The rest of us have all become red shirts behind The Warehouse service counter of life. Staring ahead, glassy eyed, as we explain to the ferociously angry customer that the toaster they’re returning was actually bought from Kmart.
This month I have registered for Mahuru Ma¯ ori. An initiative started by educator Paraone Gloyne, where participants spend the month of September speaking only Ma¯ ori in every part of their lives. Until now I have been learning in full immersion, fulltime, but in the classroom only. Speaking te reo everywhere for an entire month is going to be a challenge. To me and to the poor buggers who have to deal with me.
But don’t tell me that I’m crazy, wasting my time, childish to speak the language of my tupuna in the very places where it was born and took its first monumental breaths and shaped, and was shaped by, a culture based on communal good. I can look at the greatest, the most rational of our modern community, and see they are at least as unhinged as the rest of us.
As I embark on this month’s journey, I have a few words of advice to some in our esteemed business community. I know it never works in real life, when we have to drag our screaming toddler out of the supermarket without the Kit Kat they so desperately crave, but I say here those famous words uttered by every exhausted parent to their snarling kiddie: Grow up.
The business world treats confidence like a virtue, when in fact it’s more like a virus.