Keep Ayn Rand out of business
Her flawed vision has many adherents in US corporate and political circles
car endeavour and using technology to evade law enforcement; and that it failed to hire a chief operating officer or build an effective management team.
“Rand’s entrepreneur is the Promethean hero of capitalism,” said Lawrence E. Cahoone, professor of philosophy at the College of the Holy Cross. “But she never really explores how a dynamic entrepreneur actually runs a business.”
“She was a script and fiction writer,” he continued. “She was motivated by an intense hatred of communism, and she put those things together very effectively. She can be very inspirational, especially to entrepreneurs.
“But she was by no means an economist. I don’t think her work can be used as a business manual.”
Rand’s defenders insist that the problems for Kalanick and other self-proclaimed Objectivists aren’t that they embraced her philosophy, but rather that they didn’t go far enough.
Yaron Brook, executive chairman of the Ayn Rand Institute, who teaches seminars on business leadership and ethics from an Objectivist perspective, said, “Few business people have actually read her essays and philosophy and studied her in depth.” Brook said that while Kalanick “was obviously talented and energetic and a visionary, he took superficial inspiration from her ideas and used her philosophy to justify his obnoxiousness.”
He emphasised that Rand would never have tolerated sexual harassment or any kind of mistreatment of employees. Rand “had enormous respect for people who worked hard and did a good job, whether a secretary or a railroad worker,” he said.
“Her heroes ran businesses with employees who were very loyal because they were treated fairly. Of course, some people had to be fired. But she makes a big deal out of the virtue of justice, which applies in business as well as politics.”
And even though “she’d celebrate what Travis did with the taxi industry, showing the world how all those regulations made no sense, she also believed there are rules of justice that do make sense and she supported,” he said. “You can’t just run over all the regulations you don’t happen to like.”
Rare mention
Brook complained that Rand’s critics are quick to point to her followers’ failures but rarely mention their successes. He cited the example of John A. Allison IV, the much-admired former head of BB&T Corp, a regional bank that he built into one of the US’s largest before he stepped down in 2008. Allison handed out copies of Atlas Shrugged to senior executives and is a major donor to the Ayn Rand Institute.
“John is a gentleman and he actually studied Rand’s works in depth,” Brook said. “He couldn’t be more different from Travis.”
Allison has called for abolishing the Federal Reserve, while acknowledging that so drastic a step is unlikely. He has met with Trump at the White House and has been widely mentioned as a potential successor to Janet L. Yellen as Fed chief.
Despite Rand’s pervasive influence and continuing popularity on college campuses, relatively few people embrace her version of extreme libertarianism. Former President Barack Obama, in a 2012 Rolling Stone interview, criticised her “narrow vision” and described her work “as one of those things that a lot of us, when we were 17 or 18 and feeling misunderstood, we’d pick up.”
She’s also dismissed by most serious academics.
“Mention Ayn Rand to a group of academic philosophers and you’ll get laughed out of the room,” Cahoone said.
“But I think there’s something to be said for Rand. She takes Nietzschean individualism to an extreme, but she’s undeniably inspirational.”
As the mysterious character John Galt proclaims near the end of Shrugged: “Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all.
‘Hero in your soul’
“Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it’s yours.”
But Rand has little to say about making the transition from this kind of heroic entrepreneurial vision to a mature corporation with many stakeholders, a problem many company founders have confronted and struggled with, whether or not they’ve read or been influenced by her.
“She never really had to manage anything,” Cahoone said. “She was surrounded by people who saw her as a cult figure. She didn’t have employees, she had worshippers.”
For his part, Kalanick is said to have turned this summer from Rand to what is considered one of the greatest dramatic works in the English language, Shakespeare’s Henry V — a play in which the young, reckless and wayward Prince Hal matures into one of England’s most revered and beloved monarchs.