Making the case for capitalism should not be a PR exercise with attention grabbing labels such as inclusive, sustainable and socially responsible. No amount of artful messaging can alter observable or perceived reality. It does, however, require much more effective communication than we have seen to date if the case is to succeed.
We are at a critical moment in history, where many orthodoxies and shibboleths of faith are being challenged and rejected by citizens around the world. The crisis of trust that business and finance face today is not an aberration – a passing phase that will disappear with as the global economy recovers — but rather a profound soul searching by an angry public about how the future can be made meaningful, productive and secure for all humanity, not just a privileged few.
If big business, in particular the financial community where particular opprobrium is directed, cannot successfully articulate its social purpose, demonstrate the positive contributions it makes to economic growth and also honestly acknowledge the risks it poses, its license to operate will be severely restricted or even withdrawn.
It is too easy to say the man on the street can never understand or doesn’t want to hear why business matters. It is too simple to believe being successful and profitable is enough of a reason to be left in peace to get on with it.
The price paid by millions of people around the world for the misguided, at best, and predatory, at worst, cannot be dismissed as an inevitability of the economic cycle or the result of media promulgated envy.
Such complacency must end if anti-business rhetoric is to be reversed.
What is needed is a major injection of integrity into how the case for capitalism is made, into telling the positive story of business and its contribution to progressive economic growth, and into how it can mitigate its dominance over the world’s finite resources.
Integriti Capital
This article was originally published in
Business & Society.