The bad guys are winning, and they’re gaining momentum. While our world always has used propaganda and devious tactics to manipulate the masses, gain power, and generate wealth, today’s state of affairs across the globe is moving us toward extinction.
Not happy words, but true ones. I have felt for years that we were heading toward a major forest fire. I didn’t know the specific players or events, but strongly felt it was coming. It’s here and growing daily.
Crooked leaders and their cronies are leveraging every lie and pretense to cheat and steal. Look at Putin, examine Trump’s tactics for decades, and see the hogwashing propagated by politicians on both sides of the aisle along with corporate America.
Add to this scary mix artificial intelligence that creates fake videos and makes decisions about whether or not to bomb someone to smithereens. I have been re-watching Madam Secretary, a well-done favorite show of mine. Going back four-plus years, these episodes were already sounding the alarm about the use of AI in war. In one scene, President McCord, played ably by Tea Leoni, has to explain how a video supposedly showing her damning the South Korean president was, in fact, a fake.
In corporate dealings, such bottom-line-obsessed entities as private equity firms are gobbling up promising companies and turning them into soul-less money-making machines. For many of these PE firms, the bottom line is the only line. But they often mask it with torrential talk of respecting stakeholders, customer service, and global caring—which in fact is nothing more than propaganda.
While they and their like-minded brethren purport to being doing good, their only real intent is to make money, then sell off the company and move on to the next. Lost amid all this is sincere trust, like, and respect—three perennial markers for how consumers make buying decisions.
Here, too, technology using a variety of artificially-intelligent platforms plays a huge role. Citing a variety of shiny new toys such as “demand gen,” digital marketers describe a world where technology IS the solution. Customer service is enhanced through technology-fueled CRMs and other artificially-intelligent offerings. Supposedly, this enables consumers to be cared for the way they want to be by addressing their preferences and needs.
Hogwash!
Technology can be a very important part of the equation, but it’s not THE SOLUTION. It takes human beings AND technology to achieve real success—which is getting people to trust, like, and respect you. In turn, they want to do business with you. My primary example of doing this without a lot of tech hocus-pocus is Costco. By offering unbeatable customer service, and honoring employees along with other stakeholders, they have turned word-of-mouth into an art form.
Costco is doing good while doing well—all without smoke or mirrors.
As they gut the souls of companies that honored all stakeholders from employees to customers to achieve success, PE companies and their minions talk a great game. They often say the right words about “doing good in addition to doing well” to get consumers to drink their Kool-Aid. But, the only true aim is to make money.
Primary smokescreening tools are lofty-sounding principles addressing the value and importance of all stakeholders—not just shareholders. Corporate social responsibility, social consciousness, ESG, are B Corp are some of the initiatives cited. In principle, they’re showcases of “capitalism with a conscience”—a decades-old term that I still use to describe doing business with the wellbeing of everyone involved as a primary driver. Money is part of the equation, but only as part of a much larger ecosystem safeguarding people and the planet at all levels.
Slowly but surely, we’re evolving toward this ideal. But, in the interim, many, many pretenders are talking the talk without walking it. Such terms as “greenwashing,” “goodwashing,” and my own “hogwashing” describe brainwashing buyers into believing that corporations care about more than just money (and power).
CBS Sunday Morning interviewed David Von Drehle, author of “The Book of Charlie,” which profiled the life of a man who lived to 109. In the interview, Von Drehle points out: “You’d ask him for his philosophy of life, and he would say, ‘Well, my mother always just said to us, do the right thing.’ If you do the right thing, it takes in a whole raft of things, see? It’s so simple that it’s so good!”
If you do the right thing, trust, like, and respect will follow. Ultimately, this is what has sustained us—and hopefully will bring under control the epidemic of lying, cheating, and stealing that currently prevails.
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Gray Flannel Head 