Theatre - the best business school there is?

I went to the theatre twice over the weekend..the first time to see "Enron" and the second to see a brilliant youth theatre production of "The Grapes of Wrath". Both were very different in style: the first a high-tech, energetic, glitzy view of the rise and fall of the world's most notorious energy trading company and the second a low-budget telling of the systematic dispossession and brutalisation of tenant farmers in America's dustbowl of the 1930's.

I came away from both thinking, quite apart from the qualities of the two productions and the performances in them, that theatre often reminds us far more powerfully and directly than can a thousand newspaper articles or pieces of academic research what some of the most important principles are on which society and business have to be organised:

• Too much power concentrated in too few hands rarely produces desirable social or economic outcomes: the landowners, fruit producers and county sheriffs that systematically dispossessed, exploited and terrorised tens of thousands of migrants workers from Oklahoma to California were NOT doing the American economy any favours. (They directly contributed to the degradation of huge tracts of arable land and to the waste of tons of produce in an attempt to artificially keep prices high). Nor were Jeffrey Skilling and his colleagues at Enron - the company lobbied for the deregulation of energy supplies in the US and then exploited loopholes in the legislation to leave California beset by power shortages that imposed real economic costs.
  
  
• Human beings are always likely to be swept along by irrational manias : whether it is stock analysts falling over themselves to talk up Enron shares or desperate farmers embarking on a harzardous journey of 2,000 miles with their families in search of a "promised land" despite plenty of evidence that conditions in California were actually appallingly harsh, people do like the sense of excitement and hope that they can experience in the midst of a collective mania. Cynical people will always seek to exploit this (Enron's management encouraging their staff to sink their life savings into buying company stock options that were ultimately worthless); and governments and regulators and shareholders would do well always to remember it and act accordingly.
  
  
• Manias can nevertheless lead to the creation of important economic and social assets: at the end of "Enron", Jeffrey Skilling is given a speech in which he makes the point that many of the most important technological advances in recent human history (eg the canals, the railways and the internet) have been associated with major boom and bust cycles in the stock market. His point is that without the huge wave of energy, enthusiasm, financial investment and euphoria that these events created, the technological advances may not have occurred or would have occurred far more slowly.

All these are well-understood points in most business schools of course. But how effectively and elegantly and concisely are they communicated in the average MBA programme compared to spending 4 hours at two highly enjoyable theatre productions?

Cadbury's - money, meaning and chocolate

Thousands of words have been written about the hostile takeover of Cadbury Schweppes by Kraft and no doubt many more will be written in the future. A lot of focus has been placed on the purely financial aspects of the transaction - the share price at which the Cadbury's board finally felt they had no choice but to recommend the deal, the amount of debt Kraft is taking on to finance the deal, the crucial role played by hedge funds in loosening up enough shares to make the deal feasible, the huge profits they stand to make from it and so on.

Other writers have focused on the possible consequences of the deal for the Cadbury's workforce (with job losses beng described as "inevitable" by outgoing Cadbury's chairman Roger Carr) or for Britsish industry more widely. While these issues are of course highly important, I've been trying to work out why the news just strikes me in some hard-to-get-at way as profoundly sad and regreattable. After all..Cadbury Schweppes is a multinational in its own right which has hoovered up many much-loved brands and commendable smaller companies (eg Green & Blacks) along the way. So why should I feel any sentimental attachment to it as an independent company that extends much beyond whether I still like the taste of Dairy Milk or not?

The answer occurred to me this morning in a weird flashback to junior school days. When I was 8 or so, Cadbury's ran a national essay competition for schools. We were shown a film about where chocolate came from, how the coca beans were grown in West Africa, were brought to England and turned into chocolate bars in Bournville and about how Cadbury's had been set up in the early 19th century and were model enlightened employers . Several children entered essays from our school and I was one of several winners - and had the excitement of six or so different Cadbury's chocolate bars arriving in the post for me a little while later. (And that felt like the riches of Croesus).

So in that one small episode, I had new knowledge about the world, a sense of what an English company did, of its history and the particular history of a place (Bournville) that I could conceivably visit and some delicious products I could eat all rolled up into one. And I realised that one of the many reasons why industry is important is because such enterprises DO imbue our communities and landscapes and towns with a tangible and mysterious and magical sense of place and drama and achievement - and we feel a sense of belonging with them too, however remote. And this does not happen, by and large, with service industries or administrative offices - who was ever thrilled by the sense of knowing how management consultants work or by having a call centre as the local large employer?

And..if we allow our industries and long-established companies to be parcelled up and sold off one by one by venture capitalists and corporate predators and hedge fund managers, as so many have already been, we lose not just jobs or brand names or political face - we lose something of our history, our sense of community and of ourselves.

The Moral Economy - 1

I went to a really interesting and inspiring event this morning: a talk by Stewart Wallis of NEF about the "moral economy". The audience was a gathering of folk from the arts world and Stewart's theme was the current and coming global economic, ecological and social crisis and what part the arts might play in responding to and addressing it. Stewart's analysis of the failings of the current economic system seemed to me to be spot on:

• Our consumption of finite natural resources and our damage to natural ecosystems is simply unsustainable
• The distributions of income and wealth within and between economies have reached grotesque and historically unprecedented levels in the last few decades
• The global economy is unstable - as the recent banking crisis has demonstrated all too painfully
• "More is no longer better" - in the West, we are no longer being made happier or have higher levels of wellbeing as a consequence of having more material possessions. Instead we have record levels of depression and other mental illnesses.

In response to this situation, we need a revolution in social values - away from seeking only to maximise narrowly-defined financial profit or personal financial wealth or national GDP and towards a more holistically-defined concept of personal and social wellbeing. I would add that we need to (re?)discover the ability to think and decide from the standpoint of what will benefit us all, not just what will benefit ourselves or our immediate families. In other words, we need to make a transition to a "moral economy" in Stewart's terms.

The arts community is surely in a potentially powerful position to respond to and help address some of these challenges. Theatre, literature, film/TV and the visual arts in particular can be powerful media for radically new ideas and imaginings about how society could be organised to be developed and communicated, to large numbers of people at once and to some extent by-passing the often reactive and sometimes plain obstructive forces of government and the mainstream media.

So..perhaps we need not only creative works that show us how things are (pace Dickens, Zola, Steinbeck, An Inconvenient Truth, Enron, Guernica etc) but some imaginative and radical works that show us how things could be..in a constructive sense rather than the Hollywood disaster movie sense (or even The Age of Stupid).

We also need to engage whole communities in a multi-stranded debate about how society needs to change in very practical ways - and arts venues and facilities and their community programmes could be important resources to be used in that process.