It’s about trust

There is a very nice interview with Bolko von Oetinger, Senior VP and Director of the Boston Consulting Group and Chairman of the BCG Strategy-Institute, in this month’s Brand Eins (Issue 03, April 2004)

His thoughts currently revolve arround the problems of capitalism and argues that capitalism/the economy was part of our culture but has now freed itself. It has taken up a life of its own and needs to be reintegrated into society or possibly will die. Cutting itself loose allowed for the financial scandals of our time. Profit is more important than trust in this new system and he quotes an article of Business Week from the hight of the crisis saying something like (translated by me from german): “ _Tell the trust, don’t distort the numbers, explain the situation to shareholders._ ” As he puts it very well, this means that matter of course isn’t matter of course anymore. The trust is shrinking. We need to get it back, we need to put it first. We need to make sure that things that are matter of course should be.

On top of that, diversity of cultures need to be suppored. The different countries want to and should keep their own culture and the integration of this diversity is actually one of the most important distinct capabilities that EU members can build.

I am starting to feel more and more that make the importance of shareholder value above all else might not be the best thing. Of course you can always argue that the market for corporate control as it exists in the US will punish companies that do bad things but this is often after the fact and it only punished those if things are perceived as bad. Sometimes this might not be enough.