Business, Industry, and Education for Success

Books by Wilson Jeremiah Moses

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Business Industry and Education for Success

By Wilson J. Moses

Lines written to a close friend, a representative American intellectual, and anti-intellectual, who not surprisingly, holds a prestigious advanced degree in the liberal arts from a major university. Not sent, Friday, November 9, 2007, in response to the following anti-intellectual statement:

Of course, these are [my] views of one who has about as much regard for the academy as you for business. The former being a blood-sucking nihilistic benefactor of the latter's practical benefits brought to society. I'm sure you can see the errors of such a belief.—[Name withheld]

Dear Anti-Intellectual,

How can you possibly imply such a dichotomy between business and the academy? There is a seamless, joyous, celebratory, and mutually nurturing connection between the American academy and the American business world. Penn State has an outstanding business school, ranked 18th in the nation, and the business faculty are better paid than the faculties in mathematics and the natural sciences. I improved my position considerably, when I came to this business-oriented university and decided to introduce my business history course, which was highly "successful." As a good capitalist should, I invested my subsequent salary increments, instead of spending them.

I am surprised by your presumption of my [dis] regard for business. I have served on the Liberal Arts Committee on Business Education for many years.   I cooperate profitably with the Penn State Business programs, and I am exploring the possibilities of developing closer ties between the history department and the Business School's program in Besançon France. For several years I taught a course on the history of American business, which was officially approved as a social science elective for the business major and which enjoyed popularity with business undergraduates.

My interpretation of American history is "Hamiltonian." Translation: I argue that the American Civil War represented the triumph of industrial capitalism over the traditional slave-based agrarian economy of Jeffersonian democracy. In fact, I argue that slavery fell—as Ralph Waldo Emerson observed, in his poem "Wealth"—due to the rise of industrial morality and the triumph of the Hamiltonian capitalist ethic. My theory, while distinctly my own, is nonetheless indebted to both Adam Smith and Karl Marx. It is not a "cult theory," based on some thankfully moribund deconstructionist jargon.   My theories owe something to my immersion in the thought of Booker T. Washington and Marcus Garvey. Contextualizing their ideas has contributed tremendously to my theory of African American business mythology, as I hope is discernable in the chapters in my most recent book Creative Conflict (2004).

Thus, it should be evident that my positions on business, commerce, and industrial capitalism, are subtle and complicated. I should like to think that they are at least as ironic as those of Thorstein Veblen, who distinguished between the "industrial process" that produces goods and services for the benefit of mankind, and the greedy parasitism that in the name of "business enterprise," does nothing but cripple industries, exploit workers, inflate real estate, speculate in futures, and manipulate money supplies. I praise the industries that produce steel, electricity, transportation, and medical technologies.

The "academy" is obviously an active partner to numerous business communities, and fiscally consecrated to their sustenance and celebration. Nonetheless, Jeffrey Pfeffer, a distinguished professor at the Business School at Stanford, warns his students that, while the MBA can be an intellectually stimulating degree to pursue, it does not necessarily have many practical applications. See Jeffrey Pfeffer: "The Value of an MBA" an interesting and witty interview for NPR's "Morning Edition," August 28, 2002, Audio File, 3:15 minutes. I have heard a version of Pfeffer's statement from a wealthy and successful Business School alum of Penn State University, as well. Check out the audio at the Stanford Business School home page: Stanford Archive

One of the most interesting phenomena that I have covered in my courses on American business history is the genre of the "success book," which constituted a standing unit in my course. I recently found results of about 11,600,000 for my Google search on "success books." I found another 480,000 results for my search on "success seminars." The genre of the black business book, for example George Frazer's Success Runs in our Race, is also well established in America. Such books are flawed by the inability of their authors to provide rational definitions of race, or of success.   The traditionalism of Frazer's approach, can easily be observed by a visit to his web site: FraserNet

Like my colleague at the Stanford MBA program, I am a modestly "successful" capitalist. But I offer my students no illusion that I can teach them how to achieve "success" in business, or any other field. Neither does my honest colleague at the Stanford Business School. The project of Frazer is to sell books and CDs and charge admission fees for seminars and conferences, with an obvious profit-motive in mind.   His "product" is the promise to assist African Americans along the road to success. He markets this product to African Americans. He is too much the "businessman" to donate his advice gratuitously.

People who seek such assurances as Frazer offers will, of course, purchase his product, and participate in his African American bourgeois "success" seminars, or select from among the multitude of other traditional "Success Books," black and/or white, which continue to proliferate.

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posted 28 November 2007