With 2008/2009 looking ominously like 1929's Crash and the ensuing Great Depression, it's not surprising that journalists will zero in on tragic stories like the recent suicide of German billionaire Adolf Merckle, who threw himself under a train as his firm faced insurmountable debts. Merckle's family, I'm sure, is in a state of shock, a state the train driver likely shares. But how about his conglomerate's 100,000 employees? Imagine how they feel.
In France over the holidays, we commiserated with my wife's sister, whose employer has announced a restructuring plan that will seriously affect the lives of his employees. Though not directly linked to "la crise" - as the current economic climate is called - the move has already meant job loss, dislocation, and high anxiety. Close to retirement, sister-in-law is likely to be spared personal hardship, but she is genuinely upset - to the point of tears - about the effect on her co-workers. She has worked in the factory her entire adult life.
Elsewhere in France, it's a cousin who had to say a long, excruciatingly long, goodbye to his employer, a major electronics manufacturer, which once employed thousands of people in his provincial city. Cousin's last couple of years were spent retraining fellow employees, for jobs they knew were not going to materialize. "It was the financiers," he told us. They knew nothing - and cared less - about the core business. You can imagine the rest of the story - manufacturing is now done in China.
Both stories, very close to home, tell me that we're missing something big in the "whither capitalism?" debate. It's true, capitalism has earned itself a pretty rotten reputation of late, what with Bernard "Ponzi" Madoff, trillion dollar losses of intangible (and incomprehensible) assets, and numb skulled management by the behemoths of the US car industry.
What's missing is the human element. Apart from the unfortunate Herr Merckle, we haven't yet reached the brokers-out-windows depths of the Depression (though I recall that one of Madoff's victims ended his life). But regular people - whether evicted from their homes, bereft of their retirement savings, or given the pink slip - are already suffering in their millions.
Michael Moore, who keeps track of things in his native Michigan, wrote of the pre-Christmas atmosphere while Congress fiddled with the Big Auto bailout:
We have a little more than a month to go of this madness. As I sit here in Michigan today, tens of thousands of hard working, honest, decent Americans do not believe they can make it to January 20th. The malaise here is astounding. Why must they suffer because of the mistakes of every CEO from Roger Smith to Rick Wagoner?
Last summer, the excellent Franco-German TV channel ARTE ran an in-depth documentary on the disconnect between management and those being managed. Beyond the widening gap in remuneration, it was more a matter of the "I will it, therefore it will happen" school of management.
Daniel Goeudevert, former Ford and VW manager, described the attitude: "Our company expects X percent growth this year. But it's up to you - the line managers, engineers, technicians - to decide how to get there." Goeudevert said that "impossible" is not an acceptable answer, and that the result is that many highly qualified employees are driven to the psychiatrist - or worse.
Brothers Kenneth and William Hopper have written a book, The Puritan Gift, which, despite its possibly off-putting title, is increasingly becoming required reading as capitalists the world over ask themselves "how did we get here?" The Hoppers suggest that as business school MBAs, accountants, and financiers came to run companies, the link with the "main knowledge" - the core business that the Puritans strove to perfect - became increasingly tenuous. And get this: they point out that the "engine companies" that drove the mighty American economy were, not all that long ago, free of debt. Listen to a great BBC "Global Business" interview with the authors here.
CPAs should be confined to balancing (but not cooking) the books, crooks are best behind bars, and crony should just be a synonym for old friend, not an adjective for a deviant form of capitalism. None of them should be running the major business, financial, or political institutions that - properly led - might make Western economies the success they once were.
That's what the workers of the world would appreciate - decent leadership, in all senses of the term. In exchange, they'll perform wonders, and will be capitalism's best friends.