Businesses cannot keep buying back door influence to defend and advance their commercial interests, but must show leadership in community change, writes Rob Campbell.
“Cause I going to make you see / There’s nobody else here, no one like me
I’m special / So special / I got to have some of your attention, give it to me”
– The Pretenders
OPINION: Chrissy Hynde was not part of the group of company directors who recently made a public call for more transparency and clarity in planning from the Government over the rebuild of economic activity from the Covid pandemic.
I was, and that informal group continues to discuss options and put forward proposals in various forums. I’m pleased we have done this because although it caused some negative reactions, the process has generated some better communication.
The director group were never “pretenders”, even without Chrissy Hynde, to run things ourselves. We just thought there were key skills in business not being utilised by government agencies and aware that business and other parts of the community contribute best to social outcomes when we have clear objectives and rules.
To everyone else, including Government, I suspect we just looked like another self-serving elite on the scrounge for influence, claiming to be special on account of the brass in our corporate pockets.
I’ve been thinking about what the experience means about our government agencies, business and how we best work together. There is a wide and deep conversation to have about how modern democracy and economy are and can be.
There is nothing ‘special’ about business. In terms of influence on politics and delivery of government services business already gets plenty of say. The ‘brass in pockets’ is influential.
Right now I’m just writing about the narrow bit of it we have recently experienced.
There is nothing ‘special’ about business. In terms of influence on politics and delivery of government services business already gets plenty of say. The ‘brass in pockets’ is influential.
Business and the people who run it have skills of course. But like all skills these are limited and limiting. Limited because no one is omnipotent outside of their own fantasies. Limiting because the application of those skills in business is narrow in targets and this is not a mind-expanding exercise.
When we interact with political leaders you can see that difference between people who are weighing a wide range of matters and commercial leaders who focus on one thing or a small range. ‘Fix this’, ‘do that’ meets ‘on balance’ and ‘the best advice seems to be’.
This is not solved by giving business more even more influence. Give us power and we will use it and it would be a brave gambler who would bet heavily on us targeting the best social outcome consistently based on our historical performance.
There is a wide difference between ‘Government’ and ‘government agencies’. We elect the former and mainly deal with the latter.
I suspect many politicians get to high position and are surprised at how difficult it is to get done what they would like to do. An avalanche of other stuff from the trivial to the tedious to the traditional gets in the way.
And then they find that the agencies they thought were there to do their bidding are not all that well equipped for the task. They are structured and staffed and motivated to a significant extent to do what previous Ministers wanted. It is not easy to shift to any new play quickly or effectively in big, highly structured organisations. Agile does not live here.
Worse than this, as you get out of the tight circle of Ministry bunkers around the Beehive, you find a whole lot of dysfunction, confusion, and often simply run down or overrun agencies. This is not a criticism of individuals but just as our country has allowed our physical infrastructure to run down so has the social infrastructure to deliver policy on the ground been weakened.
Whether this is by neglect or intent does not really make much difference. We lack effective ways to meet urgent and changing demand.
To me this is now a major issue in effective reaction to crises and the creation of the new social services we need. This seems particularly the case where agencies are too stacked with people from privileged culture and powerful position delivering what they think are the right services to those from the other cultures with little power or privilege with whom the service does not resonate.
Somehow we have to turn this around as some are trying to do.
What can directors do better? We cannot do this by staying publicly quiet about things we do not like, but utilising the old channels of back door influence to defend and advance our commercial interests and the occasional spasm of social concern.
In the commercial world we have to be aware and respectful of all of this. We are not coming to discussions on what the government should do or how to best do it with clean hands.
I can see and hear it in the politicians I talk with.
They hear us saying that we have special skills but they know our productivity levels are not high on a global scale. They hear us saying that we have the wider social interest in mind but they know we have taken lazy advantage of low pay for years without doing much about it other than complain when the minimum wage goes up.
They hear us praising our own progress on gender equality but they know we ignored the issue for many years and even now duck and dive around the statistical pond on it but still don’t match the simple targets they set and met in the public service.
They hear us self-proclaiming ourselves Champions of Climate Change or Sustainable Finance. But they remember how little we did until embarrassed into it and even now how little we really prioritise it.
They know who led recent improvements in health and safety practice and also know it was not us.
I could go on but you get the picture. You can understand them being sceptical.
So what can directors do better? We cannot do this by staying publicly quiet about things we do not like, but utilising the old channels of back door influence to defend and advance our commercial interests and the occasional spasm of social concern.
All that does is to entrench our own often outdated systems and beliefs and the systems and beliefs of sclerotic hierarchies in government agencies, while reinforcing the doubt in the minds of transforming political leaders that our protestations of being sincere and special withstand real scrutiny.
What we can do is change ourselves.
Make the board membership changes now which align us with our communities. Change our objectives now to fully include all stakeholder interests. Change our job structures, pay and incentives now to be fair, transparent and consistent with our wider stakeholder interests.
Make ourselves special, worthy of attention – for more than the brass in our pockets.
