SINGING IN THE RAIN: COMMENCEMENT IN BUSINESS CRISIS

The Brigham Young University Marriott School of Management graduated its class of 2009 Friday, 24 April 2009, 5:00 p.m. BYU graduated 6000 students this spring, and the business school graduated a major village of that community. It took 20 minutes for the young people in the cap and gowns to march into the Marriott Center. It took almost another hour for each graduate to march in a line past an announcer who read her and his name to the congregation and then walk past the deans and high mucky mucks of the business department.

It seems like only yesterday that Billy Dalebout, my friend of long standing, was age 6 and laughing uproariously at his line in my ward’s primary program. Today, he became a man, or at least he graduated from the Marriott School of Business with a Masters Degree in Public Administration. I attended the Friday afternoon convocation at which the school leadership handed him his degree. His father Richard Dalebout, the Marriott School’s distinguished professor of Business Law, gave him a hug in public on the rostrum. I have known Richard and his wife Evelyn and their children for more than 35 years. Richard retires from teaching Friday and will soon be serving an LDS mission in Kinshasa with Evelyn. When the master of ceremonies mentioned this upcoming mission in his remarks from the pulpit, I turned to Evelyn and noted that the People’s Democratic Republic of Congo needs all the accountants it can get. [8^>) Protracted civil wars are expensive and require expensive bookkeeping.

It is an Alice in Wonderland sort of experience attending a Business School Convocation in the midst of the Great Depression of 2008 – 2009. The rhetoric inside the Marriott Center was all uplifting and positive, despite the rain of shoes during the past year.

I predict that the average business career of these graduates with their mint MBA degrees will last probably to 2054, maybe 2060 – depending on how long we live in the 21st Century and if the workers still have to service Social Security for the hoards of retired people and beneficiaries.

I also predict that business will be an entirely different sort of creation then. If anything the depression of 2008 onward will teach us that many of our assumptions about life in Technological civilization and business in particular have turned out to be quite bogus.

From about 1981 to 2007, the leaders and teachers of business schools, including those in the Marriott School, told us that modern business required advanced degrees because of the complexities of modern business. They also told us we had to pay these business leaders salaries and bonuses that were several hundred times what their workers got in pay, because we had to attract the best and the brightest and keep the best and the brightest with money. This means that modern business has the most expensive educated and the most heavily compensated CEOs and presidents and vice presidents EVER. Many of these expensive business leaders set the standard and the record for bad, incompetent and illegal behavior.

The professors and the business experts also taught us of the free market almost in mystical terms. They claimed it can solve all business problems, and that it should not be cluttered with laws and regulation. 2009 has taught us those were lies designed to distract the public and the government while the CEOs and the business experts pillaged with impunity.

My friend Billy now earnestly searches for a career in government. His career will probably be rather different from what he might have expected just a few short months ago. Too many in the private financial sector have so thoroughly and completely made a pig’s breakfast of the economy. As a result the private industry as a whole does not have the credibility necessary to take the lead. Now is the next great age of big government. The shape of these governments remains to be seen.

The events of the past two years illustrate that most business majors have forgotten the first and most important rule of business: if you are incompetent, you must be honest. If you are crooked, you must be clever. Many financial agents and gurus apparently were neither.

The featured speaker should have reminded the graduates of that rule. The star Professor of the Marriott School, Professor Albrecht will soon retire to serve a 3-year term as president of the Japan Tokyo Mission. The master of ceremonies predicted that he would not only be great as a mission president but transformational.

ASIDE – I always wonder how much more successful the LDS Missionary Program would have been if it had not been taken over by bureaucrats and general authorities who saw a mission as a rite of passage instead of an opportunity to teach and baptize people. I also wonder how much more successful the whole program would have been if they had found a way to get more Mormons on shorter, less-expensive missions. The Mormon mission experience started as a two to three year experience out of necessity because of the small numbers of available missionaries and the length of time it took to travel to far flung places. In the 21st century, the mission and its leaders have not kept up with modern times.

Professor Albrecht’s address contained the usual types of cliches that we get in talks of this type:

The importance of being a friend who inspires other to greatness, who helps others in times of need.

The importance of both serving an LDS mission and getting a BYU business degree in developing a strong testimony of the Church. From his definition, there must be few really strong testimonies in the Church.

ASIDE -- I have racked my brains to remember if anyone at my College of Humanities Convocation told us that a strong testimony of the Church depended on serving a mission and getting a Humanities degree, but who knows? My memory on that subject is getting a little grey and misty. I know plenty of people in other departments and colleges and in the administration so downright suspicious of the Humanities Department that they would reject that idea on principle. On the other hand, how many BYU Humanities majors helped swindle the aged out of the pensions in the past ten years, versus the number of BYU law and business major.

It fascinates me the extent to which BYU’s culture and the orthodox LDS priesthood subculture are both intensely and openly workaholic. To illustrate here are a couple of bits from Albrecht talk on the subject of “the triangle of personal character,” the three sides of this triangle being education, personal qualities and ( of course, this being BYU) gospel principles.

Albrecht believes in triangles. He developed the idea of the triangle of business fraud which is something like perceived gains, perceived peer pressure in the corporation, and money available to swindle. The master of ceremonies touted him as an expert on the subject, and Albrecht told us a story of the time an organization he worked for went corrupt and he got listed as a defendant in the 17 various lawsuits. He urged the corp to just come clean and take its punishments. Easy for him to say.

He urges the graduates to be unashamedly ambitious. – that we should always do your utmost best, work as long as is necessary, work long hours, do not obsess over credit. Do not use family or church as an excuse to not to get in and work hard and long on career assignments and getting ahead.

Albrecht also told us we should always hold home evenings and should always serve in the church, which he apparently sees in terms of positions first service second since he tells us about the times that he drove three hours both ways from his cabin to do his Sunday leadership work in Provo then back to the cabin.

He also said that we should not use business as an excuse not to serve in the Church. This means he used the same rationale in advocating workaholicness at work and workaholicness at Church.

COMMENTARY If more men in this Church would take their priesthood seriously, we would not have to burn out the same men in different positions repeatedly. I will not even mention the improvement it would be to ordain the women as well.

Professor Albrecht encouraged the graduates to Leverage our business trips to turn them into family time. Considering how expensive air travel currently has become, and considering how expensive air travel will soon become in the carbon-footprint obsessed future, it is probably not a good idea to tell students to double and triple the costs of business travel for the sake of quality time with kids and spouse.

Integrity he emphasized, which business professors always say to give things the gloss of moral philosophy. He gave us no definitions.


COMMENTARY Integrity is one of the most overrated of the supposed values. Integrity is always a matter of other people’s definitions, and in America at least, the definitions of business integrity are either shallow or vague. The whole financial disasters of 2007 and 2008 and the current gathering depression of 2009 happened in the context of supposed business integrity. Both fraud and integrity in business are a matter of definitions. He should have told us that we should be careful to understand our potential employers’ definitions of integrity and fraud before we get involved with them.

Meanwhile across campus, Mat Stokes, the 25 year old son of my next door neighbors Randy and Robin Stokes, a man I have known for nearly 40 years and a woman I have known for an even longer period of time, graduated today in human physiology / pre-medicine. His wife graduated in computer science.

In August they move to Dallas. He will start his studies at a Dallas medical school. She will work in one of Dallas's Technology industries. Mat had the foresight to take with him to Dallas a wife and a best boy friend. He also graduated in BYU's pre-medicine program; they will study together at the same Dallas Medical School.

I do hope that Matt Jenny and Billy did not let school get in the way of their educations and will not confuse paid employment with a useful career.