Norman Schwarzkopf led 800,000 troops on a 100-hour turkey shoot in Iraq in 1991. Fourteen months earlier, Mikhail Gorbachev kicked a hole in the world's most famous wall. What these two events had in common, apparently, was that they were excellent moments of “business”.In his autobiography, How To Talk Dirty and Influence People, Lenny Bruce described business as "talking about nothing". By the end of the 20th century, it seemed business meant talking about everything; leadership, democracy, war, peace. These were some of the topics up for discussion at World Masters of Business, a heaveyweight seminar broadcast to a packed house at the Sydney Entertainment Centre.
Surely, though, the most fundamental law of safe business, be it the business of defense or politics or commerce, is to prevent anyone from sneaking advantage through a leak in your scheme. Well, I scammed a free ticket from the front desk by doing little more than being polite and looking as if I knew what was going on. I have roamed the Earth ever since snug in the knowledge that I defrauded the World Masters of Business.
Once inside, however, this victory turned somewhat dark. The morning opened to a live rendition, delivered from a stage draped in American, Australian and Russian flags, of that ghastly tune The Wind Beneath My Wings - a cynical bit of lyrical work in which an up-herself-backwards narrator manipulates the ongoing slavery of her subject through a condescending glorification of his subservient role. The Mechanic Beneath My BMW. The Desk Beneath My Portrait. The Arse Beneath My Face.
Though hideous, this was probably an appropriate theme for a seminar aimed at those who wished to learn how to effectively negotiate their way through other people.
What was surprising was the act that followed - a stand-up comedian. The audience howled with laughter as Peter Kay wheeled out a litany of Monica Lewinsky jokes, for heaven's sake. One would've thought that with all the methods of communication at its disposal - email, mobile phones, long lunches, etc – that the Hugo Boss crowd seated in the Sydney Entertainment Center would've heard such historical gags already.
At last, Norman appeared (we'll ignore the fact that he entered to John Farnham's You're the Voice - it's just too baffling to be bothered with). Norman was basically likeable, but difficult to trust, as most Westpoint “men-of-honour” are (it was on a point of honour that Norman's father, Norman senior, allegedly suppressed evidence that could have overturned the death sentence for the arguably innocent Richard Hauptmann in 1936).
His first-hand yarns reeked of apocrypha and he was clearly a master of the American triptych - that standard Hollywood vocal tool in which one must declare everything thrice, changing only one word each repeat, with emphasis on the changed word. Listen to it:
“So every year we would go back and we would allocate everything just as we had the year before. We allocated our food just as we had allocated it the year before, we allocated our ammunition just as we had allocated it the year before, we allocated our cash just as we had allocated it the year before...”
American's love doing this. All for the benefit, I suspect, of the greatest accent on Earth. And it does triple your screen time.
But he had a bit of the old Patton in him, Norman did.
"I like being first,” he said, as he stepped up to the podium. Later, he equivocated: “Show me a good loser and I'll show you a loser!"
He obviously hated the boss, “what's-his-name, Bill something-or-other" and referred to Washington DC as “the only place in the world where you can run ten miles in a straight line and still be at the scene of the crime”.
Norman believed the challenge of leadership was “to get people to willingly do that which they ordinarily would not do". He spoke highly of "character”, both moral and ethical.
“Ninety nine per cent of the leadership failures over the last I 00 years were not failures due to incompetence,” he said. “They were due to failures in character.”
Yet he also believed in failure as the destiny of all leaders.
“We all come into the pyramidal society and when we enter the workforce at the bottom there's lots of room. But as we move along in life, that pyramid gets narrower and narrower and every single one of us eventually gets knocked off that pyramid.”
How this news might have helped the fiscal community was unclear. But he did distil his experience into two pieces of advice which he could "guarantee” would make us all “successful leaders of the 21st century": “When placed in command, take charge"; and "Do what's right".
No doubt these words have caused all sorts of confusion throughout the Sydney business community ever since.
Gorbachev, by contrast, was an idealist, his socialist roots embedded in his DNA. Through an interpreter with the vocal timbre of Stephen Hawking, he told us that: “The foundation of success is not only the natural ability of the individual, or the leadership ability of the individual, but knowledge. Knowledge is essential. The most important thing for all is self-education.”
At times, his unsophisticated logic seemed borrowed from Chancy Gardener, the exalted simpleton from Jerzy Kosinki's Being There.
"Politics and business are like the sea," he said. "If you wait for fair weather before starting on your way you may wait always. So you should set sail. And you should know that sometimes the weather will be fair and sometimes the weather will be stormy, but it is only those who are prepared to go forward in fair weather and in storm, only people who are prepared to take the risk, who can hope to succeed. The important thing is to prepare for the trip.
"Don't panic when things go wrong,” he said. “Try again. I'm sure it will work.”
I noticed few punters wrote this particular gem down.
In reality, Gorbachev's appearance served as little but a big name to the local businessmen. He spoke mostly of globalization and foreign investment, eventually drifting into a broadside at the USA, whose flag dangled helplessly behind him.
"We used to speak of the need for a new world order,” he said. "Today we realise that new order is not really there. A very different strategy is being proposed by the United States. They are critical of the United Nations administrative council. They are critical of the role those organisations should play. And they go as far as to totally reject the roles of those institutions in world politics. We have seen that in the current crisis over Yugoslavia, where NATO has acted without the mandate of the United Nations."
But getting back to business, what nobody mentioned here, amid all the talk of character, quest for knowledge and sailing, is that to be a successful businessman today you must first be a liar and, hopefully, a thief. You must exchange for money something which is not worth as much. You must charge people for the use of lightning. You must extract dollars from them each time they want to speak to their mothers. You must sell credit cards to children - at their schools, no less - by convincing them of how easily affordable they are, only to prosecute them with the full weight of the law when they naturally, humanly default. You must do this quietly and in a dignified manner, so as not to arouse the suspicion of idealists, lest the laws get changed and you wind up in jail next to people who sell drugs to addicts who need them or men who defraud banks so that they can feed their families. None of this was mentioned because the audience was built of such fiscal hoodlums and it's dumb to say “nigger" at a Black Panther's convention.
Perhaps I'm being a little politically undergraduate here, but it's hard not to feel your insides tilting to the left in a barn full of power-profit enthusiasts, some of whom had paid a square grand for a seat.
But the messages were there, for those who wished to hear them. Schwarzkopf himself (who, I might add, applauded The Wind Beneath My Wings as "one of my favourite songs"), while pontificating about leadership, made three apparently contradictory statements.
“Whenever there are three or more people together there is always a leader.”
“Every one of you is a leader ... and if you think you are a leader, then, by golly, you are a leader."
And…
“The leader is often not the person who thinks he is the leader."
If all were true, leaders would exist, not exist and both wrongly and rightly think they exist, all at the same time.
I don't believe Schwarzkopf, a careful man at least, made a mistake in this pre-planned 40-minute speech. I think what Norman was telling us is that to be a leader in the 20th century, you've got to be full of shit.
A fine example of his ability in this department came through in his somewhat unnecessary defense of Operation Desert Storm, where he claimed he knew what they were doing was "just" because of the mail he received while in Saudi Arabia, “the equivalent of 28 football fields piled six feet high with mail, 99.9 per cent of which was behind us”.
One can only assume that the disgruntled 0.1 per cent was written in Arabic and sent by Iraqis who, through some major security blunder, had been handed the address of the Commander-in-Chief of the Allied Forces.
But all of this is bosh. Leadership plays only one part in the business world, and democracy plays practically none, so one has to ask what Schwarzkopf and Gorbachev were doing at the World Masters Of Business. The answer, I think, is that WMOB was simply a rock concert for accountants. I doubt anyone was seriously here to pick up some top-drawer business tips, although many were scribbling down in notepads (the Lewinsky jokes, probably). Essentially, the World Masters of Business was a motivational excursion - the chance to get turned on by the sight and sound of some true white-collar heavyweights. And in that arena, it was indeed inspirational. I marched back to Deli-France and demanded a tuna roll with no butter.
For me, however, the most educational scene of the day played out by the side of the stage, as Gorbachev exited after ending his speech. As several collars milled about, trying to get a glimpse of the man, a young executive type began to argue with security, demanding to be allowed backstage for an audience with Gorby that he clearly had no official right to conduct.
Security refused and the moron began using everything he'd learned on the day, replying to a security staffers assertion of “l can't help you” with a well-rehearsed: "I know you can't help me, that's why I'd like to speak with someone else who can!”
He was basically told to get stuffed.
FOOTNOTE: There were, in fact, other speakers on the day besides Schwarzkopf and Gorbachev - notably, that memory bloke from the late night infomercials, but I honestly cannot recall his name or a single thing he said.
