Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 14, 1994 TAG: 9409160003
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: D3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ALAN SORENSEN
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Such reform, it seems to me, would benefit businesses in the long run. It surely would prove fairer than the status quo, whereby employers who do offer health coverage subsidize those who don't.
I see no problem in general, though, with the business community asserting itself in the civic arena. Quite the contrary.
I know. Journalists are supposed to be biased against greedy businessmen. We're supposed to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, and all that.
Don't get me wrong. Like every working stiff, I hear the call of class consciousness. I enjoy the occasional rebellious thrill; for example, when I loosen my necktie.
Even so, I have observed that business types, while they don't have all the answers, can play - on balance have played - a progressive role in community affairs.
Not just with jobs and tax revenues have Roanoke's business leaders enhanced the valley's quality of life. Years ago, they quietly helped end institutional segregation in the city. They've been mainstays of the arts and culture scene, of United Way campaigns and human-services initiatives such as the free health clinic.
Business people also have played a constructive role in politics. Notwithstanding popular perceptions of an omnipotent elite able to tear down viaducts and throw up power lines at will, business leaders have been, if anything, not effectual enough in pursuing their political agenda.
They spawned Roanoke Forward, a bipartisan City Council slate in the '70s that had a far-reaching impact on local government. Too bad the slate was driven out by a populist tax revolt.
They backed a well-meaning effort to merge Roanoke city and county. Too bad that was a loser from the start.
They have lobbied for regional cooperation. (The Roanoke chamber, for instance, helpfully pressured localities to negotiate a regional sewage-treatment expansion plan.) Too bad regionalism remains stymied by political rivalry, social fears and an outmoded structure of local government.
Business leaders in Roanoke and across the state have joined city officials this year to talk about the impact of urban decay on economic development. Too bad suburban interests may not be ready yet to recognize their stake in cities' future.
Just as notable is businesses' growing involvement in education. Examples:
Franklin County's school-business partnership, now being copied around the region, according to which employers agree to hire only workers with high-school diplomas.
The chamber-organized Roanoke Valley 2000, a task force seeking local achievement of national education goals.
The Business-Higher Education Council, a statewide coalition of business leaders and presidents of Virginia's public universities striving to reverse the decline in state aid for higher education.
All these efforts are aimed at economic self-interest as much as civic virtue. They're all commendable and important. But another, little-noticed business contribution to community progress may ultimately prove the most significant.
I refer to the spread of a culture, still nascent in the corporate world, that goes by the name "quality management."
Essentially a body of knowledge about how to run organizations effectively, it responds to the fact that quality service has supplanted quantity production as the paradigm for success in our economy. Given that everything from schools to hospitals has for decades been organized on a factory model, it follows that all enterprises, public and private, can learn lessons from businesses' shift toward a quality culture.
I say "shift toward" because we're not anywhere close yet. Even among firms explicitly using one or another version of quality management, preaching mostly outpaces practice. Change from one paradigm to another comes neither fast nor easily.
The thing about capitalism, though, as with democracy and science, is that over time it rewards what works, while leaving the unuseful to wither away. In a knowledge-based economy, the promise of quality management is that it works.
The theory tells us that cooperation works better than competition. That impressing customers matters more than pleasing bosses. That authority is best devolved to front-line employees, who are expert in work processes and sensitive to shifts in markets. That good data are crucial for informing decisions and continually improving how work gets done. That learning organizations will outlive inflexible ones.
If the theory works, and the evidence suggests it does, we can assume it will spread beyond businesses to other enterprises. This already is happening. The New Century Council, a group of business leaders and others developing a regional economic strategy, springs from the quality precept that organizations need a "vision" of where they want to be, and a plan for getting there.
Roanoke County government and the local United Way are among non-businesses that, as members of the chamber-affiliated Western Virginia Quality Council, have begun experimenting with quality-management techniques.
In his book "After Virtue," Alasdair MacIntyre writes about three "central characters" in modern society: "the aesthete, the therapist and the manager." I believe none of these, managers included, should be taken as offering any sort of religious authority. But neither should quality management be regarded as merely the latest way for consultants to send their kids through college.
If, in the past, conquering armies served as instruments of reason's diffusion, agents of commerce have performed this role in recent times. Within capitalism, as with democracy and science, good ideas catch on no matter their source.
Here's a workplace philosophy that prizes workers' intelligence and the potency of teamwork, that decentralizes decision-making and combats hierarchy and boundaries, that regards toil not as a transaction by which one sells his unthinking labor but as a means of productive expression and fulfillment, that elevates reason over power. Surely this is an outlook destined to transcend flip charts in boardrooms.
Business leaders are no monolith, of course, and their social efforts at times seem halfhearted. We'll see, for instance, how seriously they push for Roanoke Valley 2000's No. 1 goal - fostering children's readiness to learn, in part by ending waiting lists for the CHIP health program and Head Start.
Meantime, though, if our region came to be distinguished by a culture of quality, I can't imagine us being an unsuccessful community. Whether citizens would show gratitude to the rapacious businessmen who spread the quality credo, I can't say.
I will say that people might feel better about the Chamber of Commerce if it had gotten behind health-care reform.
by CNB