The photo on the right is the entrance to the elevator in
what was the Bank of America headquarters when I first worked there. The elevators and the entry atrium have been
kept the same. The building is now
filled with legal and accounting offices.
I took this very same elevator to meetings with top Bank of America management when I made presentations or worked on management committees.
I challenged myself to recreate my worldview from those days. Could I see the world with my twenty-five year old eyes?
The answer was immediately and correctly 'no'.....
The answer was immediately and correctly 'no'. As an example, once betrayed by a friend, we
can never see that friend with our earlier innocence and love. The world is constantly changing and our
perspective must be shaded by our experience.
One thing that I am only recently reflecting upon, is my stunningly rapid rise in business. I rose straight to the top and became the youngest vice president in American banking with offers to be president of several large banks. (The fact that I am a Jew may not have been noticed because of my last name.) I see many young Lefty friends getting nowhere in the corporate world. I am beginning to suspect that having been a prominent Republican (president of the local and largest chapter of Young Republicans, campaign manager and legislative analyst for a Republican Assemblyman) may have been helpful. San Francisco at the time was tolerant but not Lefty. I don’t think industrial commerce likes Lefties --- it doesn’t trust them.
The second thing I notice is that I was desperately searching for the meaning of a commercial world. Except for civil rights, I was alienated from the Left.
I came of age with a standard ‘radical’ 19th Century view of the world--- Wobbly and communist ideas, just as most current college graduates have.
I was fortunate because I acted on my views and tried to
escape ‘the capitalist Coca Cola oppression of America.’ I ended up in Israel on a kibbutz and as
production planner at a union run aircraft factory. My communist and pro-union
ideas were promptly shattered.
In searching for an alternative I had very little to go on. I knew Adam Smith well, I had a superb classical U. of Chicago education; I personally knew the Ayn Rand (born Alice Rosenbaum) crowd, had read Hayek, Milton Friedman and Schumpeter. I was taken by Wesley Mitchell’s business cycle theory and went to graduate school in economics (U.C. Berkeley) to study Mitchell’s work. U.C. Berkeley kicked me out, after finishing the class work for a Ph.D, when I argued for the privatization of the U.S Postal Service at a time that Fidel Castro was the darling of the economics department.
It turns out that I couldn’t have created a rigorous coherent understanding of commerce without the subsequent 15 years of small business consulting, creating the Briarpatch network, advising large international corporations and creating a school for small business marketing, finance and management.
The core understanding of business required that I see the three components of commerce (trade, industry and clientry) that are explained in the online Gods of Commerce book.
The final synthesis of a theory of commerce is covered in
the book Commerce which came out of a shocking dinner with a brilliant young
business consultant who was intellectually stuck (rejecting the Left but no where to go) just where I had been forty years earlier as
I rode the Bank of America elevator to the executive floor. I wrote Commerce for both of us.
Considering how long it took me to create the theory of commerce and the unique experiences that shaped it, I realize I may not live long enough to see the theory appreciated.