大象传媒

大象传媒

IN BUSINESS

MISSED A PROGRAMME?
Go to the Listen Again page

Thursday 8.30-9.00pm,
Sunday 9.30-10.00pm (rpt)

Programme details听

12听贵别产谤耻补谤测听2009

About this programme by Peter Day

The Puritans have had a bad press. Severe, unsmiling, critical of gaiety or relaxation, non-initiates felt uncomfortable with the Puritan ethic long before the Puritans migrated to the New World from England seeking God鈥檚 Kingdom upon Earth.

The Hopper Brothers do not see things this way.

William and Kenneth Hopper think it鈥檚 the Puritan ethic that moulded not just America but American business as well.

The book they have written around this thesis is not very new. It was acclaimed when it was published two years ago, and it is just out in paperback.

But before that the authors circulated many copies of the manuscript to all sorts of people.

One of them has been sitting on my desk for almost ten years. I glanced at it from time to time but the title 鈥淭he Puritan Gift鈥� rather put me off.

What鈥檚 a 鈥済ift鈥� about? Were not the Puritans grim confiscators of joy who dressed in a severe uniform of black and white and who sought to build the Kingdom of Heaven on the unforgiving shores of New England?

Yes, they were. But, the Hopper brothers think that it is the energy and organisation of the Puritans that inspired American business practice for much of the last 200 years and lead American companies to quite extraordinary success.

I opened The Puritan Gift for the first time only a few weeks ago and realised at once that the thesis was an important one which chimed with many of the ideas explored quite regularly in In Business.

Scottish born, Will Hopper is an investment banker who lives in London. Kenneth Hopper went to America to be an industrial consultant many years ago and is now a naturalised American citizen (though he has preserved his distinctive Glasgow accent as you can hear in the programme).

The book is a compelling narrative history of American management, demonstrating how many of the distinctive Puritan practices moulded American companies and kept them on the straight and narrow.

American business (say the Hoppers) was driven by great purpose and organisation which owes its commitment to that bold voyage of the Puritans to New England in 1629, nine years after the Pilgrim Fathers arrived in some chaos and too late in the season. Half of their numbers perished.

The Puritans under John Winthrop came slightly later, and they were well equipped for a New World with a vision of what they wanted to build there and the abilities and the skills they would need to make it happen. Hands on skills (and a love of tinkering) are a hallmark of American business leaders.

You may not like them but you know where you are with the Puritans.

The Hoppers hint that when the Puritan disciplines started breaking down in business thirty years ago the way was laid for financial engineering (not the old fashioned metal bashing), big borrowings and outsourcing and many other things that have imperilled the whole American system (as we now know) over the past decade.

Companies thrive when they are led by engineers and inventors with insights into the whole process of production, but do not always do so well when leaders are accountants or financial engineers with their eyes on the quarterly earnings figures.

The Puritan Gift - and this week鈥檚 programme 鈥� tries to explain why it worked for so long.

And as well as the Hoppers, I鈥檝e also been hearing about two other approaches to the conventional business thinking that seems to have proved so threadbare over the past two years.

So: What have we to learn from the ideas of the Romantic movement that swept Europe in the 18th and early 19th centuries? And why is Islamic finance growing so fast, based as it is on very different principles from western models of capitalism?

Maybe it is time for new ideas.