THE CORPORATE IDENTITY CRISIS
Today a new crisis has struck. But this one is different. Unlike all previous crises during the industrial era, it involves not only money but the entire energy base of the society. Unlike the crises of the past, it brings inflation and unemployment simultaneously, not sequentially. Unlike those of the past, it is directly linked to fundamental ecological problems, to an entirely new species of technology, and to the introduction of a new level of communications into the production system. Finally, it is not, as Marxists claim, a crisis of capitalism alone, but one that involves the socialist industrial nations as well. It is, in short, the general crisis of industrial civilization as a whole.
The upheaval in the world economy threatens the survival of the corporation as we know it, throwing its managers into a wholly unfamiliar environment. Thus from the end of World War II until the early 1970’s the corporation functioned in a comparatively stable environment. Growth was the key word. The dollar was king.Currencies remained stable for long periods. The postwar financial structure laid in place at Bretton Woods by the capitalist industrial powers, and the COMECON system created by the Soviets, seemed solid. The escalator to affluence was still ascending, and economists were so confident of their ability to predict and control the economic machine that they spoke casually about “fine tuning” it.
Today the phrase evokes only derisive snorts. The President wisecracks that he knows a Georgia fortune-teller who is a -better forecaster than the economists. A former Secretary of the Treasury, W. Michael Blumenthal, says that “the economics profession is close to bankruptcy in understanding the present situation—before or after the fact” Standing in the tangled wreckage of economic theory and the rubble of the postwar economic infrastructure, corporate decision- makers face rising uncertainties.
Interest rates zigzag. Currencies gyrate. Central banks buy and sell money by the carload to damp the swings, but the gyrations only grow more extreme. The dollar and the yen perform a Kabuki dance, the Europeans promote their own new currency (quaintly named the “ecu”), while Arabs frantically off-load billions of dollars worth of American paper. Gold prices break all records.
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