- January 12, 2015
- 1:17 pm
- Al Gini
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Many Shoulders, one city: Let’s change Chicago’s brand
Gini in a Bottle
Many Shoulders, one city: Let’s change Chicago’s brand
Al Gini
This essay first appears in Crain’s Chicago in the last week of December 2014.
As chair of a department of management, I am convinced that the business of business is to be successful at doing business. As a professor of business ethics, I also am convinced that the larger purpose of business is to provide for our collective wants, needs and security.
As Peter Drucker has suggested, business and society are in a symbiotic relationship. Business and management only can be morally justified if they provide for the greater well-being of their individual customers and the larger community. Business is not just a private profit center. It is a service center for others.
Chicago long has been known by several related monikers: the city of big shoulders; the city that works; the can-do city. Unfortunately, this reputation was earned partly because of the excesses of certain less-than-enlightened “barons of industry.” But a bigger piece of this historical reputation is based on the day-to-day efforts of a willing workforce and the insight and risk-taking of an entrepreneurial class.
In today’s global marketplace, the Chicago business community needs to restate and reaffirm our “brand” and our “can-do” commitment to ethics and enterprise. We need to make it clear that our brand is concerned with both our stockholders (owners) and our stakeholders (employees, customers and community).
We need to build a workforce and a workplace that is responsive to emerging economic requirements. We need to do business in a way that preserves and protects the environment. And we need to foster and encourage social justice and responsible economic practices both in Chicago and society as a whole.
This mantra is neither original nor novel, but it is necessary. And, at least once a year, we need to remind ourselves that the formula for achieving world-class status starts with each of us—employer and employee alike. Achieving a better future starts with learning from our past.
Al Gini is chair of the management department in the Quinlan School of Business at Loyola University Chicago.