Business: Help Wanted

It's time for corporate leaders to get off the sidelines on important public problems.

In late May, the media reported that prominent business groups were joining in serious discussions aimed at addressing our country's huge health insurance gap. This came as welcome news, because it hinted that American business leaders might get off the sidelines on major issues that confront this nation. We have not seen this kind of altruistic business ethic that in the 1940s led to the formation of the Committee for Economic Development, to guide America's transition to a peacetime economy, and the Economic Cooperation Administration, to get behind the American program to help Europe recover from the ravages of war.

Collective action in the public interest usually is the province of domestic government or international public consortia. But we have reached a point where paralysis prevails in the public sector. We suffer from what author Jonathan Rauch calls "demosclerosis," a condition characterized by a "me first" struggle for resources by a thousand special interest groups. Rauch documents the sorry trend in his book, Government's End: Why Washington Stopped Working (Public Affairs, 1999).

I was struck by the same message when it emerged last December during a forum on the government's worrisome budget problems. Comptroller General David M. Walker, and others he convened at the Government Accountability Office, voiced the view that government could not pull out of its downward fiscal spiral without pressure from responsible leaders on the outside. On this matter, I thought, the business community is the most effective messenger.

Responsible financial stewardship is a hallmark of American capitalism. But business leaders should engage with the public sector on a broader scale. In a May column titled "C.E.O.'s, M.I.A.," New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman lamented "the disappearance of an internationalist, pro-American business elite." On issues of public education, energy policy, health care, science funding and free trade, business should be pushing for better government policies, Friedman argued.

A few companies offer exceptions to the code of silence that generally prevails. IBM, with its efforts to promote global innovation and research on public sector management, is one example, and Microsoft's Bill Gates is devoted to making a difference on vital concerns of education and global health.

But business leaders need a forum for collective engagement with the public sector, as Jeffrey E. Garten, dean of the Yale School of Management, argued in his persuasive book, The Politics of Fortune (Harvard Business School Press, 2002). Lest "the country's chief executives . . . be seen as little more than self-serving protectors of their own special interests," Garten wrote, they should come together to help the country address its pressing challenges-preservation of the social safety net in an era of deficits, lifting billions of people out of global poverty ("the great moral issue of our times"), achieving the right balance between government regulation and self-regulation and more.