Virtues that shaped Lankan business in 2006

We tend to be steadfast in our malleability in the face of the inertia of either matter or men; and unlike our counterparts in America, we do not risk failure and ruin by constantly trying to reach beyond ourselves just to be at the cutting edge of what is humanly possible.
In fact, it is because our businesses are, for the most part, modest and prosaic in their vision and have become habituated to a narrowly pragmatic creed that they have the malleability to plough on and grow to become, when exceptionally skilled, those highly diversified blue chip conglomerates.

The narrow utilitarian pragmatism and expediency for which we are renowned held fast in 2006 as the mainstays of most Lankan businesses. It perhaps is just as well that our businesses should be habituated to such a narrowly pragmatic creed, which is often stereotyped as womanly “practicalism”.

It is difficult to imagine what other creed could have sustained our businesses, when it has been our fate to live in a tempestuous economic environment, as a consequence of the cultural proclivity of our nation to entrust economic policy and fiscal management to statist ideologues, lowly-cultivated practitioners and borderline criminals.

One needs to be very practical indeed to yield humbly to the demand for undistinguished goods and services that such an environment imposes on us. For only the cheerfully mediocre, having become accustomed to taking more than their share, and lacking in the ability to conceive a distinguished and consummate goodness, would be happy and at peace with the profits obtained with such lack of distinction in the work of their hands and the creations of their minds.

Yet imagine the bankruptcies and the general chaos that would ensue, especially in our economic environment, if in the place of malleability we had heroic steadfastness that, undaunted by defeat, impervious to advice and risking isolation from men, sees the willingness to be whatever the circumstances demand as the mainspring of spiritual self-destruction.

It is indeed a blessing, even if it is in disguise, that the pragmatic temper of our business is so far removed from the quintessential pragmatism of Americans.

In fact, it is because our businesses are, for the most part, modest and prosaic in their vision and have become habituated to a narrowly pragmatic creed that they have the malleability to plough on and grow to become, when exceptionally skilled, those highly diversified blue chip conglomerates.

Besides, what is growth through conglomeration but the refusal of single core businesses to risk failure to deal with the imperative call of growth for continuous improvement and innovation aimed at everything from cost-efficiencies and resourcing to know-how and value engineering and positioning?

Some might say, a conglomerate is a faceless timeserver – “One who serves only for a time, and afterwards deserts or ‘falls away’” – and one who would never have the effect of courageously devoting to the progress of any industrial sector, as would be the effect of a business with “an irreducible centre of uniqueness”.

Nevertheless, we cannot be expected to do things differently.

True greatness and tragic destiny might be the consequences of heroic steadfastness and obstinacy. But why would any of us want to risk ruin for true greatness?

We live in a nation that is desperate and misgoverned, where even hard work finds the crown of mere success elusive. When it comes to the manly assertion of our will, we are apt to fall back on duplicity, manipulation and animal aggression – (surely, this type of conduct is not limited to Harry Jayewardena) – while relegating the argumentizing assertiveness of a rational being to naivety. Perhaps, as the ethnic conflict seems to tell us, violence, not thought and action, is the only possible agent of change with us – which makes thuggery our quintessential method of cooperation.

No, it is not given to desperate nations to witness the heroically creative energies of men who would live nobly or die nobly.

The narrowly pragmatic chase after profit, with its stubborn refusal to admit a vision of perfection as the guiding star or the measure of value, alone fits a nation that has failed miserably to inspire and sustain a passionate devotion to all that is best in existence.

In such a nation what becomes of its people in business? Do they become culturally conditioned materialists through and through – that is, neurotic lovers of pleasure, profit and prestige whose activities are untouched by a spirited yearning for the ideal, the eternal and the sacred?

Well this much is at least clear – there aren’t many business leaders in this country of whom it could be said that they are idealists working on matter and refining the material world profitably.

Of those of whom it could be said that an idealistic type of utilitarianism is animating them, Ranjan Yatawara stands out. Speaking of the globality of Haycarb, he said,

“It was the sheer interest in the product that drove me to be number one in this business, which was like infatuation with a hobby.” And he added: “I have often been called an impatient perfectionist.”