Penalty Blog

On-campus

I attended the Mina Nair speech that she gave at the Writer’s Voice. I found it thoroughly enjoying. Mina Nair was an insightful, interesting down to earth speaker. Her stories of her filmmaking were entertaining, and it was amazing to hear about all she’s seen and done throughout her life. I also really admire her for her open and powerful methods of breaking down walls, whether based on gender, race, class, or any other differentiating characteristic. She is definitely a powerful and confident woman who is full of life and love for the world around her. I particularly like that she gardened as a hobby. It’s nice to see that someone who has accomplished so much and who is an amazing creative and passionate individual still has relatively mundane hobbies, and can appreciate the calm of a garden. Mina Nair was all around awesome.

On-campus

This afternoon I attended a talk by the Whole Foods Market CEO, John Mackey. His Conscious Business plan is thought by many to be revolutionary because of it’s unusual strategies and it’s concern for individuals besides shareholders, including customers, employees, and suppliers. It was an interesting talk for me because while economics is an important part of political science, I don’t know nearly enough about it. I learned a great deal about the potentials of capitalism, which is a system that I typically find to be exploitative and greedy in nature, and the information given allowed me to expand alter, and reinforce various ideas that I have about the capitalist system. The potential Mackey highlighted was the ability of corporations to increase overall wealth for many varying groups and the idea that profits can be a means to the end of both helping others and increasing business success, instead of being ends themselves. I particularly appreciated and respected Mackey’s advocating of corporate philanthropy, and the Whole Foods program of micro-finance loans in poorer countries where they get many of their products. With that said, I did have a couple of problems with Mackey’s talk. First, many of his methods of implementing his business strategy are focused around love. I am all for compassionate capitalism, but his methods were a bit too cheesy for me to take seriously. If even I, a bleeding heart liberal, am unable to fully get on board with his strategies of love in the office, I doubt that many individuals in business, which is often a cutthroat and brutal profession, would be able, or would even want to follow Mackey’s strategies. I feel that he has a great business model, but his really great potential contributions to business, like helping others through philanthropy and other programs, could possibly lose credibility due to his extreme version of compassionate capitalism. Secondly, throughout the presentation, Mackey made two comments that I found somewhat offensive, involving both sexist and xenophobic content. The xenophobic comment may have been a joke, I couldn’t tell, but the sexist comment seemed completely genuine. He caught himself halfway through it, after his point was made clear, and then had the gall to say that he gets in trouble for “being honest.” As someone super interested in the feminist perspective of all areas of study, I have learned to develop a tough skin with sexism, and not get too easily offended. With that said, listening to Mackey preach about helping everyone through business, and then drop an offensively sexist comment was both shocking and saddening to me. Overall though, I enjoyed and learned a great deal from the lecture.