What We Can Learn from Canada and Denmark
Bill George is professor of management practice at Harvard Business School, where he has taught leadership since 2004. He is the author of four best-selling books: 7 Lessons for Leading in Crisis, True North, Finding Your True North, and Authentic Leadership. With co-author Doug Baker he recently published True North Groups.
Mr. George is the former chairman and chief executive officer of Medtronic. He joined Medtronic in 1989 as president and chief operating officer, was chief executive officer from 1991-2001, and board chair from 1996-2002. Earlier in his career, he was a senior executive with Honeywell and Litton Industries and served in the U.S. Department of Defense.
Mr. George currently serves as director of ExxonMobil, Goldman Sachs, and the Mayo Clinic and also served on the board of Novartis and Target Corporation. He is currently a trustee of the World Economic Forum USA and Guthrie Theater and a former Trustee of Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He has served as board chair for Allina Health System, Abbott-Northwestern Hospital, United Way of the Greater Twin Cities, and Advamed.
He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2012. He has been named one of "Top 25 Business Leaders of the Past 25 Years" by PBS; "Executive of the Year-2001" by the Academy of Management; and "Director of the Year-2001-02" by the National Association of Corporate Directors. Mr. George has made frequent appearances on television and radio and his articles have appeared in Wall Street Journal, Business Week, Fortune, Harvard Business Review, and numerous publications.
Mr. George received his BSIE with high honors from Georgia Tech, his MBA with high distinction from Harvard University, where he was a Baker Scholar, and honorary PhDs from Georgia Tech, Bryant University, and University of St. Thomas. During 2002-03 he was professor at IMD International and Ecole Polytechnique in Lausanne, Switzerland, and executive-in-residence at Yale School of Management.
He and his wife Penny reside in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Question: Why did shareholders fail to curb some of the excessive risk taking of banks and finance companies that led to the crisis? (Dan Indiviglio, Atlantic Business Channel)
Bill George: Well first of all I think shareholders were blinded themselves. They were so caught up in the short term game. I have identified the root cause of this crisis as leaders who practice short termism, but the shareholders were caught up in the same game, how much can you get outright now and I think it was deeper than greed. It’s getting caught up in the fervor of we’re all going this direction. Everyone is doing well and no one was really taking a hard look at the risks and the naysayers were kind of pushed aside and so it was go, go, go and as Chuck Prince of Citigroup said famously, “You know we couldn’t stop dancing while the music was playing.” Well somebody needed to stop dancing and shareholders could have done that, but they chose not to.
Question: Should the U.S. follow the lead of Canada and Denmark by discouraging mortgages with less than 20 percent down payments? (Scott Sumner, the Money Illusion)
Bill George: The answer is absolutely. Show me the cash. You need to have skin in the game. By the way, I’ll apply this to healthcare. I apply it to every walk of life. You shouldn’t be able to get a 105% mortgage on a new house that is way beyond your means and it’s got to be you know show me the 20% you can come up with, absolutely. I was up in Canada at the Canadian Housing and Mortgage Corporation and also talked to Gordon Nixon, the head of Royal Bank of Canada. They didn’t have all these subprime problems because they kept their standards up. Does it benefit your citizens for people to get cars they can’t afford and have to default on the mortgage? No, it just causes untold misery. Better to stay in a rental facility. Yes, everyone wants to own their own home, but we need to save money to do that. Now back to the savings and consumption argument. This is a huge argument right now and I think it’s an indictment of the last ten years, our focus on consumption and it feels good. It’s one of these things it like a drug. It feels good while it’s happening. Everyone is spending. Great, the economy is going up. We’re racking up GDP points. We’re hiring more service workers. There is a price you pay just like the day after that drug and we’re paying a huge price because people haven’t saved and as a country we haven’t invested. We haven’t invested in infrastructure publically and privately we haven’t invested enough in manufacturing and research and develop and all those things that make this country great. I don’t think we can become just a service economy and we need to get back not trying to drive consumer spending to a higher percentage of the GDP. We need to lower that and put some money out there for investment and that’s a complex issue because it’s going to require restructuring of our capital gains tax so that you get greater benefits for starting a company or holding an entity for ten years than you do for a year and a day. Right now you get long term capital gains treatment for a year and a day. That’s not long term. I’m on the board of Exxon. We look at 25, 50, 75 years for those investments to payout. That’s what it should be, but we’re making 29 billion dollars in capital investments this year too and I think we need more companies focusing on how can they invest in the company and invest and create an investment economy and an innovation economy.
Question: Do we need to fundamentally reevaluate how we tax consumption versus savings?
Bill George: Well as you know the Europeans have a built in consumption tax in the VAT and the argument against that is it’s like a sales tax. It’s somewhat regressive. Your idea of putting a higher tax on luxury items, sure, why not? Why try to drive evermore materialistic society and I think we can get more a building society. What are we building here? Are we building a great country? This country was built on investment and in the eighties and nineties it was built on entrepreneurial companies growing up. I mean if you go back 20, 25 years companies like Microsoft, Intel, Walmart, Target, Cisco, Google they didn’t exist. They’ve grown up in the last 20, 25 years. Those are the big job creators and they’re also the big wealth creators. Genentech in the biotech field was just taken over by Roche for 98 billion dollars was the post market capitalization of the company, stunning. You know they turn out more drugs for a period of three or four years than all the U.S. pharmaceutical industry did. Why? Because they’re so innovative, they’re so creative. Isn’t that what we want? Don’t we want the YouTube’s out there and the Skype’s and the Google’s to be creating ideas for us? Same in healthcare, my company was basically an innovation machine. That was the proudest thing when Business Week said that because we’re treating so many more patients and helping save lives. I think that’s the key to the economy, so it’s a combination of investment and innovation, which are one in the same, but I think we need then to change the tax laws to favor those long term investments.
Recorded on December 9, 2009
Harvard management professor Bill George explains why we need to keep our standards up, and why tax laws need to change.
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Why vaccines are absolutely necessary
Vaccines have done their job so well that anti-vax parents have forgotten the horror of contagious disease.
- "Autism is caused by a lot of factors that we don't fully understand," says epidemiologist Dr Larry Brilliant, "but vaccines are not one of those factors."
- Vaccines have saved hundreds of millions of children's lives—they have eradicated smallpox, nearly eradicated polio, and they have reduced the population explosion. How? Thanks to vaccinations, parents no longer expect 50% of their children to die from disease, so they have less children.
- Vaccines have protected the lives of children so effectively that anti-vax parents—who only have their children's best interests at heart—have lost sight of how critical vaccines are. When polio was rampant in the U.S., parents waited in line for hours and hours to have their children vaccinated. Safety changes our mental calculus, but vaccinations must continue to ensure that safety lasts.
