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The cult of doing business
Erik Baker’s history of the entrepreneurial work ethic explores the unholy union between American psychology and American business.
At a time of great upheaval, he writes, “New Thought promised to restore power to the individual” and “grant practitioners the ability to overcome ‘concern’” about the “precarious labor market.” Eventually, this quirky strain of neo-transcendentalism evolved into what Baker calls a “doctrinally fuzzy success philosophy.” One of the more amusing figures, Napoleon Hill, a con man and the bestselling author of Think and Grow Rich(1937), urged his readers to cultivate a self that one could market, which required “imagination.” His own imagination invented a meeting with Andrew Carnegie as a ploy to sell more books; other creative schemes included credit fraud, an oil-stock scam, and embezzlement from charities. Baker describes Steve Jobs, who encouraged “an almost cult-like esprit de corps” in his Macintosh unit, as “the most ruthless entrepreneur to emerge from the counterculture.” In Silicon Valley, charismatic leadership of the kind that aroused the Austrian economists was given a friendly, New Age twist.
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