The origins of Mitt Romney’s corporate worldview

The nagging problem with the consulting worldview, however, is that it easily loses sight of the human costs of business efficiency. Corporate consultants — now part of a $366 billionglobal industry — may have revolutionized the way people think about companies. But they’ve rarely been asked to assess how a company fits into society, what its purpose is beyond raising returns for shareholders or what happens after an employee is laid off in the name of efficiency.

“I’ve never seen a strategy consultant that was given a project [that asked] how can we create more jobs?” Kiechel said. “I do think that over the course of most of its history, corporate strategy and the people who thought about corporate strategy — like the consultants — they did have rather a blind spot to the human dimension of what their ideas and analysis would entail.”

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 A collection of cartoons about the former Massachusetts governor.

Of course, it can be argued that the role of a business consultant is to make a company more efficient and more profitable, whatever the human costs. The role of an American president, however, is often to soften precisely those human losses. As a presidential candidate, Romney has translated his business experience into an economic policy focused on helping companies make more money. His plan largely calls for loosening regulations and lowering corporate taxes. The unspoken assumption is that helping American companies will also help the American people — another way of saying that corporations are people.

Romney says he helped create more than 100,000 jobs at companies that received investments from Bain Capital, including new jobs that were added at the firms after he left the private-equity world. The central argument of his candidacy is that his private-sector experience qualifies him to be president at a time of high unemployment.

“I think if people want to have someone who understands how the economy works, having worked in the real economy, then I’m the guy that can best post up against Barack Obama,” he said at a debate Mondayin South Carolina.

But there have been signs in recent years that some of the ties between corporate America and the rest of the country have weakened. Major U.S. multinational firms — think marquee names such as General Electric and Intel — have become hugely profitable as they’ve expanded overseas. Yet that success has not necessarily resulted in more jobs in this country. As a whole, U.S. multinational firms reduced their workforce here by 2.9 million between 1999 and 2009, according to Commerce Department data. Meanwhile, they added 2.4 million workers overseas.

It has also been hard to miss that since the financial crisis, corporate profits have largely rebounded, but unemployment remains stuck far above pre-recession levels. Wages have been stagnant for working-class Americans, and inequality has grown.

Romney has certainly noted that as companies chase growth, there can be personal costs. In “No Apology,” he writes that as a lay pastor in the Mormon Church, he counseled families that were hit by job losses.

“Marriages faltered, faith dwindled, illnesses appeared, countenances changed,” Romney writes of the people he helped in the Boston area through his church. “Ever since these experiences, unemployment is not merely a statistic to me.”

He adds: “Given the beneficial effects for the economy, for the nation and for the average citizen, we should not restrict trade or burden productivity. But as a nation we must do everything we can imagine to help the affected people transition to new and more productive employment.”

Romney spent his private-sector career fixated on the productivity question. The test of his campaign may be whether he can convince voters in a struggling economy that he’s the best candidate to handle the people question, too.

yangjl@washpost.com

Jia Lynn Yang is a business reporter for The Washington Post.

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