Global companies urged to adopt indigenous practices to fight "dispirited nature of enterprise"

A Māori academic advocating a global move back to the traditional wisdom approach of indigenous business to clean up a “dispirited nature of enterprise” says tackling ethical failures and environmental disasters should be a worldwide priority.

Dr Chellie Spiller (Ngāti Kahungungu, Pākehā), a senior lecturer with The University of Auckland Business School’s Department of Management and International Business, says global markets are now punctuated by shoddy standards, unfair executive compensation, poor employment relations and substandard ethical about-turns.

She says businesses across the world could benefit from adopting indigenous practices – such as those practiced by some Māori and American Indian businesses – that include considering the future of stakeholders such as employees, suppliers and local communities, and long-term future generation orientation.

And Dr Spiller – who will travel to North America next week on a five-month Fulbright Senior Scholar Award to study indigenous business ethics of American Indian companies – is urging world markets to acknowledge the old English meaning of the word ‘wealth’ as ‘to be well’, saying too often these days ‘wealth’ is parlance for short-term profit.

“As a speaker at a recent conference in the United States, I noted the concern of management scholars worldwide who are becoming increasingly disquieted about falling standards and shoddy management practices,” Dr Spiller says.

“People are concerned about the ethical failures, environmental disasters, the dissociation from society and dispirited nature of enterprise.

“Examples are the global financial crisis, oil spills, dishonest accounting practices, excessive and often unjustified executive compensation, environmental degradation, poor employment relations, imbalances in the quality of life, and the continuing intense poverty...including here in Aotearoa New Zealand.

“A key feature of the indigenous response to the global crisis of sustainability is the wish to participate in ways that meet our own cultural and spiritual ideas of development.”

Although many Māori businesses operate in a global setting and incorporate some Western business practices, they also operate traditional exchange protocols that emphasise relationships and reciprocity, she says.

When a business focuses solely on the creation of financial wealth where profit is an end in itself, it can develop an orientation that leans towards the short-term and present generation, with priority placed on generating individual shareholder value, she says.

Dr Spiller is working with other indigenous scholars researching alternative business models. Her research reveals that many Māori-based businesses aspire to create sustainable wellbeing and wealth across multiple dimensions including social, cultural, spiritual and ecological well-being, as well as financial wealth.

“The outlook of many of these businesses is a long-term future generation orientation, and they adopt a stakeholder approach. They factor in and involve others such as employees, suppliers and local communities. They give respect and consideration to ecologies,” she says.

“Some of these organisations operate in collective shareholder environments, with shareholders in perpetuity. In this view, profit is a means to an end, and the underpinning idea is that there are environmental limits to growth.”

Dr Spiller will this month join Harvard University and the University of Arizona to continue her studies into the traditional wisdom approach of indigenous businesses. She will work with the Harvard Project on American Indian Development and the Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy.

Dr Spiller is planning a book of case studies that advance indigenous modes of business, demonstrating how they can be a catalyst and creator of multi-dimensional wellbeing and wealth.

“I’m hoping that the project will tell business stories that call for a return to the sustainable wisdom contained in values, developed over the aeons in relationship to the world around us,” she says.

“These stories are intended to promote indigenous management practice and education, affirm and encourage indigenous business practitioners to create relational wellbeing and wealth based on their own values, and foster change in the wider business community.”