Gore offered encouragement to a crowd of about 1,500 people -- many of them students at business schools throughout the country -- who had gathered for a sold-out conference put on by Net Impact, an organization that promotes social change through business.
"You're on the right path," he said. "Millions of people are searching for a better way to find meaning in their lives when they routinely encounter a business environment and a marketplace that seems too frequently to clash with what they see in their personal lives as right and good and just."
"Market fundamentalism . . . has denigrated our abilities as free citizens to make decisions together about the deepest values that we hold," Gore said. "We need to reaffirm that we have a right to assert values even if a supply and demand equation says, 'That's not efficient.'"
Part of the problem, he said, is that the marketplace is obsessively focused on improving quarterly profits. This routinely forces business leaders to push deeper values aside.
"Managers face pressures from their institutional investors to make sure they hit those projections," he said. "The quality of our lives get excluded if the time frame is so impossibly short and the focus is so impossibly narrow."
Gore closed by encouraging the young audience to put more conscience in business. He suggested they model themselves on a perhaps unlikely group, the Texas Rangers, the band of lawmen who brought order to the Wild West: "One of their principles was, right is still right even if nobody's doing it, and wrong is still wrong even if everybody's doing it."
I like the title of one of the talks: "Living Your Values and Effecting Change through Tempered Radicalism"
It seems that people often forget that they vote with their dollars. That goes for spending as well as investing. Business is a battle field for ideas as much as the media. Gore seems to be focusing on both in recent times.
