Seize the chance to make banking dull again

[CHIMO]

As the dust clears after the collapse of the old financial order, mixed with fear and loathing is a palpable sense of release. Of course there will continue to be discomfort, sometimes extreme, as whole industries are sucked into the maelstrom of the imploding debt bubble. Yet now that market "solutions" are no longer self-justifying, new options for the shape of companies and economies come into view. If society comes before markets, as Philip Blond recently suggested in the FT, a different management vista begins to open up.

The nightmare that is finally ending is the 30-year neoliberal project to make humanity safe for markets. On this economic Island of Dr Moreau, individuals and institutions have been bent to fit an abstract framework of theory and ideology rather than the other way around. Pragmatism and a sense of the importance of social relations have been sacrificed to notions of efficiency that now turn out to be wholly misguided.

As George Packer noted in a recent New Yorker, modern conservatism (whether practised by Republicans or Democrats, New Labour or Thatcherite Tories) has turned its back on its origins of respect for tradition and the need for checks and balances and become its rabid opposite - "abstract, hard-edged and indifferent to experience and existing conditions".

Ever in thrall to economics, today's management has faithfully reflected this deluded rationality. Managers have grown - and been taught - to eschew messy reality in favour of managing by computer model and target.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/apr/19/banking