Iain Banks - The Business

We are, above all, pragmatists. Corruption is frowned upon not because it is intrinsically evil but because it acts like a short-circuit in the machinery of business, or a parasite on the body corporate. The point is to reduce such behaviour to a tolerable level, not to attempt seriously to eradicate it utterly, which would call for a regime so strict and confining it would limit the abilities of the organisation to change and adapt, and stifle its natural enterprise even more severely than widespread corruption would. Even so, what we regard as a tolerable level of internal corruption is — thanks to our rules on financial transparency — positively microscopic compared to that in just about every other organisation we do business with, and it is a matter of considerable pride for us that in any given transaction or deal we will almost without exception be the most honest and principled party involved.

We're quite happy to deal with corrupt regimes and people, so long as the figures are all above board at our end. In many cultures a degree of what is termed corruption in the West has long been a respectable and accepted part of the way business is done, and we are ready, willing and able to accommodate this. (In the West, of course, it is just as common. It's just not respectable. Or publicised.) In all this, of course, we're just the same as any other business or state. It's just that we've been doing it longer and are less hypocritical about it, so we're better at it. Practice makes perfect, even the practice of corruption. It ought to be one of our mottoes: Corruption — we deal with it.

Voting for your immediate superiors usually strikes outsiders as the most bizarre of our business practices. Manual and clerical workers tend to find the concept unlikely and bizarre, while those higher up have been known to react with outraged disbelief: how can it possibly work?

It works, I guess, because people generally are not stupid, and. we do our best to recruit people who are smarter than most. It works, also, because we are used to taking, and are able to take, a long-term view, and perhaps because the practice does not extend into every other organisation we deal with and undertake joint operations with.

We have had several expensive but unpublished studies performed by highly respected universities and business colleges, which have tended to support our belief that letting people vote for their bosses means that a greater proportion of able and gifted people flourish and rise using this method than any other. The more usual system, where people are picked out from above, does have certain advantages — talented people can often rise more quickly, skipping several layers of management at once — but it is our firm belief that this leads to more problems than it solves, producing a culture where those on any given level within a company are constantly trying to find ways to flatter those above them, sabotage the careers of their colleagues on the same corporate rung, exploit, oppress and denigrate those on the levels beneath them and generally spend far too much time frivolously furthering their own selfish ends and their status within the company when they ought rightfully to be engaged in the far more serious and productive pursuit of making all concerned more money.

Our system doesn't put an end to all office politics, of course, nor does it reliably weed out every plausible rogue, gifted bully or lucky idiot, but it does make them easier to spot, control and ditch before they get too far. Gaining promotion by fooling your boss, especially one prone to flattery or sexual favours, can be relatively easy. Gaining the trust of those who work with you every day and will have to take orders from you if you are promoted is a lot more difficult.

The usual objection to all this is: Don't people tend to vote for people who'll give them an easy ride?

Sometimes they do, and a division of our company might suffer because there is a natural-born vacillator in charge, but people can be demoted by those immediately below them, too, or pensioned off, and — worst case — an entire department can be closed down from above, its structure dismantled, its duties redistributed and its personnel dispersed.

This almost never happens. People would rather elect to put somebody in charge over them who knows what they're doing and whom they respect — even if they know that some of that person's later decisions will be disagreeable — than work under somebody who will damage all their interests by taking either no decisions or only easy ones.

We have works councils, too, in most of our wholly owned subsidiaries, though those tend to be at the sort of levels I'm not terribly familiar with.

None of this means that management is powerless: it's just that the spread of any given individual's power is different, tending to spread more upwards and less downwards compared to the standard model. It's still possible for senior people to encourage the careers of juniors and it's still possible for juniors to make themselves known to seniors and benefit thereby, it's just that neither can act without the tacit consent of those who will have to live with the effects of those actions.

We run, generally, a happy ship.

So why have you never heard of us, until now? We are not conspiratorial, or even particularly secretive. We don't believe in advertising ourselves, but we're sufficiently convinced of our own probity to be relaxed about any publicity that happens to come our way.

The most sinister reason given for our relative obscurity is that because we practise financial transparency and internal democracy while frowning upon conventional familial inheritance, the world's media — generally run by people for whom any one of these ideas is anathema — regard it as profoundly in their own interests to give us as little exposure as possible.

Another reason is that we undertake many more joint ventures than we do wholly owned ones, and in such situations we always let our partner company take the credit and deal with the exposure. We are a holding company, mostly, our interests lying in other companies rather than physically manufacturing products or providing services direct to the public. So we're partly invisible. Also, we have a variety of different company names and corporate identities for each individual branch of the business, all accrued naturally over the centuries, and so have no single name — apart from the Business, of course, which is so bland, general and vague it is almost a form of invisibility in itself. We do sometimes get confused with the CIA, though, which is silly; they're the Company. Besides, they're much more open than we are: there's no sign on the DC Beltway or anywhere else pointing to our HQ.

When somebody — sometimes a journalist, more usually a competitor — does start to investigate one of our concerns, they find that the ownership trail leads (sometimes straight, sometimes only after the sort of Byzantine flourishes and convolutions which are a good creative accountant's artistic signature) to one of those places that act as the commercial world's equivalent of black holes, into which public information might fall but from which none ever emerges: the Cayman Islands, Liechtenstein, or our very own Great Inagua.

We are not, however, totally invisible. There are articles about us occasionally in magazines and newspapers, sometimes there are television programmes that touch upon our interests, and every now and again a business book will mention us. The conspiracy theories are the most fun. There have been a couple of books and a number of articles, but the true home of those who would be our nemesis was the Net and now is the Web.

We have dozens of paranoid Websites dedicated to us. According to which one you choose to believe, we are either: