The Bible is good business but Galileo fell short

By SELWYN PARKER

The fascination with extracting commercial and, in particular, management lessons from historical figures is not new, as lecturer and management historian John Deeks, of the University of Auckland's faculty of commerce, points out. It has been going on for more than a century.

Protestant clergyman Thomas P. Hunt started it in 1836 when he wrote The Book of Wealth: In Which it is Proved from the Bible That it is the Duty of Every Man to Become Rich.

In 1925, advertising executive Bruce Barton, son of a preacher, took the trend a big step further with his bestseller The Man Nobody Knows, turning Jesus into "the founder of modern business."

It was Jesus, enthused Barton, who "picked up 12 men from the bottom ranks of business and forged them into an organisation that conquered the world."

It seems to be almost exclusively Americans who reinterpret historical figures in commercial terms. Edgar J. Swift, then chairman of the psychology department of Washington University, discovered fatal shortcomings in Galileo's salesmanship in his 1925 book, Business Power through Psychology.

Galileo might have correctly challenged Aristotelian philosophy, formulated a theory for the exact measurement of time, invented a hydrostatic balance, written a treatise on specific gravity, proved that all falling bodies, great or small, descend with equal velocity, and hugely advanced modern astronomical theory, but, says Swift, the Italian failed because he could not convince the bigots of the day that he was right.

"He was an investigator and not a salesman. He could not get his goods marketed."

If only he had hired Zig Ziegler.

* Contact Selwyn Parker at wordz@xtra.co.nz