Death, purgatory, rescue – religion and management

I had recently attended a two day international conference dealing with innovations. It had a severe business model orientation with a lot of talk about BOP (Bottom of Pyramid) opportunities while making pleasant noises about technical innovations. There was also an associated exhibition highlighting innovations down the ages and across the globe and so on. Of course, there was the mandatory Indian chest thumping: We too have been there; we have also done that. I sort of excused that because and only because the exhibition helped me post this!

 You would not be able to read much from the above photographs. I do not know who compiled the list of “10 Great Entrepreneurs Who Daringly Changed History!” but no matter. Any such list has to be subjective and the prerogative to choose or ignore is with the compiler. Therefore, I have neither critical nor approving comments on those appearing on the list. If you look at it (I will list out the people to help you out: King Croesus, Pope Sixtus IV, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Benjamin Siegel, P T Barnum, Ray Kroc, Ross Perot, and Jobs and Wozniak), Nobel not being there could surprise you. So could the absence of Bill Gates, Rockefeller and a host of others. No issues, as each made a lot of money and is that not what marks a successful entrepreneur?

But Pope Sixtus IV raises my eyebrow. For one thing, while he raised a lot of money for his company, the Vatican (I refuse to rate it as anything loftier than a con business), but is he an innovative entrepreneur? Hmm… I have to think on that and the proceedings at the conference helped me.

At the conference, speaker after speaker focused on market reception to an innovative idea. Indeed, by the end of the conference, I had been brow-beaten to believe that if the market does not appreciate a new idea, process or product, it is not even an idea, process or product, not to speak of it being innovative. The market defines innovation. Therefore, Pope Sixtus IV satisfied the market, indeed created a market and then satisfied it (that is he was not a salesman but a marketing guru!). It is for this reason, he is tagged a great entrepreneur. If you do not believe, please read (if you can) what the poster at the exhibition given below says.

OK, you have not been able to read. Then, let me give an extract from it to make my point.

"Pope Sixtus …set out a new business idea and realized that there was money to be made in damnation and thus opening a new market – the dead – for the pure or holy indulgences the church had been selling for years … in 1478, he expanded the market and this swelled the purgatory’s ranks by 100,000 souls in 15 years." [Had the percentage increase been given I would have worked out the CAGR]

Pope Sixtus IV did not invent the dead; he rather innovated the dead. What is the difference? Invention carries a lot of risk as it involves blue sky thinking (please excuse the management jargon; it takes time to filter through the system and to be discarded). Clouds can gather any time. But innovations are typically incremental. The risks are much lower and even failures are not particularly catastrophic. Pope Sixtus IV successfully extended what the church has been doing “for years”. Besides making money for his company the pope also made it sustainable (I will come back to this a little later) by increasing the customer pool. The citation (if that is what it is) is wrong – he went beyond “setting out a new market”; he created a business model that is truly sustainable – there will never be a dearth of the dead, and every sinner is, in time, a dead sinner! But, there was a negative externality – Martin Luther!

I do not want to Google to find out when Martin Luther nailed his theses to the church door. But till then the business of indulgences to rescue the dead from purgatory thrived. Yes, that was a successful business model.

The death of the business of the dead could have been catastrophic but it was not. It created new avenues of religious exploitation or at least sustained the then existing ones with increased efforts. The end of the indulgence model may be a case study for what is called “creative destruction”! Look for it in management programs. If Harvard can co-opt Laloo Prasad Yadav, surely it can co-opt the Vatican along with its program for the dead!

Now it is not through indulgence the church fills up its coffers. Though it was successful, indulgence was not the sole goose that laid golden eggs the church had. It focused on all the other geese and bred many more!

If this business model is good for the Roman Catholic Church goose, it must be good for all the other religious ganders. This suits the management types, so good at selling one-size-fits all stuff, as you know very well. They can collect their consultancy fees from across the swathe of religions, and other business too with mere tweaking (the meaning of innovations, by the way) with no or just a little effort. Isn’t this another kind of indulgence? I think so.

Now look at what Pope Sixtus IV has done over more than five centuries. He developed a business model and made a lot of money. He has made a sustainable model that is universal within the discipline (religion) and transcends disciplines (reaches into management) at one stroke. He has rescued management from purgatory, five centuries hence. The church’s scientific model – geocentric universe – survived only till Galileo came on the scene. But its business model survives! And, Pope Sixtus IV was the author.

Therefore, I conclude that Pope Sixtus IV was truly a great entrepreneur. He was innovator supreme. Indeed, the poster at the conference did not accord him due respect. No matter he came after King Croesus chronologically, the pope leapfrogged ahead of the king and this should have been acknowledged in the poster.

For a conference promoting innovations, this was an inexcusable slip. It has lost at least some of its credibility quotient with me. Therefore, I have survived the brow-beating and I now think that technical innovation sustains the business model, going against the dominant business orientation at the conference. It is the pope’s focus on the technical matter of rescuing the dead from the purgatory through indulgence that created the business model, after all. Management gurus rescue their dead ideas from obsolescence through business school publications.

Death, purgatory, rescue – you get the idea.

Raghuram Ekambaram