When it comes to the
financial industry, Jim Owen, author of “Cowboy Ethics — What Wall Street
Can Learn from the Code of the West,” is less cynical but no less critical.
“Americans are known for
being optimists,” Owen writes. “But you don’t have to be a cynic to believe our
country is seriously off-track.”
The former investment
professional’s premise is that the problems that cause corporate scandals and
market meltdowns are not economic and financial in nature: the root causes are
ethical.
Owen says his book, which
has sold almost 100,000 copies, has struck a nerve with those who are
disillusioned with greedy corporate executives, gutless politicians who govern
without principle, and a culture that glorifies wealth and celebrity while
ignoring the rash of Americans down on their luck.
In short, the national
motto, he says, has become: “It’s all about me.”
Owen, 69, is not a former
main-street merchant displaced by the market meltdown; he’s a 40-year Wall
Street veteran who observed what he says were the underlying causes of the
current recession: greed and egotism.
“I thought it was a case of
a few bad apples,” he laments. “But I thought wrong. I realized the problem was
becoming an endemic and was firmly embedded in our culture, a culture of greed
and ego in excess.”
Owen wrote the book in 2004,
when he was living in Montecito and working as a partner at an investment
company in Los Angeles. Troubled by an increasing number of corporate scandals,
he turned to his lifelong interests in Western history and lore.
Owen found the American
cowboy to be a valuable model for what he called the Code of the West. The
cowboy, he says, was someone who stood for something, who could be counted on
to be true to his beliefs, and who lived by a code that was less about rules
and more about character.
The perennial icon enabled
Owen to develop 10 principles based upon the “Code of the West” —
aphorisms as simple as “Always finish what you start. Be tough but fair. When
you make a promise, keep it.”
“These are common sense
principles, nothing fancy,” Owen says. “They have struck a chord because people
want to go back to a simpler time when a man’s handshake was worth a 40-page
contract.”
Owen has taken his message
across the states, having spoken before more than 150 business groups, colleges
and universities, school districts, nonprofit organizations and trade
associations.
In January, he will bring
his message to the Alisal Guest Ranch & Resort as part of a four-day,
three-night seminar. Some 70 employees of an Oregon software company will be
his first class.
“We want to combine cowboy
ethics with the cowboy experience,” Owen says. “These people from corporate
America will be around animals, and will do riding and roping, cooking steak
over the fire — and then I’ll talk about cowboy ethics.”
Although Owen tears into the
climate of greed that gives rise to financial corruption, his message is not an
indictment against Wall Street as a whole; it’s an effort to heighten a sense
of personal responsibility and create a strong sense of civic consciousness.
“All of business is built on
trust,” he says. “If you take trust out of the equation, what’s left?”
In 2006, Owen established
the Center for Cowboy Ethics and Leadership, which has
developed a model program based on the 10 principles that high schools can
incorporate.
A four-week unit, “The
program helps high school students build the personal qualities that they will
need to achieve true career and life success,” according to the center’s
website.
The program was adopted by
Cherry Creek High School in the Denver area, targeting at-risk students, and
educators say it has been a success.
“The message is that we’re
not going to turn around 50-year-old bad guys,” Owen says. “We’ve got to take
this ethics to the kids in the schools — the future of our society.”
Some businesses are adopting
the code. Jonah Bank of Casper, Wyo., prints the “code” on its business cards
and adorns its walls with frame posters featuring each of its 10 tenets
Cowboy ethics, Owen
concedes, may not enrich people professionally, but it encourages them to
explore their lives in meaningful ways.
“Everybody is so busy,
multi-tasking, running around like crazy,” he says. “So it’s very difficult for
people to ask themselves what is most important in their lives right now, what
they stand for, what inspires them, how they want to be remembered. Asking
those questions can transform peoples’ lives.”
Owen says answering these
questions can provide people with the grit and determination to succeed.
“Determination trumps
ability,” Owen explains. “I know a lot of smart people who just cannot get off
the dime and others who have figured things out because they want to give 100
percent to what they’re doing.”
Former 3rd District
Supervisor Brooks Firestone lauded his friend’s book.
“It expanded on the hard
work, the individual ethic of independence and the spirit of the western
cowboy,” he told the Journal. “They had a hard life and did hard work that
developed character.”
Firestone calls to mind the
late cowboy poet, Jake Copass, who had worked as a wrangler at the Alisal Guest
Ranch beginning in 1946.
“There was the image of the
cowboy who got into bar fights,” Firestone said. “But there was the
Copass-type. I’d see him drinking coffee at 6 a.m. every morning in downtown
Solvang before going off to work 12-hour shifts. He never complained. We had a
lot of those cowboys in the Valley who set a good example.”
Coyboyethics.org
jfoster@syvjournal.com