Another reason for confusing business with Metabusiness is that our media don’t provide us with any better example.

The general-interest media don’t actually pay much attention to business, unless it runs significantly afoul of the law or causes dramatic environmental damage.

To find out about Corporate America’s doings, we usually have to turn to the business press.  But the business press isn’t especially interested in reporting corporate foul-ups.  For one thing, it is companies that buy the advertising that sustains these periodicals, and companies tend to be less inclined to spend their advertising dollars in publications that have made them look ridiculous.

In addition, the people who read business periodicals are not all that interested in hearing about the kind of clueless fumbling with which, as participants in large bureaucracies themselves, they are already all too familiar.  What they want is examples of smart, alert behavior that they can copy.  The business press provides them with this. 

But by avoiding unflattering references to other kinds of behavior, it creates an impression that being heads-up and innovatively adaptive is the corporate norm. 

We then end up divided between people who don’t read much of anything about business, and other people who consider themselves more expert by virtue of having read a lot of congratulatory puffery in the business press.