September 2, 1990

I’VE BEEN spoiling for a fight for a while now, and I thought I’d found my opponent last week. I received an anonymous package that contained the details of a three-day, so-called “Colloquium on Competition,” to be sponsored in mid-September by the Redwood Shores database giant Oracle Corp., and at first reading the program is pretty lopsided to the status quo.

Tom Wolfe (“Bonfire of the Vanities,” “The Right Stuff”) is delivering the opening address, called “The Fever of Money.” A panel discussion on Day 2 features William F. Buckley Jr. as “moderator.” Panelists include Henry Kissinger and Marvin Goldberger, director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University.

On Day 3, “Breakfast with the Editors” includes Malcolm S. Forbes Jr., Norman Pearlstine of the Wall Street Journal and Marshall Loeb of Fortune. A panel discussion later in the day on “Competition from Within” includes Caspar Weinberger, former secretary of Defense and now publisher of Forbes and John Kenneth Galbraith, professor of economics at Harvard University. Not what I’d call a progressive group. Not a single woman is named on the program, and only one is listed as a participant — Anne Wexler, a former Carter administration staffer who’s now a lobbyist in Washington, DC. The only mention of women and “non-whites,” as minorities are termed in this document, is under the panel topic “Human Capital” — a term that sums up the way the status quo (that is, white male) power structure in this country perceives labor. The thought of them sitting around discussing how to “use” women to increase “competitiveness” made me turn green.

And what do all these people have to do with Oracle, anyhow?

Mark Rawlins, Oracle’s director of corporate marketing, explained the genesis of the Colloquium. “Last quarter, Oracle did about 16 or so million-dollar-plus deals. When directors had to sign off on a deal that size, they’d ask, “Who’s Oracle?’ We were trying to come up with a way of creating relationships with Fortune 500 executives so they don’t have to ask.”

So Oracle sought an issue that was facing all these executives, to draw them together in one location. That issue, after extensive interviews with many executives from the Forbes, Fortune and Business Week “top company” lists, turned out to be “competition.”

And, says Rawlins, as they worked on the colloquium, they realized that the issues facing the Fortune 500 were the same issues that Oracle faced in its business. “Our intention migrated very slowly but very directly,” he says. “The colloquium was no longer the end, but a means by which Oracle could sit down with people who had hands-on experience with these issues and learn how to address them.”

And, he adds, “in the past month or so, we’ve been going back to executives and asked if they’d like to send an expert in their place — for instance, Apple isn’t sending an executive, but it’s sending an expert who deals in the education of paraplegics and quadriplegics, to bring them into the work force.”

Other issues include internal and external economic forces (allegedly, no Japanese executives would even respond to invitations to participate here), technology management, education (including assisting the community, literacy and numeracy and apprenticeships) and the environment (everything from ethics to waste management).

This still didn’t solve the “human capital” issue, though, so I called colloquium director Shiela Starr. No women or minorities are on the program, said Starr, because there are virtually no women in the executive suites of the Fortune, Business Week and Forbes 50, 100 and 500 companies. “We had to dig” for the 10 women they did find, but to no avail. For reasons Starr does not understand, they either refused to attend or — in the case of the editor of Harvard Business Review — asked a prohibitive speaker fee.

However, if the world situation doesn’t change soon, Oracle’s whole idea may be to no avail. Though colloquium attendance was limited to 100 attendees, space was still available before the “conflict” with Iraq erupted. Since then, there have been many cancellations. That’s disappointing. I hope that there’s a way to keep these people talking to each other. If some of the great minds and egos of the corporate structure want to talk to each other about how they’re fixing their mistakes, there may yet be hope for our economy to rebound.