Mark Bertolini is calling for investing in workers, education, and taking a holistic approach to healthcare as the path forward to restoring the American dream, and fixing capitalism.
With America rocked by social tensions, the debate over inequality has taken on a new dimension. In a recent talk at Verizon Media’s RESET YOUR MINDSET AT WORK, the former Aetna CEO addressed business and tax practices that perpetuate the gap between the wealthy and the working class.
The 64-year-old insurance executive veteran has long spoken out on a capitalist model that’s widely perceived as failing, acknowledging that it’s a “broken system.”
Bertolini said that “People have been rethinking it. But I think we’ve been given lip service to the kinds of changes that need to happen.”
In a wide-ranging discussion, Bertolini suggested that companies needed to pay more attention to the development of their employees, in order to address persistent satisfaction and quality of life issues.
“Probably since the early 70s, what we’ve seen is a flip where financial capital is now plentiful, and human capital is very scarce — well-trained people who know how to learn, and continually evolve with the kind of organization they’re in,” noted Bertolini, the author of “Mission-Driven Leadership: My Journey as a Radical Capitalist.”
Yoga as productivity booster
Pointing out that people were treated as a resource that could easily be replaced, Bertolini called out the U.S. tax system, which allows companies to depreciate investments in physical capital like machines, but not investments in human capital.
While running Aetna, Bertolini implemented numerous programs for employees that included tuition and student debt assistance, pay incentives, yoga — and even pet therapy.
In his book, Bertolini recalled how he convinced Aetna’s chief medical officer to sign off on a yoga in the workplace initiative by conducting a 12-week study on the impact of mind-body stress reduction.
The effort made Aetna realized that quality of life is a significant source of stress — and those employees with the highest levels had much higher medical costs.
Workers who were encouraged to practice yoga saw a 50% drop in stress levels and an additional 69 minutes in productivity. From there, he began to make other investments in his workforce, including boosting wages.
Those investments in people didn’t put a dent in the company’s bottom-line, but helped reduce overall health care costs, resulting in more productive and engaged employees and higher customer retention rates.
“And we have not made those investments because, quite frankly, as business people, we aren’t rewarded by the tax system to do so. We can’t depreciate our investment in people like we can in machines,” he said.
“So machines are a better economic spreadsheet outcome than people are, and I think we’ve lost our way as a result. So we’ve got to turn that around,” Bertolini stated.
‘Stop teaching to tests’
Education reform has become a focus of discussions about how to improve capitalism. And according to Bertolini “the single biggest thing that we can do to restore the American dream and to improve the quality of our human capital overtime” is to invest more money in K-3 education.
“We should stop teaching to tests — standardized tests — and teach these children how to learn based on the circumstances they’re in,” Bertolini said.
“On the other side of it, we then need more people that know how to learn — the ability to re-skill people for the communities they live in, not necessarily for some job halfway across the country, because social mobility, geographic mobility, labor mobility, is all but stopped, while people stay in their communities where their families are, and their social networks are,” the executive added.
Source: Yahoo