Success Quote by Marvin Bower

Bower’s line is disarmingly calm, the kind of managerial sentence that sounds like a neutral observation until you notice the power claim hiding inside it. “The course of business” isn’t just commerce chugging along; it’s the choices corporations make about pricing, hiring, advertising, supply chains, and what they’re willing to fund or fight. Put differently: markets don’t simply respond to culture. They manufacture it.

Coming from Marvin Bower - the McKinsey patriarch who helped professionalize modern management - the intent reads as both diagnosis and quiet instruction manual. If business shapes public opinion, then executives aren’t merely accountable to it; they can design it. The subtext is that legitimacy can be engineered through performance and perception: deliver growth, project competence, sponsor the right institutions, and the public will recalibrate its beliefs about what’s normal, necessary, even “common sense.”

The phrasing also launders agency. “Course of business” sounds like weather, not will. It sidesteps the uncomfortable fact that “public opinion” is often downstream of concentrated capital: who gets a platform, which risks are normalized, which costs are externalized, which products become habits. That’s why the quote still lands in an era of platform capitalism and brand activism. Companies don’t just sell goods; they sell narratives about work, identity, convenience, and who deserves what.

In Bower’s world, this is a reason to behave responsibly because the stakes are civic. In a more cynical reading, it’s a reminder that the boardroom can be a propaganda studio with better lighting.