Greg Brown writes:
>I am repulsed at the most basic level because fpc's are by definition
>anti-life. They were and are created to make profits.
Greg, I'm sorry that your experience has not included contact with
for-profit-companies that act on higher principles. I worked for one. We
didn't think we were in business just to make profits -- we were trying to
make the world a better place. Our mission (as publicly stated and as
actually followed) was "Helping people become all that they can be." We
provided training programs -- but you need to take a look at the kinds of
"training" we provided. In addition to what you might expect, we also (in
the late 1970's, before most people even were aware of this need) taught
"wellness" [mind/body health], we taught people how to get along better
with other people, we taught "team" work [when almost no businesses
employed teams], we began the company by teaching salespeople to be
customer-service focused rather than teaching them tricks to get "their"
money out of your pocket, etc. And, in some small ways, we did make the
world a better place by encouraging and enabling changes in the workplace
that you now take for granted. As a result of our work, thousands of
people were treated as human beings by their managers (instead of being
exploited), thousands of people were helped to make decisions in their own
long-term best interests (instead of being sold things they didn't need),
thousands of people began to take better care of themselves, thousands of
people learned to value cooperation, and a myriad other changes have been
made as a direct and indirect result of our work.
But the point I'm trying to make is that it really was these results we
thought about -- as managers in the company, when we made decisions they
were based on how we could maximize the achievement of good for others.
>From time to time we would have to remind ourselves that we had to make
enough money to stay in business, and we (barely) did. Frankly, we could
have accomplished more good for the world if we had been better at making
profits! But we never focused on that.
This company was special -- but far from unique. Others exist, today,
which espouse and further different kinds of values (think Ben & Jerry's,
which seems to value its employees above all else) but many
for-profit-companies exist that are not focused on profit-making. In
fact, in my 20+ years of consulting, I have to say that the companies I
saw who were focused on profit making (such as General Motors in the '70s
and '80s) didn't do as well as the ones who focused on providing other
kinds of values to customers, employees, suppliers, etc.
I do think it may be prudent to be wary of those companies who have, as
their primary focus, their shareholders ("the street.") These companies
seem to me to be the most dangerous ones. But please don't make the
mistake of believing all you read in annual reports -- a publicly-held
company feels obligated these days to bow to "shareholder value" in their
public pronouncements, to keep their stock from being sold off, but that
doesn't necessarily mean the company is actually run that way.
John W. Gunkler
jgunkler@sprintmail.com
--"John Gunkler" <jgunkler@sprintmail.com>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>