The Place of Business in the World

Consider these prevalent aspects of conventional business practice:

Shorter and shorter term thinking. Make money now and get out. The future be damned.

Money myopia - shareholder returns above all else. And shareholders only care about returns. The celebration and expectation of fast money. Money as the primary indicator of success.

Denial of the human aspects of business, the pretence that business is all rational. Emotions have no place in business.

Feature-focused, we-tell-you-how-to-think advertising practices that are decades old.

Fear driven decision making - let someone else try it first. Copying someone else is good enough, we don't have to do any better. Despite Deming's call to drive out fear, it has become even more entrenched in many businesses today.

Rear-view-mirror driving - we have been doing this all along so why change now?

Ever-myopic compartmentalisation and reductive specialisations - everyone must fit a particular box. If you don't fit we don't know how to use you. We don't know where in the production line you fit.

We can only think ever deeper down the same paths, but we cannot or don't want to see alternative paths.

Price and features wars are the primary form of differentiation.

Same-old "best practices" applied to strategies - cost cutting, offshoring%u2026 all short term symptomatic fixes. The general lack of substantial and inspirational real long term vision.

Business operate as if they are divorced from the reality of the community around them, or indeed divorced from the reality of the planet. The assumption that resources are endless, that waste is ok as long as we are making money (and someone else is cleaning up), and that the overt exploitation of people can be flippantly justified as a cost minimisation exercise.

Business thinking has not evolved in step with the power of business to affect lives.

The power of business to impact our world has grown tremendously over the past century. It has dovetailed with, and powered, by the amazing advancements in technology.

This rate of growth has not been mirrored by the evolution in business thinking.

The limited, fear-based, profit-centric, short-term thinking of the industrial revolution is now in the driver's seat of the most powerful force of change humanity has ever seen.

The actions of just one or two large retailers affect the choices available to an entire nation of people. The collapse of one large corporation can destroy the lives of thousands. The business decisions of pan-nation corporations can be linked to the deaths and suffering of thousands%u2026

Why does this sound like giving a child matches?

The whole innovation drive is a great opportunity to seriously rethink how we do business into the future. The newfound respect and demand for creativity combined with the nature of creativity makes this the best time to humanise business practice.

Business has more power than ever before to directly affect the lives and wellbeing of the majority of people on this planet. Business decisions affects how we think and how we feel. Business decisions determine what tools we have access to, what medication, services and opportunities. We have more choice, but also less choice.

Business also has the power to destroy our planet, and do so well within our lifetime. And this power can only get stronger as our population continue to climb, and more and more of us get access to global media and markets.

A business is a fusion of everyone within it. Consciously or otherwise, it acts in accordance with the attitudes, values and motivations of its constituents. Every business action is by definition the actions of the people within it. What a business puts out to the world, it gets back. What it expects to see in the world, it does.

Business practices directly impact lives, much as we try to deny it. Nothing is ever "just business". Because business involves people, and the majority of people (with the exception of those with certain psychological disorders) are emotive creatures. Because business decisions affect what services and products we have access to.

Isn't it time we take responsibility for our actions?

Using the bottom-line as the sole business success indicator is shortsighted and stupid. For business owners, this means wasted talent, missed opportunities, and devastating price wars. For workers, exploitative work practices with offshoring to look forward to. And for consumers - the illusion of more choice and abundance, paid for with our health and our children's future.

Working to make money is just boring. We are each capable of so much more. And yet work does seem to be primarily about making money. We celebrate "entrepreneurs" out of envy for the amount of money they can make in the short term. We judge businesses primarily but their turnover.

There is no such thing as "it's just business". Every decision you make or implement at work have consequences that reach beyond the bounds of the business. What you sell, how you sell and how you treat people all have an impact on your community.