- John Uibel
Why is Business?
An odd title but what is a business and why do we run one. For some, it's the love or desire for money, for others, it's the ability to help others and do more with less. Virtue and integrity are sometimes a rarity in business. "
Reports that CEOs in America earn more than 400 times the wages of their lowest-paid workers make a mockery of Plato’s ideal, in what was, admittedly, a smaller and simpler world,that no person should be worth more than four times another." I find this to be an interesting concept and one that I think people should abide by out of the goodness of their heart and now followed due to the law.
In Charles Handy's Harvard business review, he states,
"We need to
eat to live; food is a necessary condition
of life. But if we lived mainly to eat,
making food a sufficient or sole purpose
of life, we would become gross. The
purpose of a business, in other words,
is not to make a profit,full stop.It is to
make a profit so that the business can do
something more or better.That “some-
thing”becomes the real justification for
the business. Owners know this. Inves-
tors needn’t care."
More honesty
and reality in the reporting of results
would help,for a start.But when so many
of a company’s assets are now invisible,
and therefore uncountable, and when
a company takes seriously the idea of
itself as a wealth-creating community,
with members rather than employees,
then it will only be sensible for mem-
bers to validate the results of their work
before presenting them to the finan-
ciers, who might, in turn, have greater
trust in the accuracy of those statements.
And if the cult of the stock option wanes
with the decline of the stock market
and companies decide to reward their
key people with a share of the profits
instead, then those members will be
even more likely to take a keen interest
in the truth of the numbers. It seems
only fair that dividends be paid to those
who contribute their skills as well as
to those who have contributed their
money.Most of the latter,after all,have
not in fact paid any money to the com-
pany itself but only to the shares’previ-
ous owners."
"The urgent need now is to retain the energy produced by the old model while remedying its flaws."
I think this is an interesting proposal that could, in theory, work, however, I would find it hard to believe that Americans would give up their ownership of money in such a way that would benefit others. I may be wrong but holding people accountable to truth might prove to be too difficult for some.