The Method of Madness

The sole purpose of a business is not to make money.

Hopefully I just struck a couple old CFOs dead with that statement. Enjoy the Fourth Circle*!

Notice that I said sole purpose – in truth, business never has one sole purpose, but many purposes. It’s the unfortunate reality that most business owners focus solely on profit. I’ve worked in small businesses before, and it’s usually the same line: sales and marketing are the darling departments, with the product development house a close second, and other departments and functions regarded like an appendix: they’re part of the structure, but no one really knows what they do, and people believe they’d be better off without it (*ahem* HR).

My point is thus, and to be fair, it isn’t anything new: profits are a means to an end. To exactly what end, however, is where I disagree with so many. Good business, in my opinion, is predicated not only profit, but employees and social responsibility. Think about it: we treat businesses like real people. They have legal rights and responsibilities, can defend itself in court, and so on. So why does the maxim “business is business” continue, when the stark reality is “business is people”?

Taking this metaphor a bit further, like any person a business can do a lot of bad to itself and still manage to function. A business with a C-Suite at the helm that’s concerned blindly on the balance sheet is like the fat person eating McDonald’s everyday: unhealthy, counter-productive, and ultimately, it’ll kill you. You need a balanced diet. And let’s think a bit further on this. We read countless articles on how we must give back to others, to our communities, and that through giving we get back more. And yet, so many businesses do not do this, usually in the holy name of the “bottom line” (piecemeal be upon it).

I firmly believe that a good business is built on three things: profit, reinvestment in employees, and reinvestment in the community. Profit’s a no-brainer: have a solid product and appropriate strategies to sell it. Then re-invest that profit into your employees. No, I’m not talking about expanding the marketing department to drive the sales engine; that’s reinvestment in the organization. Reinvesting in employees is giving your staff the opportunity to develop, either by providing training for new skills, wellness programs – anything that will increase employee engagement and trust. Reinvesting in the organization is ultimately a part of reinvesting in your employees, because you’re increasing the amount of organizational resources available to your employees.

Social responsibility, or reinvesting in the community, is the business giving back to the community in which it resides. A lot of companies have charities they donate to, and I advocate that the charities and causes be local to the business. Being an active philanthropist as a business helps build community trust, and when the community trusts your business, the community will in turn invest in the business by purchasing those services and products.

The key to building a business isn’t just in the product and the price it’s sold for. A good business knows its greatest assets are its employees, and its best supporters are the community around it.

* The Fourth Circle is a reference to Dante’s Inferno, where the greedy were consigned to their punishment.

On the Internet, everyone is an expert. I’ve come to realize this from being on Twitter and roving around the HR and Recruitment social media space, and this disturbs me.

One of the most important things to me is authenticity, which goes hand-in-hand with truth and other qualities like it. Authenticity is important to building an audience and building credibility, but I’ve witnessed a lot of people building authenticity and had myself thinking, “How in the world can they be doing this?” I thought about it, cursed a few times, had a beer, and then it came to me. Well, really, it just came to me, but whatever.

Community. In other words, these “authentic” people (Bloggers, Tweeters, what-have-you) have essentially found others willing to agree with their ideas and opinions. In this world of social media, those folks are also (usually) willing to reshare the content. And so the cycle goes, turning into a self-sustaining circle jerk of like-minded personalities that does nothing but recycle and re-hash the same content and ideas.

Cliques, anyone? My, how little changes from high school…

The next step, of course, is the “community” self-styling itself as a collective of experts. This works, by the way, because of how “authenticity” is constructed; it’s akin to a virus, really. And bingo: you’ve got a load of bullshit coming down the pipeline, probably 2/3′s of which is more self-serving drivel to position the community as experts, and the other 1/3 consisting of the recycled content.

So in the beginning of my post, I singled out the HR/Recruitment social media space. My bottom line opinion about it is just what I’ve written here: a bunch of self-styled (and self-rewarded) influencers who do more collective hot-air blowing than any real change. I can’t even count how many blog posts, Tweets, and statuses have reflected and condemned some of the worst HR practices – discrimination, bad decisions, etc. – and yet, I’ve seen nothing remarkably changed about the industry by all of these “influencers.” So, again, my contention is that their “influence” stops as soon as it hits the computer screen.

And so the illusion of expertise. Expertise on a subject goes beyond just knowing it and talking about it. Expertise would have you effectively sharing these ideas to enact meaningful change. If these “influencers” can’t produce meaningful change in the industry they purport to represent, the only thing they’re influencing is other people’s perceptions of them.

Sorry, I’m just not that into you.