Companies are a means to an end. That end isn’t making employees lives endlessly blissful. Of course, miserable employees lead to lots of problems but nonetheless it is mistaking the proxy for the outcome to say that employees are the only relevant judges of company culture.
How do customers learn about the corporate culture? Do they have a complete enough picture to focus on their voice? Employees are often customers of their company and have a more wholistic view of the culture.
As a customer, I can tell a lot about a company's culture by:
- Their sales process. (Is it high pressure? Do they know what they're selling? How do they handle aspects of their product/service that is weak relative to competitors?)
- Who is actually targeted by the sales process. (Do they actively try to court technical individual contributors, or do they try to bypass them and pitch directly to leadership?)
- Their support process. (Do the support reps know the product? Are escalations handled quickly? Are conversations organic, or is it so scripted that you may as well be talking to a robot?)
- General product development. (Are product iterations delivered to market in a timely and consistent manner? Is it a quality product [i.e., does it work as advertised]? Does it seem like there's a consistent vision and design language for the product?)
- General employee sentiment? (Do you have a long-term company contact, or does it seem like your contact changes on a monthly basis? What's the general mood of the people you interact with [i.e., one person may just be having a bad day, but a consistent coldness suggests something more systemic]? Are high-level people generally leaving or joining the company?)
There’s no vote to determine whether or not a company’s culture is good. We have to look at outcomes and then work backwards. Customers play a key role in those outcomes, and therefore determining whether a culture is good or not, despite not knowing anything about it.
I personally don’t think such a system would be competitive over the long term. I look at the most totalitarian countries, that use widespread coercion to encourage productivity, and notice that they aren’t wildly successful from an economic output point of view.
Customers, shareholders, competitors. The goal of good culture, I think, is to create great products. If the employees are all ecstatic and the products suck for customers then I won’t buy them. Similarly if capital returns or poor then as a shareholder I won’t invest.
It seems to me like the goal of any particular culture -- by which I mean the effort of trying to create any particular culture -- will necessarily be in the eye of the beholder. Owners will be looking to maximize profit. Employees will be looking to enjoy their jobs. Customers will be looking for good service.
If the customers don’t buy anything eventually the company goes under and there’s no pie for owners, managers, and workers to divide up. Well, at least unless a government endlessly bails it out, but then the government is de facto the customer.
Who decided what the end is? It would seem that when society accepted the legal construct of the corporation, it was not because the man in the street felt that there had to be a way for capitalists to get even richer. And still to this day, if you ask the man in the street why we have corporations, I don’t think the answer will be that.
But you are right, many executives tend to agree with your point of view. That’s probably the single largest problem in society today.
Right. We accept corporations because their entitlements (such as liability limitation) and some regulations enable investment in great ventures that make society more prosperous as a whole. That's the theory. Whether it happens or not is of course a worthy matter of ongoing debate.
In my view, the end of a business is whatever serves the self interests of the participants. A customer may want something different than an employee or an owner. A supplier is not obligated to offer a price that benefits the owner. Instead they are free to negotiate a price on behalf of their own interest. Likewise an employee, which is a kind of supplier. To the extent that the public are affected by the behavior of a corporation, they can demand regulations based on the public interest.
The people who are actually legally or contractually obligated to serve as fiduciaries for the owners can usually be counted on the fingers of one hand.
"It is not to the benevolence of the butcher, brewer, or baker, that we appeal for our supper, but to their regard for their own self interest." -- Adam Smith
Adam Smith tells you the exact opposite. Their self-interest is not the end, it’s the means. The end is to provide society with reasonably priced bread, beer and meat.
I guess we could dig deeper and ask "what is the purpose of gaining wealth?" and "what is the purpose of money?".
One answer to the first is that wealth can be used to change the world. Small scale wealth can change things for you alone, like buying a nicer house. Large scale wealth can change things for everyone around you, like supporting a political platform of your liking.
In the same vein, money as a means of transaction is supposed to capture the social good that is gained within every transaction and make it abstract so we don't have to specifically barter for what we want in the present.
If we accept for the sake of argument the above, then we can examine if corporations are really doing social good, because if they are not then the ought to be restructured. This line of thought is what lead to the anti-trust acts of previous eras, safety regulations, food and drug regulations, and general business regulation in the present day. We have previously acknowledged that businesses can gain wealth, and power, without adding social good and as corporations are an abstraction created by society, it's well within our rights to change them for societies betterment.
Society didn't accept, it was enacted by the government.
The thing that disheartens me is that most people today fail to realize that people have been organizing into large work entities since time immemorial to build products and offer services in the hope of making money as owners, workers, and investors. Many people in every culture have accumulated great wealth by enterprising means. Yet people act like working for someone else is some new construct that exists to oppress everyone and most of the common mans ills are because of capitalists. This to me is quite silly.
The only easy things in life are complaining, procrastinating, failing and dying. Most everything else that is worth having in life takes discipline, work, and self growth. Yes some people will get more of those good things, some for less effort, so what though? As long as they are not breaking laws to do so I am fine with it. If someone breaks the law then punish them.
> people have been organizing into large work entities since time immemorial
Mercantilism didn't appear until the 17th Century.
> Yet people act like working for someone else is some new construct that exists to oppress everyone and most of the common mans ills are because of capitalists. This to me is quite silly.
Criticism of capitalism is as old as capitalism itself. Organizing a hierarchy that replicates monarchy/aristocracy carries the same problems -- mostly incompetence hidden by birthright and social status.
Markets work and have existed since time immemorial. The problem is that modern capitalism is so corrupt that is has destroyed the market. All products are more or less terrible, because the executives running the company never use the products they produce, or have any real idea what their workers do on a daily basis. This reality was even recognized by Adam Smith:
"The trade of a joint-stock company is always managed by a court of directors. This court, indeed, is frequently subject, in many respects, to the control of a general court of proprietors. But the greater part of these proprietors seldom pretend to understand any thing of the business of the company... The directors of such companies, however, being the managers rather of other people’s money than of their own, it cannot well be expected that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in a private copartnery frequently watch over their own. Like the stewards of a rich man, they are apt to consider attention to small matters as not for their master’s honour, and very easily give themselves a dispensation from having it. Negligence and profusion, therefore, must always prevail, more or less, in the management of the affairs of such a company. It is upon this account, that joint-stock companies for foreign trade have seldom been able to maintain the competition against private adventurers. They have, accordingly, very seldom succeeded without an exclusive privilege; and frequently have not succeeded with one. Without an exclusive privilege, they have commonly mismanaged the trade. With an exclusive privilege, they have both mismanaged and confined it."
> Most everything else that is worth having in life takes discipline, work, and self growth. Yes some people will get more of those good things, some for less effort, so what though? As long as they are not breaking laws to do so I am fine with it. If someone breaks the law then punish them.
The privatized natural gas company in your town hires a lobbyist to eliminate safety regulations. The gas seeps in your home and explodes when your partner goes to light the stove. You survived the explosion, but the hospital bills emptied your bank account. Your insurance doesn't cover negligence by a third party. No law was broken.
You are now bankrupt, homeless, alone, and unable to work. How is discipline, hard work, and self growth going to help you?
The purpose of a business is to make money. Corporations are a type of business with basically the same goal. I think this is pretty well understood by the general public.
I don't know enough Grustaf to comment, but strangely many common people that I know believe this, further they believe that the company has to make a profit ( often at the expense of a poor man ) as generally defined by the textbook definition.
