What's a Business For?

This week we evaluated what it means to be change makers in the world of entrepreneurship.  Overwhelmingly, being a change maker is more than just making a profit in the financial sector. Being a changemaker means that the businesses we create exist to solve a problem, fill a need, or make something better and easier for mankind. This was a key point in the article "What's a Business For?" written by Charles Handy.  Mr. Handy first recounted the problems created from an over emphasis on the bottom line that led to the erosion of trust within the capitalist sector of the United States and Britain.  With this over emphasis on an over inflated wealth system that produced no real new wealth, many companies were concerned only with how their numbers looked to their shareholders and resorted to dishonestly reporting earnings in order to keep numbers high.  However, without integrity in an economy, the system eventually comes crashing down as the unethical details come to light.  This creates a situation where no one wants to "play the game" of business from shareholders, to investors, to the regular people being willing to buy and sell. Instead, of focusing solely on profits for profits sake, Mr. Handy asserts that the real reason for business is to make a profit in order for the business to create "something more or better."  Therefore business exists to advance innovation, share technologies, offer solutions to life's problems and make these solutions available to the common people. These ideals shape the world that we live in as we know it. This is what it means to be a change maker. 

Mr. Handy offers several proposals that he feels would help fix our current economic system, bring trust back to business and enable companies to do a better job at being change makers instead of businesses interested in profits only.  I agree with how Mr. Handy proposes that people should be valued in terms of the intellectual contribution that they make to the company.  Currently, Mr. Handy says that people are treated as property and costs associated for the business rather than the assets that they are since it is the skills, talents, and work that the employees contribute that lead to the success of the company. Mr. Handy proposes that these employees be given a higher stake in the decisions, values, and outcomes that affect the company as a whole.  Therefore the business becomes more of a community than an organization to be owned by a select few shareholders who neither contribute to the success of the company or have any real investment in it. The second proposal that Mr. Handy makes that I agree with is along similar lines.  This proposal is to help "companies to see themselves as communities whose members have individual needs as well as individual skills and talents.  They are not anonymous human resources."  This means that not only are employees given a say in the decisions being made concerning the products and services that the company is based off of, but that the employees themselves are looked at for more than just their work.  They are seen as humans who have real limitations to health, both physically and mentally and therefore needs that need to be taken care of.  When those needs are met, productivity actually increases even if working hours are shorter, vacations are more frequent, and the basic necessities of life are provided through adequate compensation. I agree with both of these solutions because they involve treating the employees as the valuable people they are instead of just resources to be used. It is the idea that people matter more than profits.  People are to be cherished and profits are to be used rather than the other way around.  This has always been my philosophy as well and I believe that if all companies instituted this line of thinking on their own rather than being compelled to by government laws and regulations, then we really would have great progress and change in our society.