Mammon and Me

Today’s blog comes from the classroom. This trimester for my MBA program, I’ve got class on 6 weekends this summer (6-10 p.m. Friday, 8 a.m. -5 p.m. Saturday), and since I know my brain will be the consistency of clam chowder when I am done today, I’m getting a head start while the stew is still cooking.

This weekend’s class is a business symposium, which is the MBA-bourgeois lingo for “really, really rich, successful people telling you how they got really, really rich making fertilizer out of… (you get the point).” Don’t get me wrong – the speakers were impressive: Victor Tsao (Pepperdine graduate, mind you), the founder of Linksys, who started the company with his wife in their garage; Mary Ellen Weaver, who turned a $1 investment into a $460 million dollar company; and the turnaround king, Steven Plochocki, who took a failing healthcare company you’ve never heard of (Insight Health Corp., or “I Told You So”) and made it fabulously profitable after only 2 years and repeating the phrase “badda-bing, badda-boom” 13 times a minute.

All had fabulous stories of success by worldly standards, and they all seemed like ethical business leaders who enjoyed excelling in their fields. In a classroom of some 160 students, I could tell that, for some of them (especially those who had already been trying a startup), seeing these real success stories was as close to heaven as a dung beetle in a cow pasture. Yet, I found myself left with a very strange question:

What is the point of business?

Yep, I heard you say a 180% increase in shareholder earnings in two years. And I heard how hard you worked, and how you dealt with an unpredictable industry against all odds. But really though... what is the point? I heard what you did, and how you did it, but what is the point of it all? What is the point of business?

Now, for those of you that don’t know me, I’m not what you would call the “typical” MBA student. I think I'm the only one in my classes who got a B.A. in Humanities (emphasis in 20th century Europe and Philosophy, mind you), and minored in Religion. I don't work for a corporation, I'm not tremendously motivated by profit or little green bills, and frankly, I'm not getting this degree because my life's ambition is to be a suit. I applied to the program initially because I felt it was clearly what God wanted me to do, despite the fact that I was about as cynical as I could have been about capitalism and corporate America. Heck, one of my application essays read like a cocky 22 year old’s diatribe against avowedly corporate career goals (and although I read it now and roll my eyes at how stupid I sounded, it is truly a testament to God’s plan that I ever got in to the business program, assuming someone ever read it). I have learned a lot since then, and think that I have come to see what business can be versus what it often is not - and frankly, I've loved the learning, especially involving leadership and organizational behavior. But, I don’t sit in a room and drool over P&L or ROI figures, or catchy lingo and 10-step programs to building a performance-driven salesforce. At all.

The answer to the question is really quite simple though: the purpose of business is profit. Yep, that’s it. Profit. If we trace the purpose of this (in an admittedly simplistic way), the rationale goes somewhat like:

The purpose of business is profit.

The purpose of profit is to facilitate making even more profit, leading to the accumulation of monetary wealth both personally and organizationally.

The purpose of accumulating monetary wealth is to obtain material wealth.

The purpose of material wealth is to increase comfort in life.

The purpose of increasing one’s comfort is to achieve happiness, and possibly deep, meaningful fulfillment.

-The End.

And that's it, folks. Some people probably don't see anything wrong with the formula above. As for me, even thinking of arriving at the end goal of "meaning" or "happiness" by those means is a total farce. This is only reinforced as I realized how all of the speakers missed out on much of their children's lives, and how much of their personality and time was spent incessantly working to find satisfaction that always seemed to elude them (even at the top of their game). It's a litte uncomfortable to put it in those terms, but by all rational arguments, the point of business, as it stands, is profit. I'd challenge anyone in business to argue something else, if they were inclined to do so. Now, what I have also come to realize is that good business necessitates having some other peripheral purposes or goals, such as: meaningfully employing people, providing for employee and customer needs, contributing to the community, etc., but the purpose of business is: profit. In other words, "no margin, no mission." Period.

This is already dragging on, but I'd like to leave you with one or two closing thoughts. First, although I would argue that the purpose of business is profit (like it or not), I have to ask: should it be? Does it have to be? A big realization I had from reading a book early on in the MBA program called The Worldly Philosophers (Heilbroner), is that if we were to travel back in time only 400 years ago, the idea of personal profit was considered totally wrong and evil, because capitalism as an economic system didn't exist. Biblically, it was the sin of gluttony and avarice. In fact, today's "American Dream" of a Lexus, private schooling for the kids, and a summer lakehome was unequivocally considered sinful. Granted, oral hygene was also a sin, but think about it: there are even court cases in colonial America of people being fined and threatened with excommunication for making too much personal profit in a business transaction. What a different paradigm we live in today.

I'm not saying that profit, in and of itself, is wrong. But what if the first purpose of "business" wasn't profit, but rather community, relationship, and creating something of usefullness and excellence. Profit becomes the side-effect of a right focus on those pursuits, and in turn, helps to further those pursuits. It may even be a minor shift in focus, but a big difference in the likelihood of arriving at the desired outcome of meaning. Because I don't really think we know God through profit, unless it's at the end of a broken life that has gotten that way pursuing it at all cost. I definitely don't have all the answers here, and much of my reflection comes out of a realization that I incessantly try to fill my longings with "stuff" - but these are the ideas I wonder about from time to time, and these are the things I'd like to play some role in changing within my lifetime.

...time to go check my stocks.