THE HEART OF THE MATTER
This website is about business. The essence of business in a market economy is:
- Providing customers with something that they want and value.
- Doing this through the efforts, ingenuity and skill of the people who conceive, design, produce and sell the businesses' products and services.
Therefore the true and sustainable value of a business lies in its relationships with customers and in its people. Everything else is peripheral.
Of course, sustainable businesses will need to make a Profit in order to invest in new products and services, and to pay their people.
And in order to innovate and grow, they may need at some stage need access to money beyond the cash that they generate themselves. In this case, the providers of capital will need a fair return for their money.
These are the simple verities that underlie good businesses.
However:
- We make doing business impossibly complex through inventing theories and fancies that have little to do with its fundamentals.
- We somehow seem to have put the providers of capital at the head of the queue, way ahead of People and Customers, the true creators of value. This distorts the fundamental purposes of business.
- We are distorting leadership from a natural activity, performed by many in organisations, into an occult art performed by a few celebrity superstars.
Why are we doing these things? What can be done about it?
Read on.......