March 30, 2010

What's love got to do with business?

I just had a great conversation with a british author working on a book about love in the boardroom. 

Her challenge is similar to the one I faced a decade ago when I wrote Love Is The Killer App.  She has to answer the following smart question: What's love got to do with business?  It seems fair enough, business after all is about measurable results and love is fuzzy - difficult to define and impossible to weigh.  

Her research tells another story.  She told me about the days of chivalry, where the "good lords" developed a fondness for their charges, and built highly loyal and effective teams.  Later, during the industrial revolution, scale changed all of that.  You can't scale the good lords model, argued early industrialists.  The whole point of capitalism is to scale something into increasing returns for the owners.  Love doesn't scale, but machines and processes do.  That's where love was buried in the model of big business. 

When I thought about it, that made sense.  Show me someone who wants to build a massive business, and I'll show you someone that has a hard time finding a role for love in the model.  Of course, there are some pretty big organizations (Southwest Airlines, SAS Institute, Aveda, etc.) where the founders defied convention and much like the good lords, leveraged engagement of their people into profits (via customer delight).  

In my experience, when you show business love, you are sharing your intangibles to promote the other's growth.  You are sharing knowledge, your network of relationships or your compassion to help others grow, end suffering and prosper.  You do it with the belief that nice smart people succeed and most of all people reciprocate.  This means you have a high degree of faith in human nature's tendency to give back and love back.  This is where it all goes wrong for the modern industrialist.  That's a big bet to make, especially on an entity as unpredictable as humans.  You can go Six Sigma and have blind faith in an almost perfect assembly line, but you can't put people at the center of the business without a slight fear that chaos is around the corner. 

You need to find the faith.  The norm of reciprocity is as statistically valid as any manufacturing process ever created.  We are a species that reciprocates and gives more to people that truly care about us. Here's the real problem: ego.  The modern business leader never wants to be wrong about people, because that would be quite 'personal'.  You can make a bad bet on a machine, then blame someone later in the supply chain.  Hire someone, groom them for greatness, then have them compete against you in the market?  A failure of epic proportions on your part. 

Get over it.  If you want to test how you will feel about this in your later days, just visit any retirement community and talk to the former bizfolk staying there.  Ask them about their managers, reports and vendors.  Ask them if they consider them friends, sons, daughters, brothers, etc.  To a person, you'll get a twinkle and a tear, as they explain that some of the greatest relationships of their life happened at work.  This is why I love my people in the here and now.  I'm not so hungry for scale, that I'm willing to turn humans into objects.  I'm not afraid of being wrong about people, perfect is the enemy of good.  

Posted at 11:14 AM in Business Effectiveness , Leadership  |  Permalink  |  Comments (0)  |  TrackBack (0)

Comments

Post a comment

If you have a TypeKey or TypePad account, please Sign In