The Business of Love
I have had a lot on my brain of late. So many changes have happened around the office. Lots of discovery on my end into the endless encounters I seem to have with relationships. Having just celebrated my 29th birthday…okay okay…my 37th birthday, there was a lot of love being spread around by the best wishes for a great day from all of my friends and acquaintances all the way to the cozy love I feel from my family at home. Fact is, for several reasons, I’ve been thinking lately about love and how it acquaints to business in general. I’ve been writing notes for a month on this topic alone…
How do we even answer that 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. Recently I was on a conference call with my life/business coach Kevin and we were listening to a British woman who was preparing to author a book about love in the boardroom. As she spoke of her research, it simply told a different story. She talked 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. Early industrialists argued that you can’t scale the good lords model. 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 I think love was buried…in the model of big business.
When I think about it, it makes 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 (I’m thinking Southwest Airlines, 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 was around the corner.
You need to find the faith. The norm of reciprocity is as statistically valid as any manufacturing or systematic 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 biz-folk 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.
Jim Barnett's Blog 