Ethics 101 – The Forgotten Business Course

The problems of mass production often stem from the same process as the benefits. In the beginning, this may be a superficial complaint, as poignantly highlighted in the familiar Henry Ford quote “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black”. The obvious benefits of mass-production – reduced human error, a reduction in labor costs, and increased production – intrinsically create a few problems. One is the superficial kind just mentioned, the inability to tailor the product to a customer’s whims. But the greater problems are the result of either legitimate unintended consequences, like the detrimental health effects of eating McDonald’s highly-processed foods, the destruction of family farms by agribusiness, or the toxic wasteland that we’ve created through our hunger for more and more at a lower price, or another kind of more INTENTIONAL consequence. If the elements of the game are as simple as “create a product at the lowest possible price and sell it for the highest possible price”, someone, somewhere, is going to pay. And when the entity making those decisions is an amoral collection of guidelines designed solely to maximize profit to please stakeholders – the long term price is hardly worth the cash savings at the time of purchase. For companies like McDonald’s and their competitors to have food outlets all around the globe, and for two thirds of the world to have a cell phone, a lot of “someones” had to make the decisions to utilize nearly slave-like labor, to destructively mine rare minerals to create throw-away devices that return to the environment in massive toxic dumps, or to engineer food that is shippable and attractive but has no flavor and questionable nutritional value.

This Soapbox Makes Me Feel Pretty Tall!

So all I’m really saying here is that I think morality in business skipped a generation, and if you’re planning a global empire to deliver your widget, why not throw some basic forward thinking into the mix? While the iPad, for instance, is an amazing device, its artificially low price was made possible largely by sending jobs overseas, massively underpaying THOSE workers, and marketing it with a “sin of omission” lie, which was failing to tell the marketplace that it was a walled garden media platform. And if you’re a big Apple fan (I personally love their products) you may be shocked to learn that the company engages in virtually zero charitable donations. Is that really success? I don’t think so. Not if our grandkids can’t afford to pay their electric bill and recharge the thing because they spent all their money on potable water and health care.

*steps down from soapbox*

The Work You’re Doing Today May Be Your MBA Program

If you don’t feel like picking up a copy of that Forbes Greatest Business Stories book that I mentioned above, there’s a lengthy excerpt here that includes a part of the story that suddenly resonated in a powerful way for me upon re-reading it. And that part of the story was the part immediately BEFORE where the McDonald’s tale really begins. It mirrors something that I’m sure is true for thousands of us pursuing various careers, but that few fail to capitalize on. In that excerpt, the author points out that Kroc had spent “thirty years selling paper products and milk-shake machines to restaurants all over the nation”. And that “In his journeys, Kroc saw an astonishing variety of operations – coffee shops, mom-and-pop dinettes, diners, burger stands, and ice-cream chains like Tastee-Freez – and became something of an expert on the low end of the American restaurant scene”. Were you paying attention just now? Ostensibly, Kroc was a “paper products and milk-shake machine salesman”. But his job in fact allowed him to observe – in a way that no business researcher possibly could – the inner workings of hundreds, if not thousands of different foodservice businesses. To the uninspired sales rep whose only aim is meeting and/or exceeding his numbers – the common framework of even the most successful sales professionals – this career of Kroc’s may have had an abysmally dull end, as the aging sales guy lost his edge, and ended up living on some meager retirement he may or may not have been smart enough to assemble. But Kroc kept his eyes open and his brain switched on, and recognized the goldmine of the real-world foodservice research lab that was right in front of him every day. I personally began applying a similar concept just a couple of years ago, which has led me to doing consulting, authoring a couple of books, and preparing to position myself as an “expert”. I am quite confident I have found my truer path, and am already beginning to feel the early success of my efforts in this new direction. My story has a similar arc, in that for over a decade, I worked with dozens of small and medium businesses on a rather intimate level, mostly helping them refine their digital media or marketing strategies. I didn’t come away from that decade with millions in net worth or a huge revenue stream, but I came away with something I now know is even MORE valuable, which is the knowledge of a hundred ways to fail or be mediocre, and the mindset that makes that path a near certainty for an entrepreneur. We’ll see if I end up building a multi-billion dollar empire like Kroc, but one thing I’m CERTAIN that I – and perhaps you – DO have in common with Kroc, is that by working hard on one thing, but keeping my eyes open to others – I have basically put myself through business school, and gotten paid to do it! Is there a learning opportunity in YOUR life that you’re overlooking? You don’t have to be a traveling salesman to learn from the work experience around you, you just have to remember to pay attention in business class!

Next time: Why you probably don’t want to actually be like Ray Kroc.

In parroting this old saying, there’s also a sort of implication that quantity is going to be the most important factor. Satirist H.L. Mencken said “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public“, but that’s no reason to take aim at that as your target market. I know a couple of skilled designers that do high end interiors with “reclaimed” materials. They shop all sorts of weird places for discarded industrial fixtures or wood, pay little or nothing for these materials, and charge a very rewarding amount of money to refresh the items and create stunningly unique residential and commercial interiors. They do very little “work”; most of their energy goes into diddling around looking for old treasures, and talking to people. And they rightfully take pride both in the creations themselves, and the knowledge that they’re preserving great design elements of the past while recycling materials that are otherwise “waste”. Both of the gentleman I’m referring to are just that – GENTLEMAN – and have no shortage of class or income. One of them is friends with a former president, if that adds to his cred in any way.

But I’m not suggesting that there’s anything WRONG with making millions or billions from a mass-market product, but it was after all one of the greatest mass-producers of all time – Henry Ford – who said “A business that makes nothing but money is a poor business“.