All Great Businesses are Inherently Moral

This fact has been proven time and time again by modern business and human psychology experts.

No business that exists exclusively for profit, without the advantages of corporatism or cronyism, will ever be very successful and certainly not over the long-term.

This is not my opinion. This law of business is as well established as the laws of gravity.

By a great business I very simply mean a profitable enterprise that lasts for an extended period of time. An unethical business can fool people for a short time however it cannot fool them for very long, particularly in the age of social media.

Business experts from a few decades ago called this vision and mission. Brad Sugars in Instant Team Building insists on vision, mission, and culture points. Tony Hseih in Delivering Happiness calls on vision and culture statements. Mike Michalowicz in The Pumpkin Plan has his immutable laws. Sam Carpenter references his Rules of the Game in Work the System.

Jim Collins in Good to Great discusses the requirement of all great businesses to have a “Hedgehog concept.”

One of the primary findings in, Built to Last, that contradicted the teachings of many MBA programs, is that businesses that have survived and excelled over time were often the ones that were centered around a core business concept, not a great product.

Let me summarize a major portion of all of those books very succinctly…

Every great business expert knows that a business MUST be motivated by something more than profit to inspire your team, stay focused and even maximize profits.

If you’re still not convinced, pick up a copy of The Loyalty Effect by Frederick F. Reichheld and read about the numerous studies that have shown that companies who downsize in the interest of short-term profits rarely ever recover and often their stock prices suffer for a very long time. Obviously there are necessary times to downsize and appropriate ways to do so, but to simply improve next quarter’s earnings is not one of those times. As a general rule, downsizing is best treated as a last resort.

In The Millionaire Mind, Thomas Stanley discovered that the #1 thing millionaires attribute to their success is “being honest with all people.” (And 88% of the millionaires he surveyed achieved their wealth through entrepreneurship.)

Marcus Buckingham’s research in First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently demonstrated that pay is not even in the top 5 reasons people stay at or leave a job. Through 20 years of research with 20,000 managers and over 80,000 interviews, he has developed 12 questions that do show what motivates people and pay doesn’t even make the list.

In other words, money is not the primary motivator for people and all businesses are run by people.

Dan Pink takes it a step further in the below video. Through extensive research in the psychology of motivation he shows that for someone to truly excel they need Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose. If your boss, the corporation, or the government is dictating what you should do, there goes Autonomy. If your “hedgehog concept” is to maximize profit, then you’ve thrown Purpose out the window.

A non-crony entity that exists primarily for profit will never be a very successful business and every great business leader knows this. The idea that companies should be immoral is as old as Machiavelli and it was as wrong then as it is now.

If you work for someone who runs an immoral business, start educating them that there is a better, more prosperous way. As a matter of fact, help every business leader and employee you know appreciate the long-term business benefits of running an ethical, moral business.

It’s truly the only path a business can take to succeed over the long-term.

To your ethical business building success,
Bryan

P.S. My team’s number one culture point is Love and we try to live it as best we can. It’s not easy and we don’t always succeed but it is our most core value. I highly recommend you infuse it into your culture.