Businesses should try to be the best, not the biggest
joanwestenberg.medium.com
Businesses should try to be the best, not the biggest
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Re: Businesses should try to be the best, not the biggest
#2That assertion is nothing new. I believe there were even studies made about that, comparing economies to organisms, and high-growth companies as cancerous manifestations. But don't ask me what and where.
Re: Businesses should try to be the best, not the biggest
#3To push the metaphor a bit further isn't humanity itself a kind of cancer of the earth?
Re: Businesses should try to be the best, not the biggest
#4> The so-called accumulation of capital which gave birth to the bourgeoisie changed the very conception of property and wealth: they were no longer considered to be the results of accumulation and acquisition but their beginnings; wealth became a never-ending process of getting wealthier. The classification of the bourgeoisie as an owning class is only superficially correct, for a characteristic of this class has been that everybody could belong to it who conceived of life as a process of perpetually becoming wealthier, and considered money as something sacrosanct which under no circumstances should be a mere commodity for consumption.
[..]
> [Hobbes] even, through sheer force of imagination, was able to outline the main psychological traits of the new type of man who would fit into such a society and its tyrannical body politic. He foresaw the necessary idolatry of power itself by this new human type, that he would be flattered at being called a power-thirsty animal, although actually society would force him to surrender all his natural forces, his virtues and his vices, and would make him the poor meek little fellow who has not even the right to rise against tyranny, and who, far from striving for power, submits to any existing government and does not stir even when his best friend falls an innocent victim to an incomprehensible raison d'etat.
> For a Commonwealth based on the accumulated and monopolized power of all its individual members necessarily leaves each person powerless, deprived of his natural and human capacities. It leaves him degraded into a cog in the power-accumulating machine, free to console himself with sublime thoughts about the ultimate destiny of this machine, which itself is constructed in such a way that it can devour the globe simply by following its own inherent law.
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> By "Victory or Death," the Leviathan can indeed overcome all political limitations that go with the existence of other peoples and can envelop the whole earth in its tyranny. But when the last war has come and every man has been provided for, no ultimate peace is established on earth: the power-accumulating machine, without which continual expansion would not have been achieved, needs more material to devour in its never-ending process. If the last victorious Commonwealth cannot proceed to "annex the planets," it can only proceed to destroy itself in order to begin anew the never-ending process of power generation.
-- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism"
Mind you, IIRC Arendt didn't argue that the above "leads to totalitarianism", it's just something she wrote about in that tome, too.
Re: Businesses should try to be the best, not the biggest
#5To push the metaphor a bit further isn't humanity itself a kind of cancer of the earth?
It may have become, but it wasn't until we figured the physics out.
Re: Businesses should try to be the best, not the biggest
#6Do lifestyle businesses really have the negative connotation that I’ve been told they have? I’ve heard about this stigma of a lifestyle business numerous times, but everyone Ive ever actually talked to has said they sound lovely: you maintain a lot of control over your life and business, at the expense of perhaps more (unnecessary) money.
I had thought for a long time that lifestyle businesses which weren’t optimizing to grow would be looked down upon, but I’ve never seen that. I think maybe there is some bias because of course we will hear more about the Ubers and Doordashes of the world, rather than the Basecamps of the world.
Re: Businesses should try to be the best, not the biggest
#7I'm not the biggest fan of this analogy. I find it reductionist to the point it loses it's meaning.
Actually the whole human body is constantly growing, not just cancers. I'm am growing new skin cells as we speak, approximately every x3 weeks I shed old skin cells so need new ones. The problem with cancerous cells is that the body stops recycling them and so then they grow unchecked. Modern companies are more like skin cells, they need to grow new capabilities and shed old ones as the environment changes. If they don't then they will die, the same way I will die if my body stops growing new cells to replace the old one.
Saying a company purpose is merely growth is nonsense, different companies have different purposes, mostly they want to survive which involves both growth and decay.
Re: Businesses should try to be the best, not the biggest
#8To push the metaphor a bit further isn't humanity itself a kind of cancer of the earth?
"I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet." - Agent Smith, The Matrix
Re: Businesses should try to be the best, not the biggest
#9Paywalled. But the claim sounds a bit dubious. A cancer is not the same as a company, and the growth of a cancer is not the same as a growth of a company.
Living things increases entropy faster than dead things[1][2], and companies or organized economic activity increase entropy faster than non organized economic activity, and better (more profitable) companies do this better than less profitable ones, and bigger ones do this faster than smaller companies.
On average, the amount something costs is highly correlated to the how much it increased the entropy of the universe, where something that was more expensive than something else usually resulted in a higher increase in entropy.
This does not make companies that grow cancer any more than it makes life that evolves to increase entropy faster is cancer, it just in line with the universe's tendency to transition to states of higher entropy and to select for processes that increase entropy faster, like life on earth, which is much better at increasing entropy now than 4 billion years ago.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKbJ9leUNDE&list=PLoaVOjvkzQ... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_and_life
Re: Businesses should try to be the best, not the biggest
#10Ugh.
This person is kinda suggesting that companies should have some noble higher purpose.
Companies are entities for making money for investors and employees and maybe having fun doing it.
The irony is this person is suggesting companies should be “changing the world” a la Silicon Valley TV show. The author probably had no idea.