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Businesses should try to be the best, not the biggest

joanwestenberg.medium.com

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Re: Businesses should try to be the best, not the biggest

#221

Post by titzer »

qazpot wrote: post #122
hh3k0 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We have a finite environment—the planet. Anyone who thinks that you can have infinite growth in a finite environment is either a madman or an economist." David Attenborough

SpaceX is trying to solve the finite environment problem.

Taken to its absolute limit, space travel is limited by the speed of light. So when you get to that limit, you are limited by space, as you can only expand in a sphere--i.e. O(n^3). Space is so enormous that even the tiniest exponential will overrun O(n^3) before even getting out of our galaxy. Result. That exponential is going to flatten out and look more like a sigmoid.

Re: Businesses should try to be the best, not the biggest

#222

Post by Qwertious »

zpeti wrote: post #116
jspash wrote: post #36

I often question the motives of my company. It has only 100 or so employees. Has been in business for 25+ years. But we are on a continual drive to increase sales, hire new people, add size to the facilities. But it wasn't always this way. It only happened once it went public. Now we are working for the investors. They need to see an increasing return on their investment. Management choices are no longer about the cu…

Then your management aren't very good. The reason is that every business, or system gets worse if you don't improve it. Call it entropy in physics. If you don't try and improve, pay attention to the market, adapt, move, change, or at least maintain or build a moat, competition will inevitably want to have what you've got. It's why capitalism works. If you get old, and don't satisfy your customers, someone else will.…

"If you don't try and improve, pay attention to the market, adapt, move, change, or at least maintain or build a moat, competition will inevitably want to have what you've got. It's why capitalism works. If you get old, and don't satisfy your customers, someone else will."

So, the Traditional Sake corporation example aside, I agree - you do need to have some improvement over time.

This is not what public stockholders demand though. Public stockholders demand that intangibles be sacrificed in an attempt to improve tangibles. Sacrifice quality of service in an attempt to increase the profit margin. Sacrifice the lifetime of the product in an attempt to lower the RRP.

This isn't improving the product, it's just moving things around. At best it's shifting market demographic in hope that the new demographic is more profitable, at worst it's burning your customers for a short-term windfall.

The core issue here is that there are limits to what you can improve in a given timeframe, and if you don't respect those limits then you end up just making things worse. Management often just tells themselves otherwise and keeps pushing until they've already killed the golden goose. At that point, the lesson they've learnt is irrelevant - it's too late, customers are already leaving and their reputation is irreparably tarnished.

Re: Businesses should try to be the best, not the biggest

#223

Post by sitkack »

revax wrote: post #168
belval wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That quote always bugged me because it disregards that our economic growth is not really tethered to natural resources. Sure a company like Coca-Cola can only grow so much before it effectively covers the entire planet, but they can still reduce costs to improve their profit margins and displace existing drinks from other companies with a new product. The cloud as a business is mostly about building products that add…

>That quote always bugged me because it disregards that our economic growth is not really tethered to natural resources. I really think the opposite is true, what makes you think that?

The only growth that could be tied to non-natural resources is something like the combinatoric possibilities between a set of options.

Everything else links back to matter. Even my "internet points" on HN are tied back to the food I had to eat to type in that sweet sweet snark.

This notion that economics isn't ultimately a resource scheduling theory that falls out of a base set of behaviors (commerce). If we removed choice, we get operations research.

Capitalism is akin to wanting to cook a hotdog on a campfire and burning down an entire house to do it.

Re: Businesses should try to be the best, not the biggest

#224

Post by rtx »

kevincox wrote: post #151
rtx wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We could add more people to share the happiness.

We could but at some point having 10x more people then you need working half a day a week doesn't seem optimal. Maybe it could work but it seems that there is some sort of workforce size that makes sense for a given amount of work. I think that something like a universal basic income makes more sense here than to force a company to grow, possibly harming its product just to employ more people.

>universal basic income

Its fake news similar to FTL.

Re: Businesses should try to be the best, not the biggest

#225

Post by titzer »

isoprophlex wrote: post #136
dm319 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a growing body of thought that capitalism and, more specifically, continued growth, is unsustainable. A lot of the literature focuses around the environment [1], but we should also think about businesses that perform a useful community service or product to their community - must they always grow? If not, must their competitor? [1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1558/jocr.v5i2.197

> There is a growing body of thought that capitalism and, more specifically, continued growth, is unsustainable. Excuse my language but... who the actual fuck thinks otherwise? This is extremely perplexing to me. How many layers of double speak must one hide behind before you can believe that sustained growth for its own sake can be a healthy, sustainable goal?

People with no imagination, knowledge of history, or capacity to think about anything but themselves. People who think humans have a right to obliterate all other forms of life in order to carpet this planet with...whatever we want. People who go to zoos and watch Ow My Balls.

Re: Businesses should try to be the best, not the biggest

#226

Post by lamename »

jspash wrote: post #36

I often question the motives of my company. It has only 100 or so employees. Has been in business for 25+ years. But we are on a continual drive to increase sales, hire new people, add size to the facilities. But it wasn't always this way. It only happened once it went public. Now we are working for the investors. They need to see an increasing return on their investment. Management choices are no longer about the cu…

"The list must grow, the spice must flow"

Re: Businesses should try to be the best, not the biggest

#227

Post by _qulr »

indymike wrote: post #183
dm319 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a growing body of thought that capitalism and, more specifically, continued growth, is unsustainable. A lot of the literature focuses around the environment [1], but we should also think about businesses that perform a useful community service or product to their community - must they always grow? If not, must their competitor? [1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1558/jocr.v5i2.197

I think capitalism is being misused in this sentence, and that is making it hard for people to make sense of. Capitalism is simply an economic system where the means of production are privately owned. Growth is not a requirement or even feature of capitalism. Being able to own companies, property and hold currency are all features of capitalism. If you are trying to say "infinite growth is unsustainable" that stands…

> Capitalism is simply an economic system where the means of production are privately owned. Growth is not a requirement or even feature of capitalism.

The problem is that private ownership leads to the classic collective action problem, where actions that are individually rational to each private owner have consequences that are collectively irrational and make the world worse off.

This is not to say that private ownership should be abolished. But there has to at least be a heavy collective counterweight to self-interested wealth accumulation.

Re: Businesses should try to be the best, not the biggest

#228

Post by scatters »

baron_harkonnen wrote: post #190
Diggsey wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Continued growth: absolutely. Capitalism itself only exists because resources are finite though. It's the most practical method we have right now for efficiently allocating those resources. Allocating resources is a hard problem to solve. If we had infinite resources we would not need to solve it.

> It's the most practical method we have right now for efficiently allocating those resources. This is where true why is our way of life less sustainable today than it was 1000 years ago? Nearly all first nations tribes lived in a way of live that was sustainable indefinitely. In 250 years of developing capitalism we have destroyed most of the biosphere, and trigger climate change that has the potential to undo civil…

Because there are many, many more of us than there were 1000 years ago. Per capita, sustaining the lifestyle of a 21st century Westerner requires less land than that of an 11th century peasant.

Re: Businesses should try to be the best, not the biggest

#229

Post by pferde »

duckfang wrote: post #187
jspash wrote: post #36

I often question the motives of my company. It has only 100 or so employees. Has been in business for 25+ years. But we are on a continual drive to increase sales, hire new people, add size to the facilities. But it wasn't always this way. It only happened once it went public. Now we are working for the investors. They need to see an increasing return on their investment. Management choices are no longer about the cu…

Where I work is in the similar boat. Except we're 130 people and still private. The company recently took a large cash infusion from a venture capital firm. The company said "yadayada you'll see small improvements how we work" - what that translates to is: 1. adding a new C level for sales 2. doubling the sales department 3. Metrics now for new customers is doubled But... The rest of the departments - we have stagnat…

"Our department is suffering. Badly. So are others. Complaints to upper management appear to go on deaf ears, or with ridiculous responses (like: well we saw one of you on your cellphone so you're not really busy)."

"And when we've asked for direct support for retaining customers (using their sales language), our team was told "just make less mistakes"."

Wow, that's literally Dilbert-level of bad management. My condolences. Where I work (a large international corp.), the two or three levels of management above me are fairly reasonable and in touch with everyday reality. I guess I'm lucky.

Re: Businesses should try to be the best, not the biggest

#230

Post by ghoward »

antoniuschan99 wrote: post #216

I agree with this article personally, but don’t economies (which comprise of businesses) have to grow to either compete or reduce inequality? Seeing how China is continuously growing at a higher rate, eventually that growth will outpace other economies proving the country a higher standard of living, technological advancement, and power. Vietnam just reported 3% growth which is good in 2020 when countries had negativ…

I'm no expert, so take what I say with a grain of salt.

There are two ways economies can grow:

* More customers.

* More value.

The first is obvious, just grow the population (and it's one reason a shrinking population is bad), but the second is more subtle.

When someone invents a new product, say when the vacuum cleaner was invented, whether or not it adds value is determined by how much the product helps its user either:

1) Save time (so that more time can be spent creating something else of value).

2) Make something else of value possible.

3) Increase the quality of life.

In the case of the vacuum, it does at least 2 and 3 (less dust is definitely better quality of life).

But when it comes to growing economies, things that do number 1 and number 2 are huge. That was why the Industrial Revolution and Computer Revolution were so huge; both produced things that did 1 and 2. And because time was saved and not things became possible, those things started to get done, growing the economy.

And all of that included companies growing big, but in the presence of 1 and 2, the growth of companies isn't necessary to grow the economy.

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