Big Companies Are People Too

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Big business. Corporate executive. Profit. Capitalist. Pro-business.

I cringe when these words are used as self-evident insults. Perhaps a residue from the counter culture thinking in the 1960s, this belief that “business is badness” doesn’t hold up to critical thinking. Or even any thinking at all.

Let’s look at some fundamentals:

1. Each business – large or small – is a collective effort to turn time and skill into value that a customer will pay for. No value? No customers and no business.

2. The people who work for a business earn wages for building their lives and wellbeing. No income? No employees and no business. Each business benefits its customers and its employees or it goes out of business. Which business benefits the most customers and the most employees? Well, I guess that would be a business with the most customers and employees. Some might call that “big business,” no?

3. To stay in business a company needs income to be greater than expenses. No profit? No business. That’s right, profit is necessary to benefit customers and employees. Note that a “big business” benefits more customers and employees than a small business.

So let’s examine what these facts might imply to those who want to kick big business with a knee jerk. Home Depot’s plans to build a new store might not be derided as big business ruining a neighborhood. It might be seen as a valuable service (see Fundamental #1, above) that will benefit the people who live there with broad selection and low prices. If the people of the neighborhood really don’t want Home Depot then they’ll vote with their dollars and the store won’t be there long. Remember, if there are no customers, then Home Depot will close the store. (Don’t get me started about the obverse of this when some then cry, “Big business is closing a store and ruining the neighborhood.”)

Perhaps the poster boy for bad business is still Enron from 2001. Surely that’s an example of a bad, bad business, right? Well, yes, but most importantly it was a major business tragedy. Just like any business, Enron was not a monolithic entity. It was a company of 22,000 people, only a small percentage of whom had the ethics of a toad. But the vast majority lost their income and their means to build their lives and wellbeing. (Fundamental #2) What’s more, at Arthur Andersen, Enron’s accounting and consulting firm, there was only a handful of incompetent people among the 7,000 who lost their jobs right away in the backlash.

Does Big Business do bad things? Sure, some of them do. So do small businesses. So do individuals. Through big leverage and big resources big businesses can have a big bad effect just as they have a large good effect. But let’s advance the conversation about “big bad business” to focus on which businesses are screwing up and which businesses are doing well. Let’s treat them individually. Heck, let’s treat them as if they were people.