Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: business vs personal is a misleading dichotomy

[Sharon Villines (sharon]

> Profit is a fundamental necessary property of any active entity which
> survives in the real world.  A plant must gain more energy from a leaf
> than it expends on building the leaf, on average, or it shrivels and dies.
> An animal must get more from eating something than it costs to find and eat
> it, or it starves to death.  Even a "non-profit" must bring in more funds
> through fund-raising than it spends on doing that fund or it loses
> money and cannot function.

Thank you for a wonderful explanation of business and profit. When I saw
Lynn's post this morning I thought "Do I have the strength to take this on
this morning?" The post was a beautifully stated view of business vs social
that so many of us operate on all the time.

One of the problems is the word "profit" has taken on a negative slant as in
"taking more than you need," making soap for $1 and selling it for $10, and
becoming a millionaire while all your workers are dying from the
manufacturing process. Another word for profit would be helpful to refocus
the dialogue.

What salaried people forget is that salaries are profits. Technically they
are defined differently (for tax purposes, etc.) but for a small business
owner, no profit means no salary.

My daughter recently returned to college to get an MBA. The entire focus of
the very intensive first few months was social skills. Team work,
understanding personalities, developing and applying social skills, constant
group activities. Understanding yourself -- your abilities and preferences.
How do these match different roles taken by business leaders?

I began to learn about people and groups when I started reading business
texts to run a small business. If you don't understand social groups, you
can't run a good business.

> Delivering the same value while using less (labor,
> resources, energy, ...) is both more profitable and more "ecological".
> The alternative is waste.

What must be emphasized here is that the workers are part of the resources
and energy. it is very bad business to harm your workers. "Sustainable" was
a business concept long before it was an ecological concept. A business that
can't be sustained is of no value.

> But life is not a zero-sum game.  Wealth can be created, value
> can be created, through intelligence and effort.  Knowledge can be
> gained and recorded and accumulated over centuries, leading to a
> steady progress of civilization.  The average American today has a much
> longer life expectancy than the Pharaohs of Egypt or the Caesars of Rome,
> and is richer in many ways as well.  Most entrepreneurs I know think
> in terms of growing a bigger pie much more often than they think about how
> to slice up a fixed-size one.  Thinking of everything in zero-sum terms
> is a habit of poverty.

Cohousing is an excellent example of creating value.  Taking a traditional
real estate development model and joining it with a traditional social
model, cohousers produce a product that is worth more than its parts.
Cohousing is excellent business.
 
> Anyway, to get back to the original topic of emotional outbursts, I think
> there are different kinds of meetings where emotions have more or less
> relevance.  If one is holding a "values discussion", emotional input is
> the main purpose of the meeting, and excluding it would be ridiculous.
> If one is holding a "business meeting" to discuss finances, it's a lot
> less clear that expressing emotions is useful or productive.

But here the argument falls back into its own trap. There is no division
between "business" and "social" values. Discussing a budget _is_ discussing
values. An emotional reaction makes the spreadsheet real. Why even discuss
spreadsheets if they have no value to human life?

Yes, it is difficult to deal with people who cannot take control of their
emotional energies and direct them, but dismissing or labeling those
emotions as inappropriate is not helpful either. There are times when
emotional "outbursts" are very grounding and very much to the point,
particularly in "business" meetings.

Sharon
-- 
Sharon Villines
Takoma Village Cohousing, Washington DC
http://www.takomavillage.org


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