The Campbell Academy Blog (8)

What are you made for?

"Your job exists to give you the life that you want."

I'm repeating that again, only a few blogs after I did it the last time, but it keeps crossing my mind as I'm thinking about where we're going next and what we're going to do.

It comes back to this thing about what you were made for.

It comes back to the thing about what your business is for or what the business is for that you are working for.

One of the things that tire us out the most is when we have to do things which are at odds with our fundamental values.

If you are inherently a good person, and by good, I mean honest, ethical and empathic, and you are working somewhere that is the opposite of that, it is devastatingly warring day after day after day.

It is for that reason that more and more people are trying to choose places to work that fit their personality and fit their values, and for that reason, it's essential that if you are a place to work, you are open and clear about what your values and your vision is.

We live in a world of shareholder primacy, invented by Milton Friedman and instigated into the world by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan more than anyone else.

After the Great Depression and the Wall Street crash, checks and balances were put into place so that companies could not run wild just making money for the sake of making money at anyone else's expense.

These were removed through the 1980s in the hyper-capitalist boom, and shareholder primacy became the norm.

The likelihood is you have grown up in a world of shareholder primacy and don't understand that it's possible to have a different thing.

The first corporations were time-limited companies in the United States; the Hoover Dam project was a classic example.

Corporations were intended to cease to exist after the projects were completed, but the rules that apply to corporations were made open-ended, and therefore, companies like McDonald's, Nike, Starbucks and all of these places were able to continue and prosper and become like small countries.

The problem with shareholder primacy is that the business exists for the good of the shareholder.

They might look after their team or look after their customers, but only so they make more money for the shareholders, and the difficulty with this is that almost everybody else has modelled their business on this.

This means that the guy who owns a dental practice owns a dental practice for his own benefit to make as much money as possible to drive the value of the business and then sell it and go and live in Thailand.

And so, in that model doesn't really give a sh*t about the people that work for him. He doesn't really give a sh*t about the customers or the patients or the clients or whatever you want to call them but pays lip service to all of this to make sure they maximise the amount of money for themselves.

Wouldn't it be interesting if we looked at a salary cap model?

Wouldn't it be interesting to look at a model where it was impossible for the boss to earn more than ten times more than the person at the lowest income level in the business?

This would be interesting because the more successful the business got, the more the boss would have to pay the people at the bottom end to make sure they got paid more at the top end.

I had a conversation recently with an extremely successful dentist who is not from this country. We were chatting about how much they charged for a dental implant against how much we charged.

It turned out that we charge much more than they do, and he couldn't understand it.

I asked them why they charged that much, and they didn't know. They said there was no point in charging anymore because they already had two Porsches.

I didn't think the point of running a business was to have two Porsches.

I thought the point of running a business was to make it a better functioning part of society, but that depends upon what you think you're made for.