On Failure Porn, Business, and Its Real Purpose
My day job is at a company that was started by two brothers when they were in their twenties and thirties, respectively. Back in the early 90s, no one was really calling anything a startup — let alone a business in the manufacturing industry. But for all intents and purposes, they co-owned a startup. That startup is now 25 years old, and has grown to over 125 people in 4 countries, on 2 continents. It’s nearing middle-age.
Recently, the two brothers took us on an off-site retreat for members of leadership and the sales team (of which I am one). They kicked things off by giving an overview of what they saw as the future of the company. By the end of the presentation it became clear that their sales and operating income goal numbers weren’t the main focus for them. All of the metrics were taking a backseat to another number — one that they put up alone on a separate slide of the presentation.
What’s in a Number?
They let us all look at the number at take a guess at what it represented. After a few minutes they revealed that it represented the number of employees that worked for them, along with the number of dependents they had. It represented the number of people that depended on them as leaders being able to keep the business running, and running profitably. It represented the number of lives (at minimum) that they were positively impacting.
Now, I’m usually skeptical about any attempt to represent businesses as anything but out for increasing profits, but this one got me. It may have been how sincere they were in their delivery. It may have been because I had not seen that done before by another business. But very likely, it’s because it touched on something that I had known all along about businesses, but that I had not quite teased out and up to the front of my mind.
Purpose and Failure
Businesses are about making things better for their people — where the term “their people” can be as wide a notion as is deemed appropriate. Profitability is the goal, but only because it helps the people by providing them a living and purpose. Every goal — be it growth, customer service, global footprint — should be in service of doing better for your people. The moment you’re not doing it for your people, that’s the moment it all becomes empty.
So yes, making a billion dollars and getting acquired may be the goal du jour for a lot of startups now, but if your people don’t end up sharing in that wealth and success, you’ve failed. You and a few partners may be rich, but you’ve failed. And not in that sexy way that people are writing articles about — but a moral failure. You did something wrong, and it hurt others. That doesn’t mean you’re a bad person, it just means you have amends to make.
That’s part of why these articles glorifying failure in business scare me a bit. I’m all for ensuring that people feel okay taking risks and falling down, but we should never glorify the exploitation of the faith and cooperative spirit of others.
If your startup “failed”, but you walked away with a wad of cash while you left a bunch of people without income — that’s not sexy, that’s a tragedy. So do me a favor and if you write an article about that particular failure, make sure to talk about how it affected your employees — not just what 5 things you learned from it that will help you build the next business.
Care About More Than Your Product
I want to be clear here. I’m not trying to give advice, I’m pleading with the entrepreneurial culture that I read about to embrace a new idea: caring about your people. This doesn’t mean providing nap pods, healthy snacks, and free gadgets — though that can be part of it. It means ensuring that your business is sustainable, that your crazy exponential growth rate isn’t so crazy that in 5 or 10 years, you’ll have to slash 1/3 of the jobs at your company.
Caring means acting responsibly. So while taking bold risks and making moonshots is sexy in the short run, that becomes harmful in the long run if it means having to chop up a company and let a bunch of people go. Caring means caring about the people for whom your company is more than just another of several income streams — it’s the better part of their day, and their only source of income.
Silicon Valley and all of the companies heavily invested in it wield an amazing power — truly amazing. But that power — as Uncle Ben famously told Peter Parker — comes with an equally amazing responsibility: the responsibility to the people that work for you. That goes from the C-suite all the way down to the people you hired to do order fulfillment.
Sure, don’t fear failure, if that makes you do great things. But understand that even if your entrepreneurial failures don’t hurt you, they hurt those who worked for you. They bought in, and you owe them for that.
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