THE TOOLKIT
Business ain’t fair.
As my mother used to tell me, “Life ain’t fair, and once you get used to it, you’ll get far in this world.” The same principle applies in business. Business isn’t about fairness. Business is about meeting customer needs. It’s about exceeding shareholders’ expectations. It’s about profitability. It’s about market share. It’s about meeting demand. It’s providing products, goods, and services to a consumer base.
It’s about production, not preparation. It’s about bottom-line results more than the effort required to achieve them. For example, if you continually save the company tens of thousands of dollars each year because you create software fixes as opposed to requesting a new software package, should you receive acknowledgement for your efforts? Sure. Should senior management look to you more often regarding your obvious subject-matter expertise? Absolutely, and if senior management was sitting across the table from me, I’d tell them just that. However, it doesn’t mean that it will happen. These reactions to your efforts all make sense. They are all logical. However, there are many people with a variety of perspectives, goals, agendas, and backgrounds taking a look at what happens in your business. Therefore, what is important, what gets rewarded, and what gets decided is going to vary as often as the people making the decisions.
Most business decisions are arrived at through a concept called equifinality. This means that there are many ways to get to the same place. Simply put, if I wanted to travel across Europe, I could hitchhike, I could backpack, I could get a Europass and take the rail, or I could go through a travel agency and have 5-star accommodations the whole way. And while my dear Jewish grandmother would argue for the latter, there are many ways to do it. In business the same is true.
When we say that business ain’t fair, we’re saying that decisions are made for various reasons. No one person is trying to be a jerk when he makes a decision to move in one direction over another. There are many ways to get to the same place. In business, there is no right or wrong. There are only business cases to be made and decisions based on the strength of their arguments. The arguments may include profitability, market penetration, quality, time, stress, morale, efficiency, or even maintenance and repair. And, when those arguments change with new data, new strategies, or new benefits, then the decisions change as well, which leads me to the second unwritten law of business.