Future thrills

Most people work in companies as this is deemed the easiest way to get a job, it offers many kinds of challenges, the possibility of getting a good salary if you succeed, many kinds of occupation and so on.

For managers it is the best way of running a business today.  It is efficient, structured, flexible, the structures are easy to establish and change, finance is available and hiring and firing people is not difficult.

For investors it is so that they can buy and sell companies easily and their metrics are easily understood. Strategic alliances can be formed and disbanded with no hassle. If companies are well run they are an investors dream. To make companies well run you just push hard and persistently and the money rolls in.

Companies are like machines, and it is quite easy to forget the humans involved in all the routines, the techniques, the hard work and the conformisms required to make a company a success.

The big companies of the world are getting bigger all the time, and we now have companies that are present in many locations all over the world, they are significantly powerful, some are economically bigger than many states, many have hundreds of thousands of employees, have become a political force and are hugely important in many communities.

The pressure for continued growth as expressed in size, shareholder value, profits and fights against regulations of many kinds make companies enter a new phase of development, and some negative overtones have emerged.

But all in all we may easily conclude that companies have been a major success, gradually being built over the last few hundred years.

Many companies are now entering a new phase where self-interest is more pronounced than before. The pressures on the company have increased, and they are of many kinds.

Increased competition have made it harder to make money, so has more regulation and rules, the is a constant need for innovation, increased welfare among employees have made it harder to employ people, the increased mechanisation of jobs are dehumanising and boring and technical development are creating new ways of doing business at an astounding rate.

The distance between global headquarters and local businesses often make cultural differences an issue, and higher educational levels and insistence on freedom of enterprise make new forms of employment and cooperation necessary. The differences between localities are slowly disappearing.

The company man now want a piece of the cake, not just wages as he has ideas and tools to perform in new ways. This is about education, new technology and growing wishes for less servility and more independence.

Many companies are now so powerful and big that they have become dangerous in many ways. They won’t abide by rules, they just do what they want as profit is threatened.  Their inherent logic is becoming too strong, and many people in such companies are becoming dangerous too as they will do most anything to achieve their goals. They are under heavy pressure to achieve their goals and to do what they are paid for – regardless.

So there are signs of development in the form of new organisational varieties, more cooperation, more sharing, more thinking and acting about human values.

But the road ahead is not clear as too many companies are pursuing fully self-centered strategies. A more human world is needed, a world where reason, sharing, equality and cooperation are the new paradigms. Much more needs to be done, much more to put a human face on the way we do business.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 11th, 2013 at 3:31 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.