Why I Follow This Marvel Superhero’s Business Philosophy

As a PhD student studying Organisational Health and Wellbeing, I have a firm belief that staff are the greatest asset in any organisation. If you treat your staff well, listen to them and pay them fairly — they will be loyal and do the best work they can do.
As a new business owner and solopreneur, I have not hired any permanent staff yet, but I feel exactly the same way about my customers. I try to delight them, listen to them if they’re unhappy and set a fair price.
I’m part of a new generation of business owners. A generation that chooses people over profits. I don’t want to give you the hard sell. I don’t want to bombard you with impossible benefits and promises that I can’t keep. I don’t want to trick you into spending your hard-earned cash. Instead, I want to help you get something that you want, and earn my living from doing this.
This isn’t to say that I do not want to be profitable. It would be fantastic to have some extra money so that I could travel around the world and know that I could provide for my family. But, I do not want any profit if it means I have to act immorally. I do not want success at the cost of exploitation, whether that is my customers getting a raw deal, my future employees or even myself. Yet it seems that doing business this way is the norm.
Take three organisational giants, Uber, the NHS and Pedigree Chum, each of which is guilty of exploiting their staff or customers in ways that vary from the insidious to the downright indefensible
1. Uber
Uber has come under some bad press recently for attempting to manipulate their drivers. For example, this article by the New York Times highlights how Uber has employed a team of behavioural scientists to experiment with techniques and tactics to “encourage” drivers to prolong their shifts and incentivise them to drive more. These include cueing up the next ride before the current one is over, giving feedback to show how close a driver is to reaching an arbitrary goal and earning badges for achieving certain milestones.
“No big deal”, you might think. “These drivers choose to work for Uber and probably want the extra money”, and that may well be the case for some drivers in some situations. But what if it was not in the driver’s best interest to keep working, perhaps due to the time of day or type of location. The driver then finds that they are nudged to do something that they wouldn’t ordinarily have chosen.
An example to illustrate this and one that you probably have more experience with is when you binge-watch a series on Netflix. It’s probably not in your best interest to keep watching past 11pm if you are tired and have to get up early tomorrow. Yet you keep watching because you’re hooked on the story and Netflix autoplaysthe next episode. Before you know it, it is 2am and you’ve been watching the Walking Dead for five hours straight, which is rather apt because it perfectly describes how you will be feeling in the morning. Both Netflix watchers and Uber drivers can stop at any time, but somehow you’re both nudged to stay.
2. The NHS
The NHS is the stalwart of the UK and the favourite political card to play. Most employees work for the NHS because they want to help people get better. Alongside firefighters and policemen, these people literally save lives. Yet staff find themselves trapped having trained in the most laudable of professions.
The Government capped pay rises at 1% in 2010, but when you take inflation into account this is equivalent to a pay cut! This is how some of the most valuable members of our society are treated. Ironically in an organisation whose entire objective is to make people well, staff are going off sick due to stress, anxiety and depression and they are unable to feed their families.
3. Pedigree Chum
Before I was a dog owner, I used to watch the Pedigree Chum adverts on TV and see happy, healthy dogs having a fantastic time running around with their tongues lolling out. I thought that this will be the brand that I feed my pet pooch on. That is until I started researching it and realised that it is all marketing lies.
The ingredients listed on a can of Pedigree chicken dog food show that it contains 4% chicken. This is chicken dog food remember, so what else makes up the 96%? Reading further down the list there are cereals, animal derivatives (as in an unknown part of an unknown animal) and oil. None of these sound particularly tasty to dogs, however, the makers of Pedigree do something to those ingredients that make it the equivalent of doggy crack cocaine.
This is no exaggeration. I once dog-sat a friend’s dog who eats Pedigree and my little pup managed to steal some of his food. My puppy went ballistic. He was aggressive, extremely hyper and weirdly once I took the food away, he just stared at the spot where the food was…like a psycho. The next time I dog-sat this same dog, my now one year old literally ate the poop of this dog just to get a taste of the Pedigree goodness. Yuck! That blue badge on all of their products means nothing.
One thing is clear, going into business is well, serious business! Business owners have a responsibility to make decisions, some of which could have an enormous and unquantifiable impact on people’s lives, their health and wellbeing and even their pets. I don’t often take entrepreneurial advice from fictional Marvel characters, but I’ve made an exception for Iron Fist from the Netflix series. This quote from the show illustrates the point of this article perfectly:
A bunch of executives are sat around a table discussing the pricing strategy of a new anti-parasitic drug which could save 50,000 lives per year.
“Good guy (Iron Fist): So you’re saying we can save lives at $5 a pill but you want to raise the price to $50? We should sell at cost price.
Bad guy (Douche bag): This is how business is done, this is normal business.
Good guy (Iron Fist): Then normal is not the best path to take. No one should make a profit off the misery of others, it’s wrong. We can make our profits elsewhere.”
I could not have put it better.
My business intentions are entirely honourable, I want to serve my customers and help them to the best of my ability. And so I issue this open invitation. If I ever start making people miserable and somehow make a profit off someone else’s pain and suffering, then please tell me to stop being a massive dickhead.
Thank you for reading! 😃 If you have enjoyed this, please consider clapping or sharing my post. Let me know in the comments below, how do you feel as a customer (or employee) when you hear this? Have you ever boycotted an organisation because of their immoral business practice?
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