THE FUTURE OF BUSINESS
Someone once asked me if I rather be an employee than an entrepreneur; if I wouldn’t rather work for myself, be part of a great and visionary team of like minds who share my goals, be a master of my destiny. And I told him that his question was an oxymoron. An employee can be an entrepreneur, seek out and build coalitions with people of like minds, and own and write his destiny. If he had rather asked if I wouldn’t like to decide the term of my responsibilities and activities, he may have been making a point. For presently the working climate in most organizations still lack a compelling engagement of their most important stakeholders (their employees) in decisions concerning the nature and evolutions of matters of bearing to them.
Recent past has seen many people drum up support & sales for their network-based reward marketing on this fact and the prospect of making more money than you would rather earn in other lines of engagement. But what is actually at stake here, is this an evolution in business operations and wealth creation? Yes. But it’s not a newcomer to the block. Marketing has been the backbone of trades right from inception, and apart from cases of monopolies, there can be no hope of business expansion and sales in any trade whatsoever if not for marketing. And yes, it’s an innovation in business operations: The wage system of work was based on the servile structure, which is in itself based on the idea of bequeathing your resources and labour to a lord with the hope that he, in turn, be generous enough to repay your loyalty by ensuring your wellbeing and the providing for your needs. But over time, with the abolition of slave labour and constant clamouring for better working conditions by labour unions, the generosity of the benefactors have been pushed to include several other benefits and increased leniency. But one thing that we have still found very difficult to prescribe with this system of affairs is to ensure an effective administration of rewards based on work input, and this is no surprise because human labour input is no standard measure, and work and its execution are different for different people. And we have also been unsuccessful in ensuring a consistent commitment to production, thus industrialists have looked to machines and technologies for a more fungible and non-disruptive operation.
Whilst the new reward system poses to address these short comings in human skill implementation. But do we actually get to do less? No. Like Henry Ford’s replacement of skilled craftsmen with common labourers doing single non-intuitive task on the production line, it only leverages on the novelty of hierarchical pyramids structure to ensure exponentially increasing output for an arithmetically progressive cost implication, while ensuring a fair reward strictly based on results and not any social inclinations. Humans are most times driven by short-term personal indulgence, the wider picture is of little or no considerations, (this is not to imply that the wider consequence of all such operations are dire), in fact, the gains, security, and resourcefulness of any such scheme are still tired to the nature of their business and operations.
It would be naive and deceptive to say that because you work on your own terms, you do not work, for wealth grows only when men exact effort. In a changing world, and with evolution in human understanding, the way we exact our efforts and how we harness them to produce results is changing and will forever evolve, and businesses must consider such innovative practices to better improve their productivity and profitability.
