Distance Makes The Business Grow Richer

There is no doubt American businesses thrive.  There remains much doubt, however, as to the reason.  A simple Google search for "business consultant" yields 489,000 hits.

That's a lot of people out there professing to know enough about business to tell other businesses about business.  The US Census bureau lists a few more than seven million businesses with paid employees in 2001.  Seven percent of those firms are business consultants.  One business in fourteen consult to other businesses about business.

If businesses actually understood what makes business work, there would be fewer business consultants and a lot more businesses that didn't offer business consulting (but rather actually made something or serviced something for profit).

Imagine if the ratio of patients to doctors was 13 to 1.  At one family per day your family doctor could come around to your house once ever two weeks just to check up on the kids.  He'd still have enough time for a round of golf every day and he'd still get every fourteenth day completely off. 

Doctors would quickly go broke and start selling Mary Kay products if there were such a glut. But a need exists in the business world for one in fourteen businesses to be business consultants. Business must be sick. 

P.T.  Barnum was wrong, though.  Maybe there isn't a sucker born every minute.  Maybe the same ones keep coming back again and again. If so, the sick businesses remain sick, even after assessment and treatment.  They never get well and they keep the business consultants busy. 

That's okay for the business consultants. So long as there are enough consultants for a business to retain some anonymity, a sick business can "consultant shop" from consultant to consultant, taking the advice it likes and rejecting the hard choices from each. 

But what makes a successful business?  That is the "golden fleece" of the business consulting businesses.  Robert Heller, in a commentary titled “Non-Management: Leading by example and total quality,” says the best business is defined by hands-on management.  This conclusion couldn’t be more wrong.

American business works best that works apart from executive interferrence.  The error in conclusion is an error in assumption.  A person whose only job is the management and direction of others will begin with the assumption that a person whose only job is the management and direction of others is necessary to success. This assumption was never true and it will never be true. 

Studies edge ever closer to the conclusion that workers, given a vision and a place to perform, will find the most efficient and most effective way of doing their jobs.  Intrusion by middle or upper management can only inhibit or quash efficiency, effectiveness, or even the ability to work. 

Jason Tanz, writing in Fortune Small Business Magazine, provides a brief history of management.

1909	Peter Drucker Writes First Management Book
1911	Rise of the Machines. Think of employees as replaceable parts.
1923	Managing by Committee. Management by Decentralized Committee.
1927	Management by Group Decision-making.
1938	Management by wandering around.
1950	Deming and Total Quality Management (Arrghh!!!)
1978	Transformational leadership. CEOs change the world.
1984	CEO as celebrity.
1990	Servant leadership.
2001	Workers no longer need companies and can work for themselves.

The next step in this business management slippery slope is ”employees can manage themselves!"  And this will be the revolution that sets business on its most productive cycle yet.

Businesses that fill their cubes and lines with employees who don't need supervisors, managers, or bean-counters will be the ones who get ahead faster, adapt quicker, and profit most.  Employees who can't manage themselves will be retrained or removed. 

Employees, at liberty to work best as they see fit, fully rewarded for their own contribution, and committed to achievement and personal growth will benefit everyone in the company. 

It only took business management theory 100 years to realize this.

This is the truth our Founding Fathers knew more than 200 years ago:  that free people with authority to govern their own lives will produce more, require less assistance, and become greater -- both individually and aggregately -- than will any society under authoritarian rule or threat. 

The fact therefore must be that the individuals themselves, each in his own personal and sovereign right, entered into a compact with each other to produce a government: and this is the only mode in which governments have a right to arise, and the only principle on which they have a right to exist.  ~~ Thomas Paine: Rights Of Man

Mr. Paine argued that man has rights (he wrote before the necessity of accommodating the sensitivities of gender-specific nouns) and those rights are not advanced by governments.  Governments usually inhibit them. 

If we examine with attention into the composition and constitution of man, the diversity of his wants, and the diversity of talents in different men for reciprocally accommodating the wants of each other, his propensity to society, and consequently to preserve the advantages resulting from it, we shall easily discover, that a great part of what is called government is mere imposition.  

Government is no farther necessary than to supply the few cases to which society and civilisation are not conveniently competent; and instances are not wanting to show, that everything which government can usefully add thereto, has been performed by the common consent of society, without government ~~ Thomas Paine: Rights of Man, Of Society and Civilization

Even more to the point, James Madison in Federalist No.  45 stated that the federal government is unnecessary to the governance of a free people.

The State governments may be regarded as constituent and essential parts of the federal government; whilst the latter is nowise essential to the operation or organization of the former.

Clearly, the direction of federalist theory is working opposite that of business management theory.   Starting from a Constitution that enumerated the boundaries of the federal government, not its power, the federal government is now an all-powerful engine. There is not a single aspect of social or market life that is not regulated and overseen by the fed.

Starting with the definition of a self-sufficient and independent constituency, citizens have decayed into mewling and needful dependents, constantly crying, "Increase the dole! Increase the dole!"  No level of interference is too great.  No amount of micro-management is excessive.

America was founded on the belief that free peoples did not need the federal government so much as the federal government needed free peoples.  Governments were considered an imposition.

Today the federal government thinks of its constituency as little more than interchangeable parts to be taxed, consumed, used, abused, and then replaced with the new generation that hasn't learned, yet, that the federal government is an unnecessary evil.  The next step, backward along the management line, is the rise of the robber-baron government where "management" is the lash of the whip and the sting of a fist.

Our founders believed the best government is that which governs least. As John Adams said,

Nothing is more certain from the history of nations, and the nature of man, than that some forms of government are better fitted for being well administered than others.

And nothing is more certain from the history of man than this, that some states of man are better fitted for humanity than others.  Free men alone can constitute free governments.

~ Dexter