The Purpose of Money

The Purpose of Money

Has the Purpose of money been lost or distorted by Organizations?

I’m a fan of car analogies.   Wonderful use here by Simon.

“The Purpose of a company is NOT to [just] make money, but to contribute to Society in some meaningful, [distinct – don’t say “competitive”] way” – Simon

Yes!

I briefly tried to raise this topic with a friend, two former clients (VP level) and my father.   I was very disappointed by the prevailing mindset playing through these people, downloaded and unmindfully “re played” to me [and many others, I’d assume].   There is a term for this behavior.   It’s called Prejudice.

I’ve suggested across all my writing and speaking, that Life is essentially individuals Thinking and Moving those thoughts into Physical action.   This is essentially a challenge of how to scale Awareness and Influence of a shared reality.  Due to large scale complexities of Life and inability to share space with every person on every issue, we must rely on a relay of others’ experiences and evolving opinions, for dimensions of life we haven’t yet experienced our self.

As a result of Life’s complex design, society most often lacks a way to align on Thought and shared Action.  How do we efficiently seek opinion, effectively clarify that we understand one another, debate in a healthy manner, align on the Next plan of action, and then check-in with one another during and after OUR shared Action? Can we expect our selves to reflect and adapt on the outcomes when we were not allowed to participate in the planning and action?  Can society accept for how well WE are evolving [together], without attempts to Share reality?

Direct experiences should trump beliefs held prior to any personal experience on the topic of interest.   There should be a continuous replacement of belief with direct, evolving experience.  There’s a plethora of online content proving how stagnant the human mind is, biased towards more myopic views and experiences based on the breadth of experience realized to date.   The fundamental opportunity is sparking inspiration and expanding action for the human experience of What’s really occurring here in so-called reality.

I can speak fairly on behalf of my Father’s reaction to my question, since he has reflected and accounted for the essence of that question, over the course of my shared lifetime with him.  He preemptively defended his opinion that “businesses exist just for the sake of making money, and they [the infamous ‘them’] will do anything to ensure their own survival, without any concern for the person/employee”.  As I lovingly challenged the context of his experience justifying his opinion, I caught him realizing he was replaying the prejudice of ‘others’, and when he realized I had him cornered, he shut down the talk.   My father was a loyal blue collar employee for 30 years in an organization that went public in the last 10 years of his tenure.   This company “right sized” the majority of his family and friends out of the organization.    He has some justification for how he feels.

It saddens me greatly, when seemingly an entire cohort is trapped in prejudiced thinking.   Yes, there is a wide spread example set to pull from, where both some people operating out of Fear and artificial need of Self survival, were either the Predator [the evil Executive] or the Victim [millions laid off to “right size the desired market course correction”].   In my line of work, Consulting with executives and employees across all layers of the organization, I can tell that too often, the layers of the organization and speculating about one another, largely due to an inability to relate meaningfully with one another.

The prevailing issue is that Strategy, Decision Making, and Execution of Plans, happen in isolation and in a manner disconnected between the layers of the organization.   Because the executive and the operations employee can’t see how things are progressing and why a certain Standard Mode of Operating was set the way it was, the Feel of Separate interests and uncaring self-service prevail.   The executive cannot trust the talent they hire to be transparent and self-sufficient, so they must [attempt to] command and control all of their activities.   Because the employee is so fearful [of the unknown] the Executive’s motives, the presumed selfishness literally becomes a self-fulfilling Prophecy, spawned by the insecurity born from living in a disconnected manner, in BOTH directions (top down and bottom up).

to be completed …