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Human nature vs. good business sense

Tuesday | October 2, 2007 | 9:40 pm  

I was home sick the other day with an awful sinus headache and stom­ach flu.

About the only bright side was that I got to watch Bat­tlestar Galac­tica on DVD.

I thought to myself, “Boy this is a really great show. It’s a shame they never put it on NBC in the summer as was rumored on the Internet.”

Then I caught myself. Here I am enjoy­ing a fine, fine tele­vi­sion show — the visual and dra­matic equiv­a­lent of a fine bour­bon) or scotch — and yet I some­how think it’s a shame it wasn’t put on an over-​the-​air net­work for mass consumption.

Which got me won­der­ing — does human nature, at its very core, con­flict with what is some­times good busi­ness sense?

Humans are social ani­mals. It’s one of the char­ac­ter­is­tics of our species the enables us to do so much good, and harm.

Allow me to list some common busi­ness idioms that fit within that framework:

• Grow a larger audience

• Add more employees

• Add more clients

• Attract more investors

And yet there are plenty of times and plenty of busi­nesses that could prob­a­bly have been better served by:

• Focus­ing on a tight, niche audience

• Keep­ing the same number of staff and enabling them to work smarter/harder

• Keep­ing the same number of clients and improv­ing qual­ity or revenue-​per-​client

• Stayed self-​funded, or not gone public and avoided the asso­ci­ated detri­men­tal market pres­sures that come with those “growth” routes.

Noth­ing ter­ri­bly insight­ful here, I suppose.

Just got me won­der­ing if that primal instinct to grow/expand our social net­work — even cloaked in a busi­ness set­ting — leads us to judge the first set of points as “sexy” and the others as “wimpy.”

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