October 2, 2007
Human nature vs. good business sense
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.”
Filed under: Business,Management
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