“The business does not belong to the boss or the employees, but to the public,” wrote Henry Ford (translated and commented by Fernando Pessoa) as one of his “industrial commandments,” through whose dissemination he sought to explain his success and continue promoting his cars.
By enunciating this commandment, the American multi-millionaire established one of the basic principles of modern management and one of the fundamental laws of marketing, asserting the sovereignty of the public—meaning consumers and public opinion—over the commercial process, to the detriment of the internal will of the company.
What constitutes evidence in this observation by Henry Ford is that the legal right of ownership over the company (the boss) or technical mastery over the business process (the employees) is entirely worthless if the recipients of both activities (clients) detach themselves from the merits and utility produced and commercialized, denying the organization its sole reason for existence: sales success.
Commercial success is thus a consequence of consumers’ esteem and preference for what the company offers (product and service) and not properly an economic act of generosity provoked by the enormous personal admiration they feel for the boss or the employees.
Understanding and accepting this reality is crucial for anyone launching a business, because, most of the time, the entrepreneur’s attention is systematically contested by a whole series of stimuli and concerns of a purely procedural nature, ultimately losing sight of the ultimate reason for the entire project and effort—selling something to someone.
Along the same logic, many seemingly well-established companies drag themselves toward agony in strategic daydreams or internal struggles, letting the client perceive the inattention and disaffection with which they are treated, as if the client were merely another setback—the most annoying and least important of all.
Accepting that the public is the only true owner of the business carries a vast set of implications, the most important of which is the relativization of the power of the boss and employees within the context of the company.
For the boss, it means that securing and displaying property rights over buildings, furniture, and machinery necessary for the production process does not guarantee a positive economic result, and without this, such rights are a waste of assets or an irrational debt.
Thus, nothing is more ridiculous in the business world than seeing a boss more concerned with the decoration of the office or the architecture of the headquarters than with the level of alignment established between their commercial offer and the general public.
Along the same lines, it is a grave folly for a worker to apply energy and talent in a permanent fight against the boss, trying to demand from them what the business cannot give.
Taking the boss as a strategic adversary means one can never be their partner, and that should be the most important objective of any employee. Not that one realistically admits the general possibility of employees actually becoming partners to the bosses, but in terms of plausible claims, that should be everyone’s ambition.
Because the boss can only share with employees the results produced by their labor in the business in which both are involved, it is neither reasonable nor ethical to imagine that the boss will prefer employees over family and friends when it comes to dividing personal assets.
By disputing with the boss the power to run the business or by incapacitating management with internal blocks, employees have a scant probability of seeing the business’s results increase, and consequently, their remuneration or profit-sharing.
Good strategy would be for employees to constitute themselves as a demand for competence from the bosses, incentivizing or even imposing upon them a permanent attention to the public and to sales, in order to guarantee that the positive economic result is perennial and growing.
Seeking to understand the true situation of the business, grasping how money is made and spent, employees fulfill a role that approaches that of a partner, and it is both just and rational that, without prejudice to the difference in remuneration for the risks assumed by the boss, they aspire to take for themselves a negotiated share of the result.
In large companies, this worldview has long been tentatively implemented, opting to establish platforms of common interest in profit-sharing that make viable an effective complicity between bosses and employees in the fight for public preference against competition.
The issue in large companies is that, at times, physical distance, geographical dispersion, and the specialization of functions generate specific difficulties in articulation between what we could call the boss and the employees.
Right from the start, due to the nature of a corporation, capital dispersion, free market trading, and various regulations subjecting most interesting activities, the boss does not exist and internal power reflects ever-provisional alignments of shareholders’ interests, with a heavy dose of chance mixed in.
In these situations, it is inevitable that power, traditionally belonging to the boss, is exercised by people who, after all, are also employees. For this to be viable and function, the organization must structure itself by levels of authority and establish rules that stimulate a rational and psychologically healthy management practice.
Imposing rationality on management, when this is not exercised by the boss but by managerial employees, means establishing concrete reasons for professionals hired to manage to behave as if the company belonged to them without allowing them to appropriate what does not belong to them by contract.
Any misunderstanding regarding who effectively runs the company will always result from losing awareness of the public’s sovereignty over any other instance of internal power. And when that happens, the company has already initiated a path of losses and conflicts that will lead it to the abyss.
Paulo Fidalgo
CEO of Marketividade
