Business Riddles

By: Stephen K. Ainsah-Mensah

1. What is a successful business? This question must have been asked so many times as modern life is shaped so much by the affairs of business. Since business is activated by money and the incidence of money determines the success or failure of business, one is prepared to say that excess money in a business demonstrates a successful business. It is common to apply all the available human and technical resources in the procedures of business with a style intended to yield as much profit as possible. If this is all there is to business – or, at least, most there is to business – then the resources for the business enterprise must follow a certain direction. For example, all sorts of human and non-human resources ought to be assembled to redeem profit, if need be, from the claws of possible or imagined losses. What is usually not realized is that profit is not immune to the direction of life within the scope of a given culture; so you and others engineer your lives towards the philosophy of profit, and much of culture follows this pattern of life in all kinds of ways, some of which are visible and some hardly discernible. To put it another way, any implemented business decision affects the engines or affairs of culture.

2. Suppose - and this is the case - that the predominant aim of business is profit; then whatever brings in profit consumes the energy, passion, drive and thinking style of business people. Consumers are attracted to the products of businesses through the unceasing outpouring of product promotion. What one may not realize is that this kind of profit-based business encourages, as well, consumption-based lifestyles. Ultimately, the structure of culture is shaped, somehow, by this character of business.

3. What benefits do you derive from spending almost all of your energy and time on amassing wealth without given thought to sufficient recreation in order to animate key elements of the spirit, the emotions? The incurable burden of business arises from the chronic love for hard work precisely because wealth is seen as coming from this endeavour. A man who falls for this kind of habit wins for himself all kinds of public honour; but his mind, his emotions keep telling him: "You're falling into a trap that destabilizes the inner fibre of your human build, and, of course, its outward characterization as this personality. When you care to introspect about the value of life, you could see yourself to be doing what reinforces your noble status in the public domain while your terrible shortfall comes about from having no time to please the inner spirit, the emotions with due recreation." Your inner life pleads for basic comfort, which you are unable to provide. The love for money has fought with the inner life over the question of comfort, of leisure, of unadulterated joy and won preeminence over the natural requirements of the inner life. There is, thus, the danger of equating profit-based business pleasure with recreation-based pleasure. The former pleases one's perceived personality as a successful person - in public; the latter satisfies the essential demands of the inner life sustaining it with peace, vigor, acceptable good health. As far as you have a praiseworthy business success, you have built for yourself a solid public personality. What you need to correct is an inner life that has reinforced the habit of "sobbing" whenever it recognizes itself as having been passed over any time the business spirit is elevated. Baffling as it may look, the crisis in the private life of alleged celebrities may arise from this "sobbing" character of the inner life, its neglect, its riotous cast, its plea for due recognition.

4. The chief deceit in business comes from the principle of profit. You begin to accumulate profit and nothing else is of comparable importance to you. As you arrive at the conclusion that profit will rise but at a declining rate, you begin to panic, supposing that the number of human resources has to be cut. You fail to understand that where your business has reached is precisely because of the smart way your human resources have worked. So, what happens? After cutting human resources, its present small number gets overworked. The individual employees’ feelings, interests about their jobs are, for the first time, gloomy, discouraging. It comes up naturally that job morale drops to the disappointment of the employer. But who is to blame! When it becomes so clear that human resources are not well managed to stimulate interest on the job, the chain effect is that everything else in the business may suffer from quality reduction. And this is the problem: Profit does not go up the way you expect, but it does not make sense to necessarily cut the level of human resources without careful thought on the negative repercussions. It may be prudent to encourage individual employees to upgrade skills or/and be multi-skilled through learning and grasping new business ideas. This clothes your business with the strength of innovativeness; it prepares your business for any future eventualities that relate to doing things in a renewed smart way in the wake of technological leaps. You, thereby, stay unscathed, competitive. Think more about the future status of your business, not its present short-term stance!

5. There is nothing wrong in thinking that your business has to be saved from powerful competitors who come fully equipped with technological innovations. Does this mean abandoning the props of your business that have, up to the present, been supplied by the diligence and creativity of your human resources? If you do so, you are being unduly bold but shunning ethical manners, mature responsibility, sheer levelheadedness in place of wanton personal greed, untold selfishness. Here, as an employer, you do not understand that the ruthless exploitation of a workforce that comes from laying off a large number of employees while overworking those retained brings the sin of excess stress to the overworked employees; but that is not all! This kind of excess stress promotes gloomy personalities; it spills into the society; it works its way into the social domain and proves how its afflicted persons fail to be engaging or inspiring in fundamental issues that hinge on human interaction, friendship, networking activities, satisfying engagements, and so on. In general, culture suffers!

6. Allow yourself some time to think about powerful managers, those full of clout. The question you have to face is this: what makes such managers so special compared to others in the business in question? The answer may be discouraging in some ways; for what usually takes place is that much of the creativity, laudable diligence, commitment to work is merely a matter of delegating responsibilities, tasks to junior employees. Thereafter, the said managers may be claimed to have accomplished a sizeable portion of their tasks, goals. Should the business develop pretty fast, the managers would readily claim credit for that. In addition, they might have seized upon the opportunity to place themselves so visibly in public, proving tactical with well-rehearsed communication skills that draw the necessary attention for stimulating employees' interests in doing jobs. Then, why are powerful managers paid so much money? Well, all depends on the issue of power. If you have so much power as a business manager, your deeds are hardly checked and your competence, even though derived, somehow, from junior employees is claimed by observers, readers, the public to be yours. You are viewed, more or less, as flawless, and you proceed to work with this kind of pride and image, which, if left unchecked, may develop into unwelcome arrogance. A good, powerful manager ought to know how to please junior employees to get intensely interested, devoted to their jobs. As this occurs, there is no need for the manager to feel the pressure of work. His/her job will be done by the junior employees. Since the manager must have won the trust of junior employees, all he/she has to do is to undertake, in large measure, managerial responsibilities in the form of supervision, sociable commands, instructions; he/she, furthermore, has to articulate uncommon communication, sign relevant documents. Other duties could include attending manager-related meetings, giving speeches couched in lucid words, exhibiting a charming body language.

7. One major mistake in business comes from the decisions of experts in one culture that are made to be enforceable in another culture. Think about this. A developing culture is known to be faltering because resources, it is alleged, are mismanaged; so experts from developed cultures are brought in to fix this mismanagement by means of studying the source(s) of the mismanagement and coming up with binding conclusions. The problem here is that while the conclusions may be creditable, they may lack the cultural face. To what extent, it may be asked, do the experts understand the culture they have drawn binding conclusions about? How is the key element of the developing culture, which is the people and their way of doing things in relation to the environment, grasped in the studies of the experts and the subsequent conclusions they draw? Much of the misunderstanding between developed and developing cultures come from the failure to appraise cultural norms, mores, distinctive institutions and practices that determine the uniqueness of one culture compared to others; so we end up, in a mistaken fashion, claiming: this culture must follow this path of development. What this incorrectly means is that there is one unique path to development which resists - or is neutral to - the operational elements of culture. Much of the surging problems of development may be connected to this disregard of the elements of culture in revising or retooling the structures and operation of development.

8. There surely is a big problem with a business that focuses, so heavily, on how to manage, say, its equipment, machinery, office supplies instead of on its human resources. This way of doing business tends to belittle the unrivaled value of human resources and, thus, demoralizes the employees. It needs to be stated again that the most vital resource of a business is its employees (human resources). Demoralize your employees, and you end up jeopardizing the quality of your business.

9. Some business owners are fond of thinking profit comes much from employing contract instead of permanent employees. As it is well known, contract employees, unlike permanent employees, hardly get any benefits except for their salaries. Thus, the employer saves much money the more contract employees are hired. The risk in this business practice is that it does not stimulate the contract employees to advance business knowledge and wisdom in order to further advance the course of creativity for steady business development. What is the use of my working from the bottom of my heart if my services would be terminated soon because I am a contract employee, if I am not viewed as a family member of the micro business culture, if, that is to say, I am not made to feel that I belong to or that I am an integral part of the business? It can be seen that employers who are so glued to the idea of saving money and increasing profits by hiring so many contract employees simply lack business foresight.