God's Week Has 7 Days
Explosive Profit
Nov 21
The other day someone lobbed a grenade into a discussion about Christian business ethics. The grenade was called profit. Another person couldn't resist pulling the pin, and in a few seconds the grenade went off with a huge fuss, hurling shrapnel in all directions.
One side equated profit with profiteering. The other countered that if businesses didn't make a profit, they couldn't provide jobs.
I found myself caught in the middle. I don't like it when people are gouged. But neither do I think profit is a dirty word. I have a problem with those who righteously label all profit as evil.
Profit, writes John Rudy, simply identifies the gain we hope to realize by selling a product or service for more than it costs. Without gain, we can't be in business very long, just like a teacher or nurse can't work for free very long.
Whatever our rhetoric, don't most of us believe in some form of profit? In business or in households, what comes in must exceed what goes out. Otherwise, we have a problem. Not many people are willing to receive less pay than what it costs to live. We all want to make our own form of surplus, or profit.
Few of us have clean hands. Most of us, whether in business or not, want to maximize our own financial position in any transaction. We want to get the best deal. When we shop for a car, we want to haggle the price down low. When we sell a house, we list it as high as possible. We want to take advantage of market increases and sell for as much as we can. That's simply the consumer's version of the free-market maxim what the market will bear.
As important as profit is, I have a problem with businessfolk who laud it as a corporate deity that justifies greedy behavior. Quite simply, profit is not the goal of a business, any more than the goal of a decent politician is to get elected.
Isn't it better and more Christian to recognize that the aim of a business is to provide goods and services that help humanity? Christians in business use the skills and resources God has given them to help sustain humanity's need for food, shelter, clothing, transportation, entertainment, and so on. That makes them, in a sense, co-creators with God. They become God's junior partners.
Profit is necessary for a business to carry out its social role of providing jobs and sustaining the fabric of this world. But for a minister of commerce, profit is not the chief goal.
Max De Pree, former head of Herman Miller, Inc., compares profits to breathing. We need air to breathe, he contends, and we need profits to continue in business. But none of us would say our mission as humans is to breathe. We don't come to the end of the day and say, Hey, I'm still breathing, so it must have been a great day. We are
familiar enough with the world of medicine to know that people can be kept alive on a respirator even though they have no real quality of life.
David Fagiano, former CEO of the American Management Association, has written that any company in business to make money will soon be out of business. Profit is not the mission of any company that wants to be around for the long haul.
Companies exist to make something or provide a service. Profit is the byproduct of this activity. When profit is your mission, decisions become
increasingly short-term. The organization moves in ever smaller concentric circles, until it eventually collapses on itself and disappears (Management
Review , Sept. 1991).
That was no left-wing radical speaking; that was an avid free enterpriser.
Business guru Kenneth Blanchard has written that managing only for profit is like playing tennis with your eye constantly on the scoreboard. Not only won't the game be fun, but you won't play as well, either.
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