Are We Not All Beggars?

 In this week’s reading we read about the purpose of a business. Was it to make money or to make people’s lives better? According to Charles Handy, most American’s see top executive business owners as the bad guys. “Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.” Nobody trusts the guys at the top. It’s always for their own personal gain, according to one study, the CEO makes 400x his employees’ salary. Trust and integrity don’t exist at the top.

We have been reading about how a company’s employees are categorized as costs, not assets. But that is not right, our employees help make the company. I like this quote from the reading this week, “We inevitably come to the conclusion that a group of people get tother and exist as an institution that we call a company so that they are able to accomplish something collectively that they could not accomplish separately – they make a contribution to society, a phrase which sounds trite but is fundamental.” I have always loved working in an environment that felt like family. People thrive at their job when they feel loved and appreciated. Not like some disposable number or as competition.

Mr. Hardy goes on to talk about the poor. It was quite fascinating what he did in a 3^rd world country. He interacted with the poor and saw that they had potential. He asked the banks why they didn’t loan the poor money and they told him that they weren’t creditable. He was shocked and started doing his own experiments and loaned the poor people $27. He discovered that the people he loaned money to were able to pay it back just as promised. He opened his own bank just for the poor. He was saying how the big banks were losing money because they only focused on the rich. But the poor is an untapped resource that people are starting to realize can contribute to society and actually be looked at as people.