People Over Profit summary

Since companies indeed go through cycles, it means that no company starts out inherently bad – not even the corporation you hate most in the world. In fact, corporations begin their life cycle in a first stage called the honest era.

Think of it this way: a newborn company is just like a baby – young, innocent and also quite weak. To survive its first years, the company can’t afford to play dirty; it has to convince its employees that the business is worth their efforts, and convince its consumers to give up their time and money.

Keeping your company steady during the efficient era is all well and good, but, as time goes by, it becomes all to tempting to drift over to the dark side. This is exactly what happens when a company enters the deceptive era.

This is typically when companies decide to relocate production to developing countries (turning to child labor if necessary), implement misleading advertising campaigns, employ deceptive tactics, offer exorbitant salaries to executives and so on.

The good news is there’s a way to remain in the honest era. How? Well, the companies who do manage to stay honest share seven core beliefs. The next blinks will break each of them down one by one.

First off, people count. As obvious as it may seem, companies are made of people, not parts; these people are valuable and deserve to be treated with respect. To remain in the honest era, companies must treat three kinds of stakeholders right.  

Another important step toward keeping your business honest is, unsurprisingly, becoming more transparent. Sure, transparency can be tough, but you’ll be doing yourself a favor! Why? Because transparency is an act of liberation.

Opting for full transparency is freeing. You can reinvest the time you’d otherwise spend concocting schemes and hiding secrets into optimizing your business. And consumers also are set free; they can engage with the company without speculating about its honesty, or lack thereof.

There are two core values that every honest company needs, and the first one is a commitment to high quality. If you can achieve this, you’ll have a competitive edge, because quality speaks for itself.

When you make high-quality products, it’s clear that your company values its customers. And quality also builds credibility. A well-designed website, the packaging of products or the choice of paper for a business card may all seem trivial, but each one contributes to the image that customers have of an organization. Customers are likely to think to themselves, “If they care that much about such details, I can trust that they’ll care about me as a client.”

Now that we know how to do good, where do we begin? Start by acknowledging that the most powerful people are customers – and this means you are powerful. To break the cycle of good companies becoming bad, we have to learn to behave as consumers.

Think of your last trip to the grocery store. Did you pay attention to the origins of goods? What about sustainable packaging? If your eyes were only focused on the price tags, it’s time to make a change.