Yesterday I listened to a podcast about the Quakers. The programme focused on their religious beliefs, but near the end it pointed out how successful they had been – and continue to be – in business. Is that not a contradiction? I wondered. Can you be religious and make money? What is an appropriate relationship to money for someone religious who runs a business? And are atheists off the hook? Are they free to pursue as much wealth as their hearts desire? Of course, money is business’s lifeblood, and generally speaking we do measure business success in monetary terms, but it’s a bit more complicated than that, regardless of one’s religious stance.
There are psychological factors, for example. Plenty of people are in business to make money, but run up against mental barriers. They undercharge because they don’t want to appear greedy, and so lose out; or they overcharge, because they are, and then lose custom or trust. The law firm I mentioned in the Preface would annually set its sights on significantly raised revenue uplift for the following year, but were too gentlemanly to chase the revenue down. Again, the tension between strategy and reality was abundantly clear.
So how best in a business to manage one’s attitude to money, in order to be successful without being vilified? So that money is indeed lifeblood and not toxin?
According to the proverb, the love of money is the root of all evil. If most people are in business to make money, it implies that money is something they at least like, perhaps even love. But does it follow that there’s something fundamentally evil about being in business?
To a militant mindset, the answer of course is yes. Business aims to produce a profit mostly retained by the owners. This private squirrelling away of money leads to disparities in wealth and associated inequalities. So in effect, business is about prospering at someone else’s expense, creating a society in which the good life of the few is bought at the cost of a bad life for the many. That is ‘evil’, possibly not in the religious sense, but certainly in the social one.
The non-militant majority, as we know, hold a different view. Without business, they say, there is neither wealth creation nor progress. Money is a great motivator that gets people making the products and offering the services that other people want. The result is that quality of life improves all round. Those other people might even discover the employment they might not otherwise have found, in that very enterprise. If the owners of such enterprises end up making a profit, that is their just reward for taking a risk on an idea, and then working hard to make it happen. Money makes the world go around.
Either way, we don’t tend to ask people if they love money, however familiar the proverb. In fact, we’re squeamish about money questions generally, a phenomenon no doubt due to capitalism itself. Consider: in a communist society, where everyone earns the same (in theory, at least), we don’t need to ask because it’s not interesting. In the capitalist version, with its inherent variations in wealth, it becomes very interesting indeed, yet paradoxically the variations themselves make the subject too sensitive to probe.
I was once involved in developing an idea for a TV show whose drama consisted in the workers in a business finding out how much each other earned. As the discoveries were made and the discrepancies exposed, a great taboo was broken, the resulting emotions running the gamut from guilty smugness to frothing outrage. The key assumption on which the drama appeared to turn was that money is intrinsically desirable. The TV show couldn’t have said it more clearly. And yet it wasn’t the money per se that was the issue. It was the unevenness in how it had been distributed – the variations again. The money could have been replaced by apples or even abstract symbols. What the TV show really exposed was how deep in us the instinct for fairness runs. Although we might assent quite readily to the concept of capitalism, when we find out how far down the pecking order we really are, it can seem like the worst idea in the world.
So when it comes to loving money, what are the options? To pretend not to love it, while secretly craving more? Obviously not. One of my most interesting clients was a billionaire who made his fortune by investing in various capital-intensive businesses, from shipbuilding to mining. What I learned from him is that when it comes to the love of money, there is the appropriate and there is the inappropriate kind. The latter is apparent in many of the people who solicit him for investment funds. Essentially, they see money as a short cut. It’s as if they are thinking, ‘If we just had more money, we’d get to where we want to get to much quicker, and then relax.’ The return they have to pay to their angel, the billionaire, is effectively the price of time and effort saved.
The appropriate kind, by contrast, sees money as what enables the work to happen. You love money appropriately when you see it as the resource that allows you to rent the workshop where you’ll restore antiques, or fund the research you’ve wanted to do on ageing, or open a hotel. The money in such cases is not about sparing you some effort but about filling your tank at the start of a journey.