Anyone who has dealt with customers, especially in a service industry, knows that they can be difficult and demanding at times. Ironically, this is a feature not a bug. Consider for a moment what dealing with customers means for workers, managers, and owners. Having to serve customers in a competitive market makes us better human beings.
We must learn sympathy and exercise our imagination. We must develop virtues like patience, humility, and service. And we are held to high standards which push us towards achieving excellence. Early advocates of commercial society knew this. Adam Smith and his contemporaries saw business and commerce having beneficial effects on society. Part of what drove this assessment was their belief that human beings were social creatures whose moral judgment was formed and refined through interaction and sympathy with other people.
Many critics wrongly conflate business with selfishness. After all, we have the famous statement from Adam Smith about how the butcher, the brewer, and the baker serve their customers, not from altruism, but from a regard to their own self-interest. Smith’s example explains why property rights matter and how people should be rewarded in the market for creating value. He does not suggest that the butcher, brewer, or baker are self-centered greedy businessmen who only grudgingly interact with customers. Perhaps we might find such curmudgeonly folks here and there, but successful businesspeople know they have to focus on their customers.
To serve customers well, you have to understand something about them. What separates a good house from a bad one? Or a good restaurant from a mediocre one? What features matter when it comes to a fitness app or a vehicle or a coat? What do people value most about their accommodations when they take a vacation? Or when they travel for work?
These are the kinds of questions those in business need to answer well in order to succeed. You must put yourself in other people’s shoes – think about their situation, identify with their problems. And then you must exercise imagination and ingenuity to create products and services that help people pursue their goals and enjoy their lives. You don’t get these things sitting at home playing video games or watching Netflix. Vibrant business draws us out of our narrow self-centered worlds into the broader play of human society with all its attendant joys, sorrows, disappointments, and successes.
And within that play we learn to discipline and control ourselves better. If you want to have customers, you must serve them even when you don’t feel like it. That means exercising patience when dealing with their questions or issues. It means developing fortitude in the face of criticism. It requires humility to listen to customers and to value their feedback. Serving customers in business is an excellent crucible for refining our character – which makes us better spouses, better parents, better friends, and better human beings.
Besides improving our character, serving customers well makes us better at our craft. Customers expect certain quality and service standards. This requires quality control. It requires innovating and improving our products. We must train our employees. We must be intentional about our habits and systems if we want to serve our customers well. Success comes through discipline and intentionality.
In doing all this, we become better brewers and better bakers. We become more creative artisans. We become more capable coaches and accountants and instructors. And we become more beautiful – for all virtue and character and excellence is a kind of approach to the good, the true, and the beautiful.
Whatever the role, our work can and should refine us. Our culture today tends to prize some work over others. Media puts entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and influencers on a pedestal. The New Right puts blue collar manufacturing workers on a pedestal. The service economy, on the other hand, is often derided as being full of low-paying jobs with little dignity that lead to a “dead-end.”
Such views are mistaken.
Front-line jobs, even menial ones, have dignity and provide opportunities for improvement. Employees in even the most mundane jobs in retail or food service, have to learn responsibility. They must show up. That requires planning and discipline. It requires personal responsibility and moral agency as well as humility and empathy to serve customers well.
Employees also have to do something. And by doing something, they have opportunity to develop skills; skills to communicate and listen, skills to plan, skills to execute goals and projects. This, by the way, is what makes minimum wage laws so pernicious. They deny people with few skills and little or no experience access to one of the most edifying and beneficial activities they could participate in: work.
Work serves, blesses even, our fellow men and women. Employees participate in this, whatever their level or pay. So do managers and executives. They must exercise prudence as they steward resources. And when it comes to managing people, they must exercise justice and compassion to do their work well. People in management also face opportunities for exercising courage when making decisions that involve risk – launching new projects, restructuring departments, discounting products, etc.
Then there are lenders and investors: capital allocators. Though those with capital are sometimes called idle or unproductive, they are not. They are critical to successful business enterprises. Nearly every business requires capital – and some require immense amounts of it. This can take the form of loans for buildings, for land, for machinery. Sometimes businesses take out loans for payroll or to bridge dry spells or delays in sales.
Equity investors bring capital to a business in exchange for a share of the ownership, including sharing the risks and profits that come with it. These shareholders have a real stake in the company. They want to see it succeed. They venture part of their limited capital on companies they believe create value for society.
Besides calculating risk and return, capital allocators must also exercise certain character traits. Investors of all stripes have to practice sacrifice. They literally give up the use of their resources so that someone else can use them. And they also sacrifice some opportunities in order to pursue others since they have limited capital. They must exercise wisdom and prudence as well when judging where to invest.
Investors must also have another quality: hope. Hope that the economy will grow in the future; hope that their investments will pay off; hope that they have made good decisions. And along with this hope, they must take courage. Investing, by and large, is not a safe game. Risk is inevitable. There are many more ways to lose money than to make money. Investors are often the first to lose money when ventures go sideways.
Business drives the economic engine of material prosperity by creating new value and allocating and reallocating resources towards higher valued uses. Within a competitive market system, business drives innovation, efficiency, and productivity. These, in turn, raise our standard of living: cheaper and better food and transportation, better medicine, greater leisure, and more education.
But business can also be good for the souls of those who participate in it. Sure, greed and materialism can be temptations as the Marxists and academics constantly remind us. But as Samuel Johnson noted: “There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money.” And business, as I have been arguing, entails far more than making money.
In fact, business is fundamentally about people cooperating with, trading with, and serving one another. Balance sheets and profit-loss statements provide discipline and accountability. They “keep score” but they are not the game itself. The fact that participation in business can inculcate virtue serves as a major pillar supporting the case for free enterprise and free markets.