Public servant
In this episode, we explore the implications of reframing businesses as a public service
Okay, I’m walking down the main shopping street in this big town or city or whatever you want to call it, and an idea pops up: what does this thing called ‘business’ actually do? You know, if businesses are supposedly in business to ‘make money’, and we look back at that old arguably-daft notion of ‘money makes the world go round’, how exactly does that work? What’s the relationship of business with everyone else?
In the case of most of these shops out here, they’re providing products and services direct to the public.
For the few that don’t, pretty much all of them are providing products and services to other businesses, so that they can provide products and services to the public.
In other words, they’re all serving the public. Servicing the public need.
And there’s another name for that role: public servant
Sure, we’d usually associate that ‘public-servant’ term with government - or rather, not so much this grandiose thing called ‘The Government’, but more the people out on the front-line or in the back-office somewhere who support or deliver those actual ‘government-services’. You probably wouldn’t at first associate ‘public servant’ with business.
But let’s play with that idea for a while - the idea of business as public-servant’. Let’s see where it takes us.
First, let’s look at it the opposite way round: the idea of ‘government as a business’. True, it’s an idea that appeals to certain people, perhaps; it’s even been tried out in practice a few times now, in various places. But the short-answer is that it’s an idea that really really really doesn’t work. In maybe every case where it’s been tried - one, uh, particular recent example comes immediately to mind - we end up with the absolute worst of both worlds, including ludicrously one-sided rules, a seeming inability to make any decision at all, and, at the top, flagrant corruption, embezzlement and worse ,on a truly enormous scale. In short, definitely Not A Good Idea…
So yeah, we know that one doesn’t work - let’s just forget about it for now. But that other way round, perhaps, about ‘business as government’, as ‘public servants’? Hmm… yeah… kinda does seem worth exploring a bit more.
For example, consider that case where we’re a provider for a ‘natural monopoly’ - something such as piped supply of water, where the infrastructure-costs and/or duplication-costs are so huge that it’s simply not feasible to run that market as anything other than a monopoly. In that context, we actually must run the business like a government-service, because our relationship with our clients is more like ‘citizens’ than ‘customers’, with all of the social and other responsibilities that that implies.
But for a regular business that operates in the everyday market, with competition and all that to deal with - would this notion of ‘running business like a government’ work for that? Does the idea of ‘public servant’ as ‘services to the public’ make sense here?
One way to find out would be to ask the people who actually provide those ‘services to the public’ - the frontline staff in those businesses…
I’ve long loathed the phrase “The customer is always right”: most often, it just isn’t true, and causes all sorts of unfairness all round. And worse, it kind of shifts the service-relationship from servant to serf - again, definitely Not A Good Idea if we want to maintain any kind of motivation within the business as a whole.
Hence, for what we might call ‘serious fun’, I’ve played a bit with turning that phrase around, to something more fair from the service-provider’s perspective. For example, if I go into a store, I often don’t know for certain what it is that I want. Even more, I often need real help to separate out what I want from what I actually need. And it’s there that the frontline staff can provide real assistance, real service. Which suggests a reframing of that myth about ‘the customer is always right’:
The fundamental rule of all retail is that the customer is always wrong - and it’s our role to help the customer get it right.
Chatting with the staff in the local supermarket, and even more in my favourite café, that phrasing raises more than just a smile. More, it reframes the whole customer-relationship in a way that gives their service a much more personal meaning. “It’s why I come to work”, said one of the waitresses; “It’s why we’re a community”, said another. It helps them help the new ones learn the ropes, to learn what service actually is, and why and how it helps everyone when it’s done right. Serving the public; literally, public servant.
What about those who are further away from the frontline of the business? - those in the back-office, the warehouse, or further up the management-tree? Well, yes, it’s true that we do see in those places much the same kind of dysfunctions as occur all too often in government: an excess of bureaucracy, the wrong kind of cost-cutting and penny-pinching, often a real fear of making decisions - “everyone can say ‘No’, and no-one dares say ‘Yes” - and, yeah, often outright cluelessness up at the top about what actually needs to happen to make things work well in the real-world. All of those faults are fixable, though, if given a little bit of extra care and cluefulness.
Yet what government has, and business generally doesn’t but desperately needs, is some serious transparency - because without that, there’s no way to learn, and hence no way to make anything work better, beyond, well, wishful-thinking, really. Transparency done right is also a great way to remove blame from the picture - and getting rid of blame is probably the most important shift that makes good change possible.
The other thing that gets in the way, all the time, is the ‘money-mess’ - the inanity and insanity of the possession-economy and all that. There are ways around that mess, though as yet we’re still some way from achieving that kind of much-needed change. And the money-mess cripples most businesses, too, because it gets business-folk to focus mistakenly on the money, rather than on the everything-else that actually makes everything work. Again, though, that notion of ‘running business like a government’ actually does help here, because it helps to gently shift the focus away from the money as such, and more on the underlying story, the deeper why behind why we’re in business in the first place.
So yes, this idea of ‘running a business like a government’ seems important, somehow - this whole notion of ‘being of service’ that can make our world feel more worthwhile. Serving the public; business as public servant, as part of a broader shared-story. Worth exploring more, perhaps?