Related to the IPO decision is the strategic decision of outside investors. Certain types of investors, such as most venture capitalists, think primarily in terms of their “cash out” value. If you decide to seek venture capital—or capital from other investors whose primary motivation is to cash out within a few years —be aware that you are simultaneously making the strategic decision to go public or sell out.

In most venture-backed companies, going public (or becoming acquired) is assumed, and it’s just a matter of when. Thus, if going public, for the reasons outlined above, does not fit with your vision for the company, then you probably should not seek venture capital or other “cash out” oriented investments.

Your company is a maximization machine—it wants to make the best use of its finite resources—so it is greatly interested in identifying precisely who to invest in, and how.

The problem with this stems from the way your company executes on these good intentions. Why, for example, does it assume that it will net a good return only from certain people? Surely, the cliché that “Our people are our greatest asset” applies to all of the people in the company. As we’ve seen, every human brain retains its ability to learn and grow throughout adulthood. For sure, each brain grows at a different speed and in a different way, but this implies only that each person learns differently, not that—categorically—some people do and some don’t. Therefore, the best course of action for any maximization machine worth its salt would be to figure out where and how each brain can grow the most, rather than zeroing in on only a select few brains and casting aside the others.

Lots of companies try to win and still can’t do it. So imagine, then, the likelihood of winning without explicitly setting out to do so. When a company sets out to participate, rather than win, it will inevitably fail to make the tough choices and the significant investments that would make winning even a remote possibility. A too-modest aspiration is far more dangerous than a too-lofty one. Too many companies eventually die a death of modest aspirations.

It is one of the big benefits of being a private company. When I first bought these lands from major oil companies, they were looking ahead one quarter or one year. They wanted to get the assets ‘off their books’ to make their financial ratios look better. We can do more with these businesses because we don’t suffer the crazy pressures that are put on a public company.

One of its signals has been so amplified that it drowns out the others. The ‘profit motive’ isn’t something that can be ascribed to corporations — they don’t have motives. What they have is an imbalance between the two key higher-functions — here-and-now versus there-and-then. They aren’t capable of responding to signals from the long-term planning and intelligence function, because the short-term planning function has to operate under the constraints of the financial market disciplinary system. Either a corporation has a survival condition based on needing to make a monthly interest bill, or there’s an implicit threat from the financial environment that if it fails to behave in a particular way, it will be taken over by an outside entity.

If you take away that pressure, it’s quite likely that the natural equilibrium of corporate decision-making systems will be less hostile to human life. Viable systems fundamentally seek stability, not maximisation.