Selfishness of motive, narrowness of objective and instrumentality of behaviour are corrosive of collaborative and cooperative activities such as parenthood or education or scientific research.
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What is perhaps most strange about the invocation of competition as the primary driver of our economies is that behind the masculine bluster of ruthlessness, most businesses and businesspeople operate in a manner far more similar to real ecosystems. This is why all big organizations, for instance, have ambitions to function with the cooperative efficiency of termite mounds; why most business leaders work to establish mutually beneficial, “win–win” relationships with their suppliers, service providers, and customers; and why, even in the countries that most enthusiastically embrace the theology of free markets, a whole battery of antitrust laws exist to prevent excessive cooperation in the form of collusion between businesses, the creation of cartels, and other “anti-competitive behaviors.
The environment— social, commercial, natural— in which we operate changes over time and as we interact with it. Our knowledge of that complex environment is necessarily piecemeal and imperfect. And so objectives are generally best accomplished obliquely rather than directly.
For Penrose, the firm was defined not by the assets it owned or the contracts it made but by its capabilities and its ability to deploy those capabilities in productive services: ‘All the evidence we have indicates that the growth of firms is connected with the attempts of a particular group of people to do something.’ Perhaps that seems obvious. But her emphasis
on ‘the group’ recognises the centrally cooperative nature of business activity, and her identification of purpose – ‘to do something’ – establishes its problem-related focus.
The relationships with others essential to activities such as parenthood, education and research are valued for themselves, not just for their consequences. Most humans are good at detecting instrumentality – the false bonhomie of the used car salesman, the cynical hypocrisy of the vote-seeking politician – and are repelled by it. There is a difference between the firm that promotes the welfare of its employees because its executives care, and the firm that promotes the welfare of its employees because its finance department has calculated the net present value of reduced staff turnover. And employees can usually tell which is which.
Today the hallmark of successful business is access to collective intelligence that is not common property.