The Ten Commandments and Peter Drucker.

Regardless of religion, the Ten Commandments are a good set of principles to live one’s life by. However, if someone were to attack my family, I would defend myself and if necessary kill the assailant, thus violating the “Thou shall not kill” Commandment. In other words, there are circumstances, where acting contrary to the principles, is perfectly justified. And few people, in my opinion, would argue that my act was not justified. At least, I believe so.

Then, what is the benefit of a principle? Good question. Typically we all agree on the principle, but disagree on the specific application. For example, some would say that killing is never justified and never admit to the possibility of killing the assailant. Who really knows until the situation occurs? But the issue of principles and their application is a real one. When and under what circumstances is it appropriate to act contrary to a principle? And if such circumstances exist, then is the act contrary to the principle or is the principle merely stated incorrectly.

Here is a rewrite on the “Kill” Commandment. Thou shall not kill except to defend one’s life. Or maybe Thou shall not kill except to defend one’s life, one’s family, good friends or when one is ordered to kill in a nation’s defense. And so on. It gets a bit complicated doesn’t it?

Now I switch from Moses to Peter Drucker. Drucker wrote, The Concept of a Corporation, the story of General Motors. I believe he coined the phrase “As General Motors goes, so goes the nation.” Drucker held that the primary purpose of a business is to serve the customer by providing a service that is useful in both personal and social terms. Drucker taught that businesses that took their eyes off this objective in favor of pursuing profit as a paramount goal could not succeed. Now for the Sherwood rewrite of the Drucker principle. “Businesses that serve customers in both personal and social terms and do not make a profit will never succeed.” At the end of the day, if you have no cash to pay your bills, you have no business. Employees of the most socially conscious company typically will not work if their salary checks bounce. If customers have social goals, then profit and social goals are never in conflict. If people stopped buying cigarettes, then the cigarette companies would stop making them.

What is the point? We can not really discuss principles unless we discuss specific applications. We can agree on the need for health care programs all day long, and never agree on the right way to provide it and under what circumstances. The principle of capitalism is always under attack because the attacker typically assumes that business will pursue profit at the expense of its customers, and that the business will succeed with this program. If this assumption is true, then we are indicting the customers not the business. In the real world, customers quickly leave businesses that follow this road. Lincoln already said it, you can fool all of us some of the time, and some of us all the time, but you can not fool all of us all the time.

Am I being too obscure? Let me try and sum it up. Principles are good places to start discussing applications. However, we spend way too much time debating the principles and insufficient time debating the actual applications.

Chime in on this subject, I will post more later.