Today, via Dennis Howlett, I reached the blog of Charles H. Green, which is focused on the issue of trust in business. It’s well worth bookmarking. I particularly liked Green’s simple observation that “the best way to be trusted is to actually be trustworthy”, a tenet that my bank used to appreciate but seems to have forgotten over the last 18 months.

Today, Green has posted about loyalty and credit cards, but there is a lesson or two for everyone in it.

Green first notes the following three reasonable business principles:

1.  Profit is a measure of business activity effectiveness
2.  Measurement is a valuable tool for management
3. Activities can be disaggregated into smaller, measurable activities.

And then lists the three bastard children into which the above have evolved:

1a.  Every business activity has value only insofar as it increases profit
2a.  If you can’t measure something, you can’t manage it
3a.  Anything worth measuring is even better measured in shorter durations and smaller units.

As Green goes on to say, “This extreme thinking has meant that the management of business these days is centred on short-term profit manipulation - not on long-term value creation.”

I’ve heard 2a, in particular, from quite a few enterprise application vendors. It makes me wonder how much responsibility the tech sector should bear for the metamorphosis of reasonable business methods into the short-termist, self-defeating competitive lunacy that we see all around us.