The Family Business

I was on LinkedIn this morning, and game across the following post:

The rhetoric about a company being a family is unrealistic. Parents don't fire or furlough their children to cut costs.

Leaders would be better off calling their company a community: a place where people feel a sense of belonging and care about one another.

Point taken. But as someone who has worked with children who have been taken out of their homes for abuse and neglect and has been a foster care caseworker, I can say that parents absolutely do. We just call it, depending on when and how it happens, placing a child for adoption or child abandonment. And sometimes, the motive is precisely about finances.

And of course, to the broader point, while communities aren't often able to throw people out in the name of profitability, there are a lot of communities that defined by their physical locations, rather than the emotional bonds of the people who make it up.

We live in a society, that, broadly speaking isn't organized around large-scale communities. Once a group of people becomes too large for everyone to be easily acquainted with everyone else, that anonymity starts to erode any sense of mutual need that may have been there.

And ironically, this is how many companies are like families; not all contributions to the group are considered equal. Companies fire and furlough people because the contributions that those people bring are not considered necessary enough to retain. In most families, at least in the Western world, children are not expected to make any useful contributions at all. In some economics circles they're described as luxury goods. What sets businesses apart from families in this sense is that businesses aren't expected to have any members that would fit the definition of a luxury good. Highly-paid executives and board members generate worker resentment and shareholder scrutiny if they're seen as draining company resources and only providing good feelings, at best. Whereas parents are commonly allowed to argue not only that their children shouldn't be required to pay their own way, but that others should pay it, in consideration of the future work that those children might do.

In the end, it's a matter of feeling. "Leaders" in business use the language of "family" in often hackneyed attempts to evoke a certain feeling from their employees, even if they themselves would regard anyone on whom it worked as hopelessly naïve. The LinkedIn post deploys "community" in the same way, hoping to evoke a particular feeling about the group as a whole. But companies are businesses, or enterprises, or any of a host of other terms, that, while they lack a certain warm fuzziness, have the benefit of being accurate descriptors.