The Secret To A Business' Success

When I hear people talk about successful businesses I often here them say things like, “That's a great company” or “That's a smart organization. Most people view successful businesses as a living entity with a mind of its own carrying all people who work for it with it.

People often forget or don't realize that behind every great business, there are people directing its destiny, deciding upon the courses of action, choosing products and product design, working out marketing and advertising campaigns and carefully instituting quality controls to make certain business will continue to be good in the years ahead.

It's people who make a business succeed or fail. Any business, no matter how large or small cannot succeed without good people. With good, talented and dedicated people the sky is the limit, but without good people the business is doomed no matter how good its product is.

One of the greatest entrepreneurs in the history of the world, Andrew Carnegie, once said, “Take away my mills, my mines and my factories, but leave me my men and in a short time I'll have them all back again.”

It's the minds of men and women that can turn a downhill course into an uphill climb, and this cannot be automated. There never has been and never will be a computer that can think and plan and come up with new ideas for the future.

And while much of this is done in the conference room and in committee, it is still the individual mind of the individual person that works the miracle of a good idea; an idea that can result in a better product or service, provide jobs for thousands of working people and keep the economy rolling along in high gear.

So, no matter what size the business is that you happen to think of, remember the whole thing started with one idea in the mind of one man or woman. And from that point everything that happened has been accomplished by people, quietly working away, thinking, planning, building, testing, trying, failing and trying again until something works.

There's no way to thank these people, most of whose names and faces you'd never recognize, for what they've done for our society and economy. But they don't need our thanks. Their rewards and satisfactions come from successfully doing what they're doing.

The next time you reach for a product that bears the name you've learned by experience you can trust to do the job it's supposed to do, and do it well, you might find it interesting to remember that the name is really a collection of people, as is the business that produced it.

It's all people. The measure of a product or service is the measure of the people who produce it, just as the way you do your work is the measure of you as a person. It should be better this year than last and better next year than this year.

I believe that really great men and women are known by three signs, generosity in the design, humanity in the execution, moderation in success. You'll find people with these qualifications behind every successful business.