People over Profit - Book Report

Sahil Patel

Dr. Bagby

ENT 4325

November 15, 2017

People Over Profit Book Report

Business is one of the hardest fields to starting work in for young adults and college kids looking for jobs right after school. There are a lot of pressure that are put on them, especially in this generation. The pressures to make money are probably the toughest thing that they have to deal with. Without generating a profit, most companies will fail, or at least consider the business venture a fail. When companies are built, for the most part, their number one goal is to make a profit. When companies fail to do so, they ultimately fail on their goal. There are also some other, secondary goals that companies have for themselves which include things such as helping a cause, helping people, or providing some type of unique service to people. In Dale Partridge’s book, People Over Profit, the exact opposite is taught. Often when money becomes the main goal of a company, the company starts to do things that would not necessarily meet the moral codes with which they started. They star to take shortcuts that they would not have thought of early, in order to generate more revenue. This leads to them deceiving their customer base into thinking they are the same company from which they started from.

Dale Partridge’s book, People Over Profit, emphasizes many points in why you should put people before money in your company, but one other thing he emphasizes is that companies are inherently good. To pull from a Biblical sense, a company can be seen as a representation of Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve were the perfect humans, doing as God told them to do, without any questions. When temptation struck them, however, they took shortcuts to knowledge, which ultimately made them break the one rule that God had set for them. The same thing happens in the business world that we live in today. All companies started out as good, honest companies mostly because they cant afford to do anything else. All companies that are in the beginning stages of their business must be honest and good companies to allow themselves to create a loyal customer base. After the business has been established, most of them are presented with an issue, or a fork in the road if you will: do they continue to operate the business as they have been doing, or do they change things up to make more money? Nine times out of ten, that company will go and seek out more money, which in turn may lead to deceiving their customers. The reason this type of business works is because people are already loyal to that company, and most times those loyal customers are not even aware of the change that has been made, hence the deceiving part.

A good example of this can be a new milk product that has hit the HEB Supermarkets. Company A just started a milk brand in the beginning of 2017 and is expecting to be the new standard for organic milk. They believe in giving their customers the best product, with the least amount of tampering to their milk. After a couple months of good sales, a farm approaches Company A and claims that if they buy their milk from their farm, they will cut their costs by more than 50%, but the catch to the deal is that some of the milk may not be completely organic. With a money first mentality, Company A aggress to the deal, which in turn puts non-organic milk on the shelves of HEB. In this example, you can see the roll of putting money first in a company and how it affects how the company acts.

Going off of the main idea that companies are inherently good and that over time, they may become bad, a factor that plays into this is transparency. This is one of Dale Partridge’s seven ideas that he uses in his own company to avoid not being honest to his customers.  Often when companies try to lie about their products and deceive their customers, like in the example given with the milk company, they have to cover their track to make sure no one is able to find out what they are doing. Transparency is something that all people must keep in mind, but businesses are particularly threatened by this idea. When a company decides that they are going to be dishonest with their loyal customer base, they start to weave a web of lies, that can only get worse and worse. We see time and again when companies are exploited for their wrongdoings because they were not completely transparent with their customers.