"We should run this endeavor like it's a..."
So help me, if you say "a business" you're so dead to me.
Whatever you do, please don’t run your thing like a business unless you are hoping it will fail.
If you truly care about your thing, whatever it is, then you’d rather run it like a Burmese maternity ward than a business.
I'm done with the vacuous refrain that “a business” is the appropriate role model for our country or its various governmental institutions, like the school system or the military, or treasured private enterprises and undertakings, such as my church or the Y or the bocce club or the taco truck (which, while it technically qualifies as a business, is more akin to a revelation in my personal taxonomy of human endeavors) or the community center or the quilting bee or the League of Women Voters or the chess club or karaoke night.
(That said, I will grant all petitions for a homeowners’ association to be run like a business - purely out of malice toward that entire breeding ground of perpetual personal consent that runs with land rights. Fortunately, the type of people drawn to the flickering light of an HOA board are as apt as any, absent any formal request, to operate it like it’s a business, in the worst way, so this happily works itself out.)
As long as we believe that the necessary skill sets, key performance indicators, objectives and best practices for all non-commercial and commercial organizations worth thriving are freely interchangeable and analogous, then the data tells us we'd be far better off running all of those entities like a Burmese maternity ward.
It’s not even close:
One year new business failure rate for U.S.: 23.2%¹
One year infant mortality rate in Burma: 3.34%²
It’s absolutely astonishing to me - and then, again, it’s not - that we’ve internalized the Gospel of Prosperity preached by the most predatory of capitalists to the point that we don’t immediately mock every rube and shill who earnestly and straight-facedly declares that any thing that’s not a business should be run by, well, pretty much the last thing you’d want that thing to be run like.
We’ve set the bar for success so damn low, y’all.
And don’t you know, if it is a business that you’ve driven to failure, there’s a damn good chance there’s a tax write-off in store for you - yes, a reward - for having done so.
We shouldn’t be running businesses like businesses yet people are out there in the wild insisting that we run charities and summer camps like businesses as though that is the recipe for success. I’m dating myself when I say that we can do better, which I submit it a proven fact given how we spent the ‘90s with the good sense to know that Tim Allen trying to make lawn mowers run like race cars was a punchline.
What’s become of us since then?
Clearly, as a society, we are not well served by exalting commercial institutions as a universal template when the truth is that they’re the paragon of failure.
The next time you’re in a meeting and someone predictably throws down the recommendation to run the thing more like a business, please promise me that you’ll hit them with the hard data and tell them that, if they’re the serious-minded, tough-talking, reality-checking, telling-it-like-it-is know-it-all they imagine themselves to be, then they need to bring in a PowerPoint deck to next month’s meeting outlining all the ways the thing they care about can be run more like a Burmese maternity ward, preferably with the kinds of fancy slide transitions that the Burmese OB-GYNs are using these days.
And then - like a boss or, rather, a midwife - tell us what happens next in the comments below.
¹ U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Survival of private sector establishments by opening year” for year ending March 2023
² CIA World Fact Book, “Infant Mortality Rates, Field Listing by Country,” 2024