After a long struggle with their terminal condition, the last public companies finally passed away when the New York stock exchange – the last of its kind in the world – closed for the final time yesterday.
PLCs enjoyed an exciting life, becoming hugely more than their parents ever expected. Mr Adam Smith, a close friend of the family and a huge influence on the PLCs throughout their lives had high hopes for what the PLCs would achieve for the world. Through their relentless pursuit of profit for their owners, he saw a world made better through innovative products and services delivered to the masses.
Well the PLCs certainly delivered that and more to boot, with consumer products fulfilling every need and want imaginable. Some were clever enough to make money out of money itself without actually delivering any value at all. Those PLCs were from the Banks family. Many people were able to earn a living working for the PLCs and a few people (not the masses working for them of course) got very rich. Fantastic.
But after a happy childhood there was trouble ahead for the PLCs . They got fat. Not just the fat kids in the class, but fatter than the whole school. In fact fatter than many countries! That’s pretty fat, but that was OK because everyone was still working very hard and a lot of money was flying around, especially to the PLC’s owners on the stock markets.
The first big sign of trouble for PLCs came from those troublesome Banks adolescents. It turned out that what they had been trading was actually just hot air. Well really it was worth less than hot air because at least you can use hot air to dry your hands after washing them in the bathroom. The fat kids fell over and landed hard. Fortunately, there were some countries who were still fatter than the PLCs (other less fat countries were unfortunately squashed when they fell – oh well.)
The fat countries did the sensible thing and fed the fat kids enormous piles of sweeties to keep them really fat and get them happily up on their podgy feet again. After all they were so fat and took up so much space they if they didn’t get up then nobody in the fat countries would be able to move at all. But even with all of the free sweeties that the normal people in the fat countries paid for them to eat, they didn’t really change at all. But for a while everything looked like it was going to be OK again.
At the same time, the other PLCs were also feeling the first signs of trouble. They gradually started to realise that their masters were a group of owners who care purely about how much profit they made, and preferably QUICKLY. This was supposed to be a good thing because it kept the PLCs on their podgy toes. The owners could sell them to new masters or throw out their management if they didn’t stay fat enough. But in worrying so much about pleasing their owners, they didn’t focus on the people who mattered the most – all of those little people who actually did the work and created 100% of the value! It regrettably seems so obvious now that they’ve passed away but yes, in every PLC the employees were less important than the shareholders! And that was bad news for customers too (where 100% of their income comes from) because customers only get served the best when the employees are fully engaged.
What’s more, the focus purely on financial results turned out to not always be so good for humanity, societies and the planet. Life for many people got worse and the environment was being destroyed. They had a little go at countering this with ‘Corporate Social Responsibility’ which meant it was OK for a bank to invest several billion in a company making landmines because it allowed its employees a day off a year to paint a fence outside an orphanage for landmine victims.
The PLCs struggled on into their adult lives, but there were other leaner, fitter competitors around. These weren’t even new kids on the block, they were grown-ups too and had been around for just as long as the PLCs, but their day had finally come. These companies didn’t have to worry about shareholders pressuring them for short-term returns at the expense of the employees, because the employees WERE the shareholders. Imagine that – inmates running the asylum! And it turned out that these companies were more innovative, faster and provided better service to their customers. There was something very powerful about a business being owned by the people who actually did the work. And because the companies now existed for the benefit of people (not pension funds, hedge funds and city traders) they actually care a lot about creating value for, and not destroying societies and the environment.
One of these competitors, a guy called John from the Lewis family in England was already the most successful retailer in the UK. He was free from the pressures of the stock market and could attract and keep the best people who then delivered the best service to customers because they were owners of the business and cared the most.
These employee-owned competitors grew in number, size and power as the PLCs faltered in their later years. The best people flocked to them and they were able to think and plan long-term unlike their short-term sweetie-addicted old classmates.
Many of the smarter PLCs allowed the sensible thing to happen – they came out of the stock markets and were bought by the employees who paid for them out of future profits which were now higher because they performed better, and weren’t going to be bled out of the company to shareholders who contributed nothing.
A few tried to hang on for a bit too long and found that they just couldn’t innovate and deliver to customers as well as their more nimble employee-owned competitors. These final few were ultimately consigned to the history books when the last stock markets shut down yesterday.
I apologise because it’s wrong to speak ill of the dead, but the world is a better place now that the PLCs are gone. We now have businesses where people serve people for the benefit of everyone. And people have a conscious so now societies and the environment are better off too through their more thoughtful actions.
The slow and painful death of the PLCs surprised the pure capitalists who thought that the markets would take care of everything. In fact they actually did – the free market allowed these better competitors to make the PLCs irrelevant. And the socialists were both right and wrong too. It turned out that business wasn’t so bad after all, but they were right that things work best when the people own and control the means of production.
R.I.P.
