People come before money

I'm an idealist.

I sort of imagine a world that's different to the world that we live in now.

I imagine a world in which the vast majority of people wake up every single morning inspired to go to work, feel safe when they're there, and return home at the end of the day fulfilled by the work that they do. And I believe this thing called fulfillment, the ability to say that I love my work, that I love what I do. I believe that it is a basic human right and not a privilege. We treat it as a privilege. You know, you go out with your friends and somebody says, I love my job. And the rest of us go, oh, my God, you're so lucky. Like it's a lottery that they had won or something. And so.

I just believe that fundamentally that we as the workforce are. We have the right to demand that. That the places where we work provide us that. The irony is it's actually good for them. That's the big joke. We're more engaged. We offer more discretionary effort. We offer our big ideas simply because they said, come here and enjoy yourself and feel safe and have a good time and let us help you grow.

Many of the traditional business practices that are considered normal today are leftover from the 1980s and 90s.

Remember, the 80s and 90s were boom years. Most companies grew. It was a time of relative peace, and it was a kinder, gentler Cold War. We weren't practicing hiding under our desks in school. And a lot of the business philosophies that were being espoused and proposed were for those times. So the concept of shareholder supremacy, for example, was a theory proposed from Harvard.

In the late 1970s. Just a theory. The concept of using mass layoffs to balance the books was a practice that did not exist in the United States prior to the 1980s. Did not exist. The concepts of rank and yank were where you stack your employees based on the performance and their contribution to the stock price.

You promote the top 10% and fire the bottom 10%. And you create an environment in which people compete against each other inside the company. By the way, that's what dictators do. You keep the people divided and you stay in power because dictators fear the people. It's the same thing.

These are all fantastically good.

Theories for boom years and for the short term. We also dismantled Glass Steagall in this time period. It's not a Republican or Democrat thing because you had Republican and Democrat president over this period. And Glass Steagall was the act that was passed after the Great Depression to prevent another Great Depression from happening. Amongst other things, one of the things it did was it prohibited investment banks and retail banks existing in the same institution, which is what was allowed prior to the Great Depression. Do you know how many stock market crashes we had prior to the dismantling of Glass Steagall? Zero. We had zero stock market crashes for 50 years. Then they dismantled Glass Steagall in the 1980s and 90s and we had.

The.

87.Com crash and 2008. We've had three. Right. But it was really leaders like Jack Welch who promoted these theories of the day for a very different time. And they have become so normal today that we don't actually realize how backwards they are. We talk about layoffs, that we announce them on the news as if it's nothing. In fact, worse, when a company announces layoffs, the stock price goes up. And if you're incentivized based on stock value.

A few years ago, Citibank announced record high layoffs the exact same year that they announced record high average bonuses. Figure that one out. Right? And the point is, these systems, though they may be normal, are wrong and broken and go completely contrary to the basic human right that we all are entitled. And by the way, GE needed a $300 billion bailout in 2008 because the theories that they espouse are not good for the long term. They are good for the short term.

So for me to meet a company like NextJump.

A company that when they talk about growth, they mean their people, not their bottom line.

And a company that understands, though money is important, it is the fuel for the organization. Of course money is important because the more money you have, the more fuel you have to make the organization run. It's not a hippie commune. But the point is that people come before money. I sit in the audiences of lots of corporate events. I've never met a CEO on the planet that doesn't believe people are important. The problem is the decisions they make would be contrary to the things they say. They stand there with their list of priorities and it says, number one, priority growth. Number two, priority shareholder value. Number three, priority customer. Number four, priority employee. See, our people are important. Number four. Even when they say customer first, that means your employee is least number two. Right? And the irony is, when you take care of your employees, your employees take care of your customers, and your customers take care of your shareholders. And the big joke is that the numbers prove it. The numbers prove it. You look at people focused companies, they outperform numbers focused Companies over the long term, dramatically. GE versus Costco. Costco, year after year after year, criticized by Wall street for having a flat stock price.

But if you compare the price of Costco stock to GE over the course of the past 30 years, you'll see that GE made 600% of its money when the same year that if you invested the year that Costco went public. What did I say? 600% S&P 500. 600% Costco. 1200%. Double 2X. It's good for the shareholder. I can no longer be accused of of being a crazy idealist if what I imagine exists in reality.

That's why companies like this are very, very important for us to study. Do they have everything right? Of course not. Do they have. Are they trending in the right direction? Absolutely. Are they operating completely counter to what we consider to be normal business practice of the day? You bet they are. And here's the best part. Their numbers prove it. So for all the cynics out there who believe that numbers matter, numbers come first and performance comes before people. Guess what? They outperform their competitors year after year after year. They surprise even themselves.

Study that book and study this company. Because mark my words, if we have anything to do with it, in 10 or 20 years, we will completely undo all the nonsense that bastards like Jack Welch promoted in the 80s and 90s.

Is that enough?

Okay.