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The Soul of Enterprise: Dialogues on Business in the Knowledge Economy The Soul of Enterprise Dialogues on Business in the Knowledge Economy Ronald J. Baker Ed Kless VeraSage Press Petaluma, California The Soul of Enterprise: Dialogues on Business in the Knowledge To George Gilder Thank you for opening my eyes, and mind, to the essential role of entrepreneurs in creating an economy full of wonder, wealth, surprise, and dynamism. –RJB To Christine You are my soulmate, mo cushla! Thank you for being a partner with me in the ultimate entrepreneurial act — the bearing and raising of our children. Because of you and them I believe in a tomorrow that is better than today. –EJK The Soul of Enterprise: Dialogues on Business in the Knowledge Like a chrysalis, we’re emerging from the economy of the Industrial Revolution–an economy confined to and limited by the Earth’s physical resources–into, as one economist titled his book, “the economy in mind,” in which there are no bounds on human imagination and the freedom to create is the most precious natural resource. –President Ronald Reagan Remarks at Moscow State University May 31, 1988 The Soul of Enterprise: Dialogues on Business in the Knowledge Contents Foreword Preface Acknowledgments About the Authors Introduction: Like a Chrysalis Part I: The Knowledge Economy Chapter 1: The Economy in Mind Chapter 2: The Best Learning Tool Ever Invented: After Action Reviews Part II: The ‘Effing’ Debate: Efficiency vs. Effectiveness Chapter 3: Declaring Independence from the Tyranny of Taylorism Part III: Cost-Plus Pricing vs. Value-Based Pricing Chapter 4: The First Law of Marketing: All Value is Subjective Chapter 5: The Second Law of Marketing: All Prices are Contextual Part IV: The Morality of Markets Chapter 6: Everyday Ethics: Doing Well and Doing Good Epilogue: On Purpose The Soul of Enterprise: Dialogues on Business in the Knowledge Forward I know Ron and Ed quite well. They are dear friends, and they’re incredibly insightful. So insightful, they asked an atheist to write the foreword to a book whose title refers to the soul. That’s like asking a Mormon to write the foreword to The Joy of Homebrewing. But please understand, I haven’t read this book. The main reason I haven’t read it is because it’s a modified transcript of Ron and Ed’s VoiceAmerica radio shows. Conceptually, the format seems a little strange since I believe every chapter will be interrupted exactly three times with five commercials for Sage accounting products. Since the book is a transcript of several conversations, it’s a lot like a dialogue of Plato insofar as I haven’t been able to finish reading a dialogue of Plato either. This book is also quite similar to the teachings of Socrates because by the time it’s over you will willingly drink hemlock. Ron is an expert on value pricing and economics. He’s written the best- selling books Pricing on Purpose, Professional’s Guide to Value Pricing, and Implementing Value Pricing. Although he’s well aware of the law of diminishing returns, he’s built a career on the assumption that his readers don’t understand it. If you bought this book after reading The Firm of the Future and Implementing Value Pricing, you may also be interested in reading Amazon.com’s return policy. Ed is formally trained in theater and information systems. As both an actor and an early adopter of technology, it’s no wonder Ed gravitated to the cutting-edge technology of radio. Don’t get me wrong. I tried to read this book. But I decided early on that I would take a drink every time either Ron or Ed said, “Yes,” “Right,” “Exactly,” or “Absolutely,” and I had alcohol poisoning by the middle of page six. (Editor’s note: We even took some of these out of the transcripts and it is absurd.) Despite all the sweet-talk above, please understand, I’m a huge fan of Ron and Ed. Their depth of knowledge and insight into business and economics is profound. I’ve spent countless hours talking with them on the phone and in person. Not only do I never tire of their message, I find it helpful to regularly The Soul of Enterprise: Dialogues on Business in the Knowledge revisit their ideas. And every time I come back, I find new gems that were overlooked before, and they find new ways to challenge my thinking. This book is sure to become an invaluable resource for us to transform our businesses as we access the brilliance that resides within the skulls of Ron Baker and Ed Kless. Greg Kyte, CPA Founder of Comedy CPE www.ComedyCPE.com G. Robert Newhart Non-Value Added Fellow VeraSage Institute The Soul of Enterprise: Dialogues on Business in the Knowledge Preface How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book. ––Henry David Thoreau I gradually became aware of a chink in the armor of accounting in 1981, my sophomore year in college. I was studying to become a certified public accountant, believing it would allow me to do anything I wanted in the world of commerce since everyone kept telling me it was the language of business. I was being taught the importance of proper accounting in operating a successful enterprise, from the definition of profit to the necessity of cash flow. It was a body of knowledge, a tangible reality I could grasp, a prism in which the world of enterprise I so admired could be refracted so as to make sense to a naïve student who believed he knew more than he did. One of the problems with education is the constant pursuit of practical knowledge at the expense of pursuing answers to profound questions. No doubt we all need practical knowledge to function in everyday life, earn a living, to just get by in the world. But I now realize people are not guided by what they know, but rather what they believe—their worldview, through which we all refract reality. And in August of 1981, my worldview was about to be punctured permanently, albeit quite gradually, indeed, imperceptibly at the time. Looking back, Playboy magazine may be most responsible. No, not for the prurient reasons you are forgiven for immediately thinking of, but a far more banal explanation. As a barber, my father was an inveterate reader of Playboy’s interviews, which are excellent if you have ever bothered to read one with someone in whom you have an interest. The roster of interviewees is quite impressive––world leaders, politicians, writers, and so forth––some of whom, no doubt, are self conscious about appearing in such a publication. As a matter of fact, when devout Catholic William F. Buckley Jr. was asked why he would write for such a magazine, he wittily answered, “I write for Playboy because it is the fastest way to communicate with my 17-year-old son.” In any event, my father read the interview with George Gilder in that August 1981 issue, which impressed him. Gilder had written Wealth and Poverty, a book Ronald Reagan was photographed with, along with giving it to members of his cabinet. Gilder would go on to become Ronald Reagan’s most-quoted living author. It is little remembered, but Reagan had a degree in economics from Eureka College, translating into a lifelong fascination with the writings of The Soul of Enterprise: Dialogues on Business in the Knowledge economic thinkers. For some reason, my father was impressed with the Gilder interview, explaining to me over lunch how this author had read over 200 books to write his, and was being hailed as the most articulate, albeit amateur, supply- side economist in the country. Needless to say, I was not too impressed, pompously explaining to my dad how there are many crackpots who write economics books, most of which are useless, wrong, or belong in the fiction section of bookstores. I was mired in the mentality that only academic credentials lend credence to anyone writing on economics. Sure, Gilder may have been a graduate of Harvard, but he was not a professional economist such as Milton Friedman, whose book Free to Choose I had read the year before, which made a lasting impression on my worldview. Fortunately for me, my father persisted, purchasing a copy of Gilder’s book, convincingly insisting I should read it. I did. In one sitting. It changed my life. It opened my eyes to an entire new worldview that is beyond my capacity to describe in so brief a space. Little did I understand, but that was the sound of the first chink in the armor. The next chink came in 1982, when I read Warren T. Brookes’s book, The Economy in Mind, the title of which you will see mentioned again in the Introduction, in a more historical setting. The Soul of Enterprise brings me full circle to that first sitting of reading Gilder’s penetrating insights. It is a journey that illuminates the opportunity cost of the accounting career I chose, which was the road not taken––that of the economist. I traded away, for the ability to capture and record the historical cost of everything, an understanding of the nature and origins of value, wealth, and poverty. It was not until later in my career, after I left the then–Big Eight accounting firm of KPMG that I understood this opportunity cost was increasingly becoming prohibitive. I came to recognize I was ensconced in the accountant’s worldview, a belief system and body of knowledge that cannot really explain how wealth is created––it can only record it after the fact.
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