Democracy in the workplace sounds nice. I don’t really see how we get there.

I would like to see businesses disconnect themselves from shareholder tyranny. I would like to see businesses run for goals other than profit with profit being only the means of continuing to pursue the core business goal.

Lets say that a company’s goal is to irradiate Hepatitis C. They would need some seed money and would maybe need to eventually make some profit to pay back the costs of doing business and the initial investment but the goal is to work themselves out of a job with continued reduction in their market as they succeed in the irradiation.

We see today some businesses trying to lower the cost of getting into Space. I think they would measure their success by how payloads they orbit or how many people they help leave the planet not how much profit they make. Yeah, they would need to make some money or at least break even or they would not launch as much.

About a decade ago I ask the president of one of the biggest aerospace companies in the world if he would accept a lower profit margin to win a prestigious spaceflight contract. He said no.

TEK