|
It is impossible to receive without somebody giving, and it is also inconceivable to give without someone else receiving what we give. Our own interest is bound unfailingly to other people's interest, and that of others to ours. This serious and enriching game of receiving by giving becomes more definite daily in the managerial environment using the approach of searching for maximum profit without deceiving or pressurizing. The maximization of others' profit (that rebounds on the maximization of one's own) or the maximization of one's own profit (that stimulates the maximization of others') are the objective of managerial activity.
The main function of profit is in fact its capacity to measure the effectiveness of service in the attainment of the potential clients' greater subjective suitability. It bears with it the effectiveness of the harmonic assembling of the multifaceted variety of production factors (raw materials, subordinate and managing tasks and capital instruments) with regard to the final productions. This capacity to reflect and to measure aptitudes with regard to ultimate subjective suitability, means that through the comparative exercise of costs and revenue, profit or loss is a formidable instrument for the transmission of countless economic reports among a multitude of social agents, significantly reducing transaction, information and control costs.
Profit is never normal or balanced. It arises rather by overtaking normality, foreseeing changes and imbalances in demand that others had not foreseen. In an imaginary balanced and static world neither loss nor profit would arise. The inexpressible variability of the free concretion of human objectives produces continuous changes in demand, which generates imbalances and uncertainties on desired future productions. The approximation to or distancing from those free human concretions is the source of managerial profit or loss. Loyalty of service to the potential users of products encourages one's own profit. Their sway is felt in the market through profit or loss, adding patrimony to some and taking it away from the less economically efficient. The lucrative objective of the company causes the sovereignty of the consumers to prevail in the free market system. The concrete demands of the citizens reflect their subjective purposes and the manager, exercising his freedom, can guide production toward those goods wanted freely by the consumers.
Consumers, on the other hand, do not act at random and fortuitously. There is a series of stable conducts of human nature that allow us to distinguish between subjective preferences and objective valuations. These objective valuations refer to the universal aims of human nature. They are a certain person's or community of human beings' ideal but possible valuation which could be fulfilled with certain suitable acts of consumption and production to achieve the maximum degree of " happiness ," " success " or personal or social self-fulfilment. Subjective valuations are on the other hand those that make reference to the concrete and real interpretations of those objective purposes made by that man or that community according to certain preferences and models of life and that are the real point of all their habits and purchase acts, sale and production. The human will searches for what his reason proposes as convenient for him, although it sometimes makes a mistake by pursuing something that is not really convenient.
If the subjective purposes have a tendency toward the objective ones, these will maintain a more stable behaviour in the citizens' priorities. Loyalty to the task of accommodating production to demand, explicit in the price, does not only have to be present in the medium and long term general plans, but rather, motivated by the radical originality of each price in that place, at that moment and for that merchandise, is a daily characteristic of activity in normal business administration.
The vertical completion of production consists of an increment in value by way of a greater closeness of goods to human subjective purposes, and of these to the objective ones. Managerial and scientific specialization also tends to facilitate a better knowledge of the subjective necessities and a greater closeness towards the mysteries of the objectives of human nature. All innovation, however fleeting, is an approach towards the ultimate subjective suitability of its time and spatial environment of knowledge. That innovation will be fleeting if that ultimate subjective suitability, for which and to which it serves, is very far from the ultimate objective suitability corresponding to human nature. If on the contrary, the ultimate subjective suitability is close to the human being's ultimate objective suitability, that innovation, sooner or later, will end up prevailing in the production process of goods and economic services.
The creative powers of managerial activity are attracted by the force of the objective, authentic and true - towards the elaboration of ways of life that fit into the unalterable laws of the human universe and that are able to foment the highest aspirations of human nature. The solvency of managerial enterprising activity depends ultimately on the purposes to which it serves.
Joseph John Franch Menéu
Gaceta de los Negocios
|