>My guess is that you don't run a company and have never run one. You probably never risked it all to start a business in your garage and grow it to the point where you can employ dozens of people. Self funded, not with other people's money. There's a huge difference there as well.

That guess is wrong. I have started, run and sold my own companies before, and I'm currently bootstrapping a new SaaS company right now. I don't know about using other peoples money, as I have always self-funded, I am a firm believer of organic growth, as I have never been too concerned with becoming mega-rich, I just like to fund my lifestyle. First company I started and sold was way back in 1989, when I was 18 years old, of my bedroom and using hotel meeting rooms to see clients. Nowadays I mostly consult and mentor SMEs, as I enjoy working with plucky entrepreneurs. the only reason I'm starting a new business is that I just had my second child, so I need extra funds for my lifestyle now :)

>If you spoke to any one of my employees you'd quickly understand that the 18th. century mentality claim would be an insult...
>That is far --VERY FAR-- from an 18th. century mentality. How dare you!

How dare I? So it is fine for you to call people (experimenting with their own, so far successful, business) childish "OK, I'll be the grown-up in the room.Are you fucking kidding me? No, really."
But if I politely say that you have an old fashioned view of business your hackles immediately rise and you get morally wounded. Let alone throwing around the word hippy to describe something you don't like. Why not just call him a commie-pinko-bastard and be done with it. Or do you use the term hippy to imply drug taking as well as loose morals? You could call him naive, inexperienced and so forth. I would call him brave and innovative. But those are just our respective viewpoints.

Part of this is my fault, so let me clarify what I mean by 18th century mentality (I didn't mean to imply that you're an asshole or a slave-driver, I did read your comment all the way through, and you're one of my favorite commenters here on HN):

"Business needs a hierarchical structure with one strong leader at the top, calling all the shots taking all the risks and profits, as this is the only way that works and without it fickle employees would destroy the company within a matter of months if left to their own devices."

Patriarchal is another way at looking at this type of business mentality, and I associate it with what you said regarding being an adult and 'hippies'. You see yourself as the tough, but fair father figure of the company. There is nothing wrong with that, and a lot of successful software projects run under the auspices of a 'benevolent dictator for life'. Being ex-military I know first hand that this type of structure is necessary for successful battle operations. I just happen to think that there are also other valid models out there, and people shouldn't be attacked as acting childish or hippyish just because they try something different. Maybe for your industry the model you prescribe is they only way. That makes me sad as even you pointed out that a man died because of the stress, and you yourself went to hospital. Considering that business is an abstract model that we humans have invented, wouldn't you rather find a better way of doing business than to push yourself into an early grave?

Business is often regarded as war, but that is a choice we make.

>Understanding business economics is NOT something you can learn in two weeks. The idea that this can be taught to every employee in an organization, regardless of station and education is simply ridiculous. I am not being elitist here. It's just reality.

The reality is that it has been done, and quite successfully. It may sound ridiculous, but it actually has been done. Of course, two weeks won't give you MBA level understanding of business economics (in all honesty, a lot of the MBAs I've worked with probably spent about 3 hours learning finance), but you can structure the information in such a way that they understand enough to be able to make informed decisions about their salary and so forth. I know that you're quite intelligent ere's a thought experiment for you: what information and at what level would you present to your staff if you only had 2 weeks to give them a solid foundations of money flows in and out of a company? Especially from a 'street MBA' viewpoint. I bet you'd come up with a pretty solid course.

>You want employees at all levels working on what they were hired to do, and not busy trying to decipher states with faulty input information.

Some of the world's most successful companies have employees who also know the bigger picture of what is going on in the company. It doesn't have to be the extreme that you're suggesting, where the janitor isn't mopping floors because he is busy on excel trying to figure out a 10% cost cutting maneuver. But would you be against the janitor who, knowing his departments cost impact on the company, tries to see if the floors would look better with 2 instead of 3 coats of wax, thereby cutting his wax costs by a third?

>One example that comes to mind is that of sales people. This can be a really odd group.

You're preaching to the choir here. I completely agree. I remember one salesman I worked with who didn't understand the differences between profit mark-up and profit margin. He kept wondering why he was losing money when he discounted something. All agreement aside, one of the best salesmen I knew talked his managers into canceling his salary completely, but paying him a higher commission rate. Needless to say the managers wished they had run through the numbers a little more before agreeing to it, as he cleaned up.

>That's how it works. Again, people are not analyzing business finances. Management puts a fork in the road in front of them. Two choices. Choice number one means you might lose your job. Choice number two, you don't. No brainer.

In the above, of course it's a no brainer, people have no access to finances, and management lays out the options. One company I consulted with worked with their staff during the financial crisis to work out how to deal with the problems of lay-offs. Three of the youngest staff members came up with a novel idea, where they split one job between them. They had objective results that needed to be achieved each month, and they split the time and money according to who needed what each month. For example, when one of them needed to go on holiday he worked a whole month by himself, and took all the pay. I also had the pleasure once of consulting with a board minus 2 employee at a large insurance company. He had to lay off people in his department (the department with the largest revenue and profit) even though he was already short of staff. His main complaint was that the monthly car allowance for his boss would pay for 7 full time sales people which could bring in $Xmm per year. Luckily for management those numbers are well hidden. All of this came from the result of a three-quarter of a million dollar consulting project which came up with a hard to find outcome - lay-off 30% of the staff to cut costs.

As for unions I don't like them or believe in them and I think they are also a part of the 18th century mentality I mentioned earlier. They are a knee jerk reaction to the way a lot of traditional companies treat their employees. This again harks back to the idea that business is war, only for the unions the enemy is the employer, which is downright dumb. And let's not even go into the levels of corruption present in unions.

Business is there to make money. I just think that there are more ways to skin that cat, and that you shouldn't shout down someone who is trying a new method. The person who tried this seems smart enough, and with your experience you could probably give him some extremely useful tips about what to avoid, what problems may come, and see what he does with that. But why should he read past are you fucking kidding me you childish fucking hippy?!?

To find he should follow your method of business that leaves people in hospital or dead?