By James Santagata
Principal Consultant, Career OverDrive!
There's a very pervasive and dangerous meme in the world today that suggests that businesses create jobs or are even "in the business of creating jobs".
Nothing could be further from the truth as Peter Drucker observed many years:
"The purpose of business is to create and keep customers."
That's it. Period.
"So what? Why should I care about this?", you may ask yourself.
Simple.
Because when one understands that job creation is not the goal of business but rather an extremely unwanted byproduct of creating, serving and retaining customers a powerful shift of mindset results.
The fact remains that if a company were able to, they would hire no one. There's absolutely no benefit in employing people unless the employees are creating value such as increasing revenues, creating assets or decreasing costs.
New jobs (in the private sector) are created only (in the vast majority of the cases) when a company finds that it can no longer create, serve and retain its customers with the existing workforce.
When you understand this and take this to heart, you can then make the mental shift to realize that any approach during a job search that views landing a job as either a lottery or an act of charity is doomed to always underperform if not flat out fail.
Conversely, by understanding how and why jobs are created and why companies are ultimately in business (and what keeps them there) as well as what they are not in business for (e.g.g, creating jobs), you'll have a major leg up on your competition by understanding you must Never, Ever Beg but Always Bring Value.
Principal Consultant, Career OverDrive!
There's a very pervasive and dangerous meme in the world today that suggests that businesses create jobs or are even "in the business of creating jobs".
Nothing could be further from the truth as Peter Drucker observed many years:
"The purpose of business is to create and keep customers."
That's it. Period.
"So what? Why should I care about this?", you may ask yourself.
Simple.
Because when one understands that job creation is not the goal of business but rather an extremely unwanted byproduct of creating, serving and retaining customers a powerful shift of mindset results.
The fact remains that if a company were able to, they would hire no one. There's absolutely no benefit in employing people unless the employees are creating value such as increasing revenues, creating assets or decreasing costs.
New jobs (in the private sector) are created only (in the vast majority of the cases) when a company finds that it can no longer create, serve and retain its customers with the existing workforce.
When you understand this and take this to heart, you can then make the mental shift to realize that any approach during a job search that views landing a job as either a lottery or an act of charity is doomed to always underperform if not flat out fail.
Conversely, by understanding how and why jobs are created and why companies are ultimately in business (and what keeps them there) as well as what they are not in business for (e.g.g, creating jobs), you'll have a major leg up on your competition by understanding you must Never, Ever Beg but Always Bring Value.
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