Make Money on "People Companies"

If you wanted to make the most money, and didn't care about social good, which would you invest in --

Technogreedy off-peopling outfits that seek to maximize the bottom line at all costs, or

Socially-conscious companies that empower their employees and keep them on board at all costs?

Last summer I was interviewed on CNN by Ali Velshi (The Money Gang}. Discussing my new book, "MIND OVER TECHNOLOGY", I said that our best companies would increasingly strengthen the "hyper-human" qualities of their employees, attributes that cannot easily be automated. Velshi asked me to name companies that had applied this hyper-human principle. I said the concept was new, and that no company to my knowledge had applied it consciously and comprehensively.

After the show, he invited me for a return appearance a few days later. In the interim, I identified three companies -- 3M, Ebay, and Umpqua Bank of Oregon -- that had applied at least some of the hyper-human principles in the natural course of intelligent, humane management. I checked their stock prices and found they had far outperformed large outfits that operated in more traditional ways. For the period 9/11/01 (the day before 9/11) through 9/13/04, three years later --

- 3m (MMM) was up 65%
- Umpqua Bank (UMPQ) was up 90%
- Ebay (EBAY) was up 220%

By comparison, IBM, GE, Microsoft, Disney, Halliburton, and Wal-Mart were up only marginally, flat, or down slightly. The biggest surprise, to me, was Halliburton, the object of Iraq-war federal favor.

Moral: It can pay off big time when companies nurture the creativity, social skills, and other highly-human traits of their employees. (I believe that robust, full support of the hyper-human skills, 10 in all, would bring spectacular bottom-line results.)

Caution: Investors beware. Many things have to go right for a company to do well. Employee empowerment alone is not enough. But it makes sense, doesn't it, that people do better when they're not constantly squeezed?

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