Radical Management: Budgeting

We work from the proper moral assumptions: Borrowing is evil unless you are starving.
I categorically reject the entire budgeting and management philosophy of the West. It’s wrong before the first thought is put down on paper. Unfortunately, it’s not going away quickly enough. Radical management means we pull as hard as we can to get things going in the right direction. Life itself is a compromise, but it helps to understand what the ideal actually is, not some Utopian goofball fantasy.
The greatest asset is the people, however much good you can get from them. That will always be your number one focus. If the things we do are not about people, we should stop doing them. Simply keeping people employed is not a bad goal, but it has to fit into the larger economic understanding of keeping everyone in as good of shape as possible. Your work should bless everyone it touches, even when that touch is third or fourth hand. Since few of us can think on such terms, we have to accept the idea that God’s Laws are always correct in what they aim to accomplish. Life can be no better than what God’s Laws promise. Do what He says, and He’ll make it work out. People always come first, and your personal needs as part of an organization belong in the same basket as the needs of everyone else.
If we aren’t helping people, we cannot justify taking a single dollar from the profits. There should never exist a commitment to some ephemeral thing called “profit” which does not belong to the people involved. If we don’t have the means to begin any particular operation, we don’t begin. If we can’t get people behind something which promotes their own welfare, we are starting at the wrong place. The pure profit motive is simply wrong by God’s Laws. Get rid of the materialistic approach which divides into capitalism, socialism, communism, etc. This is about human life, not cash or property.
Your budget is the people and their abilities. Material resources are simply the means to enable people. You should always start a company based on what you can do by yourself. If it works for you, others will want in on it. Let them invest themselves to whatever degree they see fit. No one is permitted to own any part of the results unless they are directly involved in making the profit happen. Never sell stock; that’s a sin — period. It isolates property from people, and property has not independent status before God. God’s Laws presume the entire operation is owned by the folks doing the work. They can invest and divest as they see fit, and there’s not much you can do if you can’t get them so personally involved they bail at the least difficulty. Make plans and budgets which account for such folly. Measure the man, not what’s in his pockets.
Granted, Western contract laws will make this difficult, but there’s nothing wrong with keeping stuff small, as that tends to keep government and law disinterested. All the more so when you understand the basic moral failure which attends aggregations of wealth and power in few hands. Good people don’t want that much power; they want good things for other people because that is in their own best interest. The premise here, of course, is that God Himself will fight at your side against the impersonal Borg Corporation against which you may be competing. It’s not about beating Borg in terms of profit and market standing, but in terms of how you made life better for the people involved. Under God’s Laws, management is serving, not ruling.
Since this is about people, it’s also about building friendships. Impersonal relations is an abomination in business. Yes, you read that right. You cannot have business without the commitment of persons, a personal relationship of some sort. Due to the paucity of good terminology in our English language, we have no variables for degrees and types of love. If we define “love” as the extension and exertion of the self on behalf of the welfare of another, it makes more sense to understand you must care about the people you encounter in your business. One love for the associate, another for the customer and vendors, but it’s all love of one kind or another. Otherwise, it’s not blessed, it’s damned.
Budget on the fly with what you have available, and conduct as much business as is possible from that ground. You cannot possibly control all the outcomes, anyway. All that projection and planning is based on a fundamentally false assumption, particularly when management weenies make those things demigods. Take what comes and stop when you run out of people power and resources.
If you don’t borrow to build up your business, you don’t surrender your friends to the power of someone who does not love them. If there was more manhood involved in business, there’d be a lot less suffering in this world. Stand up and take the fall for your miscalculations. Stop trying to insulate yourself from the normal ration of human suffering. Take the lead and do what’s right.