With decades of experience in corporate law and the small-business world, David Grau knows that starting and operating a small business is a difficult and harrowing process—one that leads to far more failures than successes within the first year, or five, or ten. But rather than approaching this challenge with conventional, profit-motivated strategies, CHANGING THE WORLD…THROUGH SMALL BUSINESS STEWARDSHIP proposes a stable, balanced approach with a perspective that spans generations.
The idea of stewardship is central to CHANGING THE WORLD. It’s a rejection of the hedge-fund, venture-capital mindset that extracts as much value from a company as rapidly as possible—regardless of the consequences for its long-term viability. Stewardship flips the script on failure (the majority of new businesses fail) and aligns its perspective for success instead: how does one create a business that will succeed for more than ten, twenty, or forty years? That perspective allows the text to contextualize a series of clear, straightforward, and necessary principles that guide steady growth and sustainable profit.
That last point is important. As CHANGING THE WORLD reiterates, “Profitability is not the enemy of stewardship.” In fact, stewardship is a road map toward greater long-term profitability for all parties involved. The text begins with this conceptual underpinning, explaining that reversing the rote truisms of business know-how unlocks new potential. A long-term successful business meaningfully gives back to its community, which generates real goodwill; it doesn’t maximize owner and shareholder profits at the expense of employee wages, but pays fair wages and even invests in employees with training and growth opportunities. Ultimately, it breaks free from the tyranny of a single founder or shareholder and moves toward cooperative ownership, allowing the business to survive the growth and retirement of multiple generations. The second section shows how this is done, through the nuts and bolts of legal structures and accounting practices. It’s the most boring section (the text admits that the reader can skip it if they like), but it’s also what builds confidence in the overall argument; it shows that the book knows what it’s talking about. The third and final section offers some guidance for how to establish the structures that will move a business in the right direction.
CHANGING THE WORLD isn’t entirely perfect. It wastes space with annoyingly frequent and consistently meaningless quotes about success, the good life, and more—interrupting flow and adding nothing to the arguments themselves. While it makes good use of a “Stewardship Spotlight” at the end of each section, showcasing a business which puts these principles into practice, the book is light on data. The overall argument is sound and convincing, but interested readers would probably benefit from seeing more of the complete lifecycle of a business in quantitative terms. That’s the shared language of success, in business.
All that said, there’s no question that the text’s central argument is supported by experience, thoughtful consideration, and plain common sense.
David Grau’s CHANGING THE WORLD…THROUGH SMALL BUSINESS STEWARDSHIP is a technically solid, clear-eyed argument for balancing pure profitability with long-term sustainability.
~Dan Accardi for IndieReader