Or rather I should say people – as businesses are run by people.
A couple of years ago Business Celebrity Lord Sugar came to Manchester as part of a tour for the Labour Government to find out what Small to Medium sized businesses needed to help them get along.
One member of the audience was complaining about over regulation from the government. Lord Sugar simply shrugged his shoulders and said that business people just have to work with regulations rather than wasting time complaining about it.
Regulation is often good
He told a story about when he was starting out, selling electrical goods. In those days there was very little regulation on the safety of electrical goods and it wasn’t unheard of for items to start fires, blow up or do some other dangerous, life threatening thing.
He said that until regulations came in to make the products safe he was quite happy to sell the electrical goods to whoever would buy them off him. He was making money – he was happy. So in this case regulation was a good thing. It meant that the manufacturer had to make their products safer and Lord Sugar could still make money but selling safer equipment.
Regulation is usually there to protect those who can’t protect themselves. Think of the abolition of slavery. That would never have come about if the politicians hadn’t got involved. Child labour is another.
Self-regulation
People’s behaviour is controlled in some way or another either through social mores, religious conviction, the law and so on. But what happens when someone feels or knows they have the power to do pretty much what they like? Are we, as human beings, capable of keeping ourselves under control?
Recently I heard an interview with Ingrid Betancourt – the French-Columbian politician – who had been held captive in Columbia by leftist rebels for six years. She said that the guards were changed on a regular basis. At first the new guards would be friendly towards them, but then after a while the guards would realise that no-one was watching them and that’s when they would start to ‘punish’ the prisoners to some degree.
This behaviour is echoed in the Stamford Prison Experiment conducted in 1971. This was a very extreme psychological experiment that had to be cut short after only six days. It’s a fascinating and chilling study of human reaction to power and victimisation.
The examples I’ve given above are quite extreme, but it does make you think about how you would behave if you had un-regulated power?
Personally, I’d like to think I’d be a good guy and not succumb to the temptations of power. And people can – Nelson Mandela is a beacon of hope here. But many others have not resisted and many ordinary people have suffered as a consequence.
Other examples where self-regulation is not quite working are in the British Press, financial service industry and the Banks who have to be bailed out by government yet still manage to rub everyone’s noses in it with huge salaries and bonuses.
When is regulation too much regulation?
There’s a phrase here in the UK – ‘political correctness gone mad’. This is often used when people think that the authorities have over-stepped the mark with regulation. And, I’m sure that there is a lot of unnecessary regulation. But, as Lord Sugar said, stop moaning about it and get on with running your business.
And, if you’re clever you can even use regulation to create a positive marketing message for your company. We do this by offering a 15 day trial with our courses. By law anyone selling by mail order in the UK has to offer a cooling off period where the customer can change their mind. So we turn this to our advantage by using the regulation cooling off period to boost confidence in our courses. That, plus the fact that we supply excellent courses, means less than 1% of people who enrol decide to change their mind!
I’d love to hear your views on this subject so please leave a comment below. And, join our discussions on LinkedIn where we’ve been discussing ‘How friendly or familiar you should be with staff?’ and ‘What is business?’
