If you understand the way globalist entrepreneurs like Zuckerberg, Bezos, the Alphabet bro’s, etc have kept large part, if not all, of the end-responsibility in the management of their capitalistic shareholders-centric companies, you would more easily understand the way I am going to run my social-capitalistic stakeholders-centric companies, once they become incorporated.
Seeing that the majority of the people, even entrepreneurs have not taken interests (enough) to understand how multinational corporations are run, this blog is to (try to) in a more simple way explain the intricacies of the magnitude of creating and managing global ventures with operations in multiple countries, and to explain how it was always done, with how I see it being in the future and how my companies fits this vision.
Before doing that, I need to first give an introduction on the history of the evolution of my own companies, because I think understanding first how I got here, makes understanding why social-capitalism (or stakeholders-capitalism) is the business doctrine that will take the lead millennia to come in comparison with our current shareholders-capitalism (or crony-capitalism or greedy-capitalism).
The golden question of course is when the switch will happen when the majority of the companies are social-capitalistically run in comparison with shareholders-capitalistically run?
Spoiler-Alert: this blog cannot give you that answer, no human can, as the answer belongs to the collective. I of course hope sooner than later, and as a positive-realist also expect it to happen soon enough, but for that even Gen Z’ers need to accept, adjust and respect our symbiotic relationship with nature, and from the looks of it Gen Alpha’s too will have that challenge to overcome as something the majority will have difficulties respecting.
When talking about the symbiotic relationship between humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) and nature, there will be some (or more) vegans that won’t consider Tiiendemanns Group (TDG) a vegan company. Because even though no operational capital will be used to fund the eating of animals, and the minimization of purchase of products made with animal products, the issue lies in the latter because it is the companies’ prerogative to accept and respect life & death of all humans and other animals, while taking the honor and responsibility as shepherds of our planet to all humans and other animals.
At least some (but not all) vegans are of the opinion that humans may not eat another animal, while some vegans believe that it is each and everyone’s prerogative to decide that for themselves.
TDG for example is of the opinion that considerable reduction of animal death for consumption is what we need to strive for, however, complete reduction cannot be achieved because, as biological beings, human bodies are symbiotically intertwined with other organisms, including other mammals, for when nourishing them gives our human bodies the strength to carry the weight of time. Think for medicine, but also simply for longer nourishment periods in comparison with the amount and/or duration that a plant-based nourishment gives.
On a personal level, in such topics you can also see how intertwined my own world views are set into the “corporate policies and guidelines” of TDG. However, this is only true when you see it from a macro level. On a micro level I personally do not agree with everything that TDG will adhere to and what people can hold the company accountable to.
Because, I for example, do not agree that eating meat (from other animals, and when your life depends on it, from other humans) is unnatural nor wrong (or unhealthy for your body, on the contrary even). So in my personal life I already minimize (and try my best to do better each year) my yearly consumption of meat to lower my carbon footprint, but do not feel the necessity to eliminate it entirely from my life.
“Lab meat” or “killing-free meat”, when literally the same as meat taken from an animal that needed to be killed for it is obviously the way to go, and when they hit the market I will try to only buy them. But, I also know that in the end I must suffice with going for to try to buy them as much as possible, because even with affordable and identical meat obtained from lab grown cells, animals will need to be killed for several reasons, and it would be a travesty to not also utilize their meat for our consumption or the consumption of our pets.
Also when thinking about cooking special foods, lab grown meat will have a great challenge to, for example, also come with bones adhered to them. So I believe in the future there will stay a market for butcher-shops, but it will evolve in being a speciality-store selling cuts of meat at a premium price because the meat-industry will not be subsidized by governments any longer so animal products will need to be sold at true market value.
When thinking “buy-it-for-life”, at least with the current products on the market, animal products beats synthetic or natural products. Take leather for example, animal leather beats synthetic leather and natural leather, but fortunately there are already natural leather (made e.g. from mango peels) that beats synthetic leather.
So my personal views may or may not differ from what TDG makes itself accountable to the public, however, both TDG and me operate with the sense that when the collective achieve these things, while still having members of the silent-generation and boomers a live, will be the best for our planet.
If in a worse scenario, we cannot achieve this when only members of the Gen X generation or younger are a live, things will probably get rough for us humans here on the planet. And, if only the Millennials or younger are a live and we haven’t solved our consumption and destruction problem, then we, as a species on this planet are fucked, and future generations will have it very hard, if there will be any of us humans left on this planet.
It is because of my believes and personal & professional experiences, with the knowledge and wisdom I acquired during my life that I am now here where I am, and why I believe that there are not many individuals of the billions currently on this planet who can part ways with their greediness, and build a true social-capitalistic company that will become one of the multi-generational shared-profit multinational (conglomerate) of the future. The thing is, that I also believe that it only takes one individual to start making the others appear in droves and expand to the mass.
In these blogs (Partnership between T.C.P.A Consultancy and Tiiendemanns Group, Whitepaper of TDG, Mission statement of TDG, The 1001 Year Plan, Ecological Sustainability & Social Sustainability, My chosen..social responsibilities as an activist ecopreneur, and lastly Your idea of me is not my responsibility to live up to) you can find pieces and more in-depth information and explanation about certain areas of Tiiendemanns Group. Especially in the latter you can find more information about my own personal evolution with my (starting) role in TDG and the structure of TDG as a whole.
Just to give you an idea, when I was working with the person that eventually became my first co-founder who would go help me with the day-to-day operations, even when the person became my co-founder I held full end-responsibilities in all areas of the company. Afterwards when I realized I couldn’t work with that person and found another person who became a co-founder that took the place of a tech co-founder, but one that still needed a CTO to build and secure the ecosystem, I still held full end-responsibilities in all areas of the company.
It was only when we onboarded 3 other co-founders that I shared the full end-responsibility of the mother-holding company and the group in general, while delegated parts of my end-responsibilities within Viisiit.® and the mother-holding company of Viisiit.® to my then 4 co-founders. I already said what needed to be said about that partnership and explained why it ended in that last blog linked above, so the only thing I want to say now is that I am grateful for that experience with them because with the things I know now I am glad that I didn’t have to learn them when we already officially launched. Because for example then I would have lost a lot of equity and possibly control of the whole vision and mission guidance, if that break happened much further in the future.
What I can also say is that I am grateful that I dared to onboard two seasoned and experienced shareholders-capitalist, with one even having maintained high management positions in public companies, because they helped the others and me design a better structure for the company that is a win-win-win for the team, shareholders and the other stakeholders. My first design of TDG was in essence too social-capitalistic, because it would have asked too much of shareholders and the team, while also giving me end-responsibility in all areas within all companies for much longer.
Even though that would have given the company the chance to give even more to the stakeholders, having the discussions with the team made me realize that I needed to put my own ego away and accept that without the change of giving investors and team members the chance to invest and work with more direct “skin in the game” it will become more difficult to take the company to the global level. Having never build a global company I already have it difficult, so to go make it even more difficult was not an effective thing to do.
If you are paying attention, the ones who read this blog should not be surprised to hear in the future that there are several different CEO’s within TDG running different companies. The experience I had showed me that I should not be afraid of delegation and losing control of the vision and mission. However, it did show me that the person who takes end-responsibilities within the companies and me need to be on the exact same wave length in regards to among other the long term direction of the company.
To go back on the topic I started this blog with, to drive change within a startup or scale-up there needs to be one person who could “stop the shenanigans of the majority”, be protective of the vision and have the power to also drive change to project the vision in real life, or drive change within the company to salvage the vision. For an established (multinational) the need for such a person may become obsolete, however, I think this is only true when the vision of the company gets integrated within the culture of the company and all new team members will start protecting that vision by themselves.
This latter opinion of mine is why I believe that TDG cannot become the oldest multigenerational shared-profit multinational, but I am still unsure which one of the already established multinationals could become the first multigenerational company who will go celebrate their 1000th anniversary.
FYI, UNILEVER is an established multinational, unlike Apple who is a multinational but cannot be said that is established yet, as it still can be seen as a (very successful) scale-up, because it is unsure if Apple as a company will stay innovative enough to withstand the generational changes.
The interesting thing however is that both with UNILEVER and Apple you see that the business challenges they are facing can be traced back on the problem of adherence to their initial vision and having no particular person in the company who has the power to drive the vision to engrain it in their corporate culture. With Apple it is because the visionary founder died too soon without leaving someone at the helm of the company who had the vision and power to seek innovations, even when it hurts the bottom line in the short term, and with UNILEVER their “being a green company-policy” it cannot be ruled out that it was only a corporate decision to make money in an uprising industry, not something their leadership are personally striving for in their daily lives.
Regarding the challenges of managing global ventures with operations in multiple countries, any person owning and/or managing a company in one country can tell you how difficult it is to manage a company. There are several reasons for this, from staying product/service-fit in the market to managing cashflow, however, eventually everything boils down to how difficult it is to find people who you could trust and rely to help the company succeed.
My personal opinion on why it is so difficult to find people who you could trust and rely to help with the company succeed is because of the way the majority of business owners and managers have been doing business. The ideology of “money/profits over people” has broken the trust public in general has in companies. “All companies lie to their customers or team members (to make money)” is unfortunately something that is still true for the majority of the companies today.
Greenwashing is for example a big problem, and as long as there are not any major consequences for companies acting unethically, this will not change. So we can hope for politicians and governments to start taking this serious and actually enact laws against greenwashing, while also investing in the enforcement of them. But to not put all our eggs in one basket and rely on the goodwill of politicians, I designed Tiiendemanns Group to act as a pioneer in this, which when successful will push other companies to start converting their companies in social-capitalistic entities too, either because they realize how strong their own companies can become or because us as consumers start demanding them to change their ways of doing business.
Once trust is established, respect and love grows, and it becomes inevitable that all companies become stakeholder-centric because we will have a planet where greed will not be rewarded.
We need more companies (and of course also governments!) to start working on building the trust people have in them back. This was the motivation that brought me on the path of building Tiiendemanns Group, and the conviction in this vision is what motivates me to never stop as I need to see this become reality.
