A new theory of the firm – Page 2

Markets, State and People by Diane Coyle

Rousseau observed that “Man is born free but everywhere is in chains”. Many people in business, politics and media talk about markets in a similar way, as though “free markets” are the natural state and desirable order and any intervention by an agency of the state or collective popular action is represents an undesirable fettering of enterprise.

Economists since Adam Smith have recognised that markets can fail and may need to be subject to intervention. Even figures as inspiring to simplistic supporters of free markets as Milton Friedman recognise that there are proper roles for the state where markets fail.

Diane Coyle starts in much the same place as other economists who look at limits of markets and the place of government intervention in markets. She starts with conventional analysis of market failures, listing seven instances of failure in the conditions required for free markets to be efficient. She returns these seven types of failure throughout her examination of the relationship between markets, the state and people, and description of the appropriateness of state intervention or collective action to address.

In cataloguing the failures and the responses to them, Coyle assists the reader, from the economics or politics undergraduate or MBA student getting their first exposure to welfare economics and public policy, through to the general reader seeking a better understanding of how the world works. She draws on and explains clearly the work of people like Coase, Ostrom and Thaler who have broadened and deepened our understanding of how people both cause and respond to the seven types of failure she describes. The book is furthered enriched, and the lessons consequently rendered more accessible, by a peppering of case studies illustrating the core arguments.

Coyle also tackles government failure, highlighting the shortcomings in bureaucracies (or among public servants) and as a consequence of political failures (or failures of politicians) that result in the application of the wrong policies to address the market failures. The text seems to peter out in the final chapter where she addresses what she appears to hope is the solution to the problems of government failure, which is the application of evidence to economic policy. In this chapter that she reveals the limitations of her experience as a career academic and regulator, with a rather slight addressing of the use of statistics and cost benefit analysis. This doesn’t detract from the power (or readability) of the previous nine chapters, but point to the opportunity for someone else to write something of similar tone and quality to fill the gap on how to test public policy initiatives to address market failure.

Orchestral conducting as illustration of organisational “dark matter”

Bryan Magee, philosopher, broadcaster, and sometime Labour Party and SDP MP, died just over a month ago, prompting me to return to “Ultimate Questions”, his profoundly satisfying meditation on the enigma of human existence.

It contains a splendid passage that describes the undefinable qualities that is present in organisations working at the highest level, which I describe elsewhere as “dark matter“.

“I contend that our knowledge and understanding of other people, and our relations with one another, cannot be explained by the observable exchanges we make with one another. Something else is going on as well. A particular and extreme – and for that reason clear-cut and useful – example of this is provided by orchestral conducting. Many music lovers are able to hear the difference between two recordings of the same work conducted by, shall say, Toscanini and Sir Thomas Beecham, but no one seems to be able to explain how each of these is arrived at, ranging as they do from the unity of the overall architecture down to each individual detail and its integration into the whole. Such things cannot be fully explained in terms of what the conductor says at rehearsals (which often is not much) plus the way he looks at the musicians and wave his arms about. An immense amount that we cannot account for is being communicated by one person to dozens of others who carry out his wishes in subtle detail. I have long been fascinated by this, and have discussed it across the years with orchestral players and conductors. Players agree immediately, and without question, that they play differently for different conductors, but they cannot account for why, still less for how the what that is required of them is communicated to them. Conductors know what they are doing, and can do it at will, but they can no more explain how they do it than I can explain how I move my fingers, though I can do that at will too. Here we have a highlighted example of something that, it seems to me, is going on amongst us human beings all the time. It is impossible to account for the warm, capacious, deep, detailed, sophisticated and rich understanding that we have of one another in terms of our attention to another’s words plus our observations of other’s bodily movement. Something else, of a different order is going on.”

Lessons for capitalism from the East India Company

William Dalrymple has helped people who don’t have the time to wade through 576 pages (or perhaps already have backlog of doorstep sized items of reading matter on the bedside table already) by writing an extended article on the subject of his new book about the East India Company in the FT. However, it is a compelling article and means that I may add “The Anarchy: the Relentless Rise of the East India Company” to my list for Santa this Christmas.

This is a company of superlatives, starting out as a joint stock company operating under charter arising from a petition by entrepreneurs and investors to Elizabeth I, growing to become an empire with 60 million subjects, its own army of 200,000 men , accounting for half of the trade of the leading trading nation. It’s global impact was enormous, from the fears about its reach – as well as its role in the tea trade – that contributed to the revolution in the Thirteen Colonies, to the part it played in the Opium Wars. Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Apple and before them the oil majors – they were clearly nothing to this behemoth.

Dalrymple brings out in the his article the complex relationship of the Company to British state, from its original charter, through the continuing lobbying into government, the corruption in the relationships between the Company and the establishment (for example, in 1693 shelling out £1,200 a year to prominent MPs, described by Dalrymple as the first corporate lobbying scandal), and the final demise of the Company in the wake of the Indian Rebellion.

Dalrymple’s article has the effect of drawing attention to is the inadequacy of conventional theory, both “Microeconomics 101” and the Theory of the Firm, to describe one of the greatest commercial entities the world has ever known. Some of things at work are the complex interfaces with the British state and its politicians, and also its deployment of its own naval operations (envisaged in its original charter) and an army to deliver a return to its joint stock holders, as well creating an entity became transformed into the biggest single component of Britain’s empire.

As I write this, I think he has done the job with his teaser article to promote the book. Perhaps I should ignore the size of the unread pile by my bed and add “The Anarchy” to the letter to the bloke with the reindeer and sleigh.

Linear programming and the theory of the firm – flashback to the 1950s

Exposure to linear programming while doing my MBA at Stanford informed the model of the firm that I described first in May 1980 in a paper for Steve Brandt’s seminar on strategic management and developed into a core component of the Escondido Framework. So when I was told recently about Robert Dorfman’s “Application of linear programming to the theory of the firm” (Berkeley, 1951) and a collection of essays from a 1958 symposium at the University of Michigan edited by Kenneth E Boulding and W Allen Spivey titled “Linear programming and the theory of the firm” (New York, 1960), I thought I should take a look.

Both titles engage somewhat futilely in trying to extend the application of linear programming beyond its useful limits, and swamp the conceptual opportunity of applying a way of thinking about organisational problems with multiple constraints with the desire to created mathematical analytical models under conditions that are necessarily massively complex, non-linear, and dynamic.

Dorfman’s final chapter, on “Assumptions, Limitations, and Possibilities” highlights the limitations of the techniques that he explored in the previous chapters, particularly in relation to the static conditions under which the analysis might be undertaken, the challenges of coping with a dynamic and multi period condition, and with uncertainty. He effectively gives up: “There is little reason to hope that linear programming, or any other simple formulized technique will be able to comprehend this entire problem”. This probably still applies even in an age of massive computing power and ability to capture and interrogate “big data” that Dorfman could never have imagined. He did acknowledge that at the time of writing his book that “linear programming emphasises the physical inter-relationships of productive processes almost to the exclusion of the demand side”. My memory of studying linear programming at the Stanford Graduate School of Business in 1979 is that in this respect at least the commercial applications of linear programming had moved on the in following few decades. Ultimately, however, Dorfman retreats back into an assumption that linear programming could be best applied to managing and optimising internal processes, accepts that the practical applications will be limited in the short term, but remained hopeful, that “economists can rely on the mathematicians, the electronicists, and the statisticians to provide a practical tool.”

The final two essays in Boulding and Spivey’s collection move beyond the descriptions in the earlier essays of the mathematics of linear programming and how they might be applied to the activities of the firm. Interestingly in the context of a book about the application of linear programming, both end up focussing on the difficulty defining the objective function for the firm, arguing that firms seek to more than just maximise profits.

C.Michael White’s essay “Multiple Goals in the Theory of the Firm” reviews the thinking prevailing at the time about the various goals for the firm, both within the scope of profit maximisation (eg in relation to time horizons, to strategic considerations such as discouraging competitive market entry, and in relation to public relations). He cites AG Papandreou, suggesting that he had pointed out that “profit is simply one possible ranking criterion in a broader system of preference-function maximisation. Under perfect competition, profit is the only ranking criterion consistent with survival. In the absence of perfect competition the long-run survival of the a firm may be achieved best (or at least as well) through the maximisation of goals other than profit.”

White addresses the issue of the survival of the firm “The firm as a social and economic organization, like many other organisms, has a compelling urge to survive. More fundamental than the profit motive, the motive to survive is implicit in most decisions within the firm, though the possibility of organizational suicide should not be ruled out”. He later observes “Survival, including the consequent homeostasis concept (Boulding, Reconstruction of Economics, New York, 1950) is seldom an explicit primary goal of a firm but instead provide a pervasive set of limitations on other goals including profit.” However, White fails, surprisingly in an essay in a book about linear programming to close the loop that is embedded in the Escondido Framework model of the organisation as the occupying the virtual space bounded by its market interfaces with customers, capital, labour, other suppliers etc. But he goes some way in this direction, for example identifying later in the paper that “In most instances financial objective are evidenced as additional constraints on other objectives.

White’s summary is as good a description of the objective of the firm as any I have come across since embarking on this project in 1980: “The goals of firms represent a wide array of alternative objectives of which profit maximization is only one, although without doubt a most significant one. In those instances where firms strive to maximize profit all other aspects of the firm’s behaviour impose restrictions on this goal.” (He continues his summary by observing “The difficulty of estimating with accuracy the long-run prospects of a firm makes survival or homeostasis (when interpreted as a relative position within an environment) the most likely long-run objective.”)

Sherrill Cleland’s “A Short Essay of a Managerial Theory of the Firm” is an insightful attempt to move beyond what he describes as “the Traditional Firm”, a limited model developed from the work of Marshall, Chamberlin and Robinson in the 1930s and 1940s essentially seeing the firm as a passive respondent to conditions imposed by external markets for consumption, capital, labour, and materials, and the competitive industry structure. He describes how while economists were studying the operation of the market to understand the allocation process, businessmen were “developing a strong propensity to innovate in order to gain temporary monopoly control over market forces. As the businessman learned by doing, his propensity to innovate shifted to a propensity to monopolize and temporary monopoly became more permanent. The pattern of internal decision-making which he followed was designed to minimize the external constraints which had theoretically limited his decision alternatives. The initial managerial revolution, then, was an attempt by the businessman to control or influence the external forces (the product market and the factor market) that had been controlling and limiting him. That he was successful, and patently so, is evidenced by our antitrust laws. He wished to expand his field of choice, his set of alternatives, while simultaneously reducing the degree of uncertainty he faced.” He captures the different types of relationship with these external forces in the following figure, that distinguishes between those that the business accepts as given, those that provide a degree of restraint but are subject to influence, and the activities that the firm can reshape in response to its own decisions.

Cleland later proceeds develop his “Managerial Theory”, reflecting how the firm, operating in imperfect markets and consequently with options in terms of pricing and other parameters, is in a position to take choices about its internal operations, processes and outputs, and consequently is able to consider goals other than straightforward profit maximisation. He considers the possibility of satisficing behaviour, for example ensuring only that profit levels exceed the cost of capital and perhaps share the benefits of market power through spending on social responsibility programmes, and also minimax behaviour, for example by engaging in defensive pricing to secure long term contracts and thereby reduce uncertainty or discourage competitive entry.

Cleland further explores how decisions are made within the firm, and highlights to failure of traditional economic models of the firm to consider the role of the people within the firm, in particular the “manager-executive” in taking decisions, and in turn the way that the institutionalised processes, policies and procedures shape the way that decisions are taken, and the decision themselves. He also examines the firm as an information system, with flows both up and down the organisation, to provide the basis for decision-taking by managers and their execution of these decisions by subordinates.

In common with Dorfman, Cleland hopes that his essay is merely laying the foundations for further work, but I have been unable to establish whether he undertook further work in this field or whether this essay provided the foundation for the work of others. Nonetheless, a sentence in his closing paragraph about his “Managerial Theory” that deserves wider airing for its emphasis on “satisfactory profit” and the decision-making power of management: “The managerial theory of the firm considers the firm as an organized information system, intent upon a satisfactory profit level operating in an external and internal environment which allows the manager significant decision-making power.”

1993 Tomorrow’s Company paper and latest paper for Cranfield Renewing Capitalism project

Two papers setting out some of the key ideas in the framework have been added to the site. A paper written for Tomorrow’s Company, when in its initial phase under the sponsorship of the Royal Society of Arts, can be found on the Origins page. A recent paper written for the Cranfield Institute’s Renewing Capitalism initiative can be found on the home page.

Marketing, not just about consumers

At some point in the late 1990s, I wrote a short piece for Word on the Street, the Brackenbury Group’s client newsletter, which demonstrates one of the core propositions behind the Escondido Framework very clearly. The relationship between the organisation and all its “stakeholders” is at its heart a marketing relationship:

Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department. Marketing departments address only the consumers of the products or services that a company sells to those it thinks of as its customers. But the truth is far wider than this.

Companies should apply the marketing way of thinking in all the markets in which they operate. This means not just the “downstream” market, but also to the “upstream” markets: funding, labour, bought in goods and services. The company is marketing an investment opportunity to its shareholders and debt providers. It is marketing careers and contracts to existing and prospective employees. It is providing opportunities to its suppliers with markets and channels to other markets.

The marketing mindset involves understanding the differing needs of differing customer segments, thinking about how to adapt your offer to meet the needs of your target customer and then doing it consistently, understanding the trade-offs they make between different attributes of the product or service you provide – of which price is only one dimension, determining where you can achieve an advantage over your competitors. It also includes what most non-marketing people understand as “marketing”, communicating these benefits to customers in ways that lead eventually to a profitable sale.

In most companies, marketing activity occurs sporadically in the functions that face “upstream”. Presentations are given to investors and financial PR consultancies are returned to put a positive gloss on results. Advertisements are placed, glossy brochures and upbeat web pages prepared, and roadshows taken round campuses to attract prospective recruits. Invtitations to tender and requirements lists are circulated, and subscriptions taken to web-exchanges as part of the sourcing process, whether for services, real estate, or components and real estate.

But in few companies does marketing explicitly underpin the way in which directors and managers in finance, HR, buying and purchasing, IT, property approach their responsibilities. They need to think about their “customers” in the same way that their downstream facing colleagues do about the people or businesses that are customers for the products and services the company sells. Applying tried and tested approaches from the downstream markets to the upstream markets to dealing with the financial markets will yield precious basis point reductions in the cost of capital and reduce paranoia about awkward investors or even takeover. In HR policy, it will reduce total employment costs – not just outlays on wages and salaries, or even improved retention, but also through enhanced productivity. And in purchasing it will translate into competitive advantage through lower total costs of supply, higher service and priority treatment.