What is the purpose of a corporation? Why do employees come to work? These are very basic questions with very obvious answers. A private corporation exists to make money and the employee comes to work to make money.

What binds them together is unbridled self-interest. We can look at basic economic theories, Taylorism, and even Marxism, and they all make the same assumption: the employer-employee relationship is a simple business transaction.

Traditional economists, starting with Adam Smith, the author of the seminal economic treatise The Wealth of Nations, assumed the mutual advantage of this business relationship for management and the worker.

Marxists, on the other hand, would say a capitalist company will always exploit the worker and that manager-worker relationships are thereby inherently fraught with conflict.

Extracted from: Toyota Cuture: The Heart and Soul of the Toyota Way.
Authors: Jeffrey K Liker and Michael Hoseus.
Published with permission from Tata McGraw-Hill.
Price: Rs 263.

Image: Book cover.