Seth Godin on the meaning of “pro-business”

Seth Godin is a prolific marketing and strategy blogger. His work is worth following.

One of his biggest contributions has been the creation of the concept of “permission marketing“, a decade or so ago, along with many others. He’s not far off being the Malcolm Gladwell of business, albeit a little more focused.

One of his latest blog posts, “What does ‘pro-business’ mean?” really caught my eye.

Godin argues the old style of being pro-business, ie campaigning for deregulation and less oversight, is utterly outmoded.

Instead, he argues that:

“Perhaps we could see pro-business strategies looking more like this:

– Investing in training the workforce to solve interesting problems, so they can work at just about any job.

– Maintaining infrastructure, safety and civil rights so we can create a community where talented people and the entrepreneurs who hire them (two groups that can live wherever they choose) would choose to live there.

– Reward and celebrate the scientific process that leads to scalable breakthroughs, productivity and a stable path to the future.

– Spend community (our) money on services and infrastructure that help successful organizations and families thrive.

Once you’ve seen how difficult it is to start a thriving business in a place without clean water, fast internet connections and a stable government of rational laws, it’s a lot harder to take what we’ve built for granted.”

Hard to argue with that.