Talking Points Memo

While America collectively works on deciding what's next for the country, we here at TPM have been discussing what's next for TPM. What this means in practical terms is this: What do we invest in? What do we think is the best use of our resources such that we can adhere to our mission but in more productive ways? In other words, how do we do even more good journalism? How do we become an even better place to work? And how do we make enough money to pay for growth in each area? In a lot of businesses, "investing" can be a very complicated or even a misleading, euphemistic term. But at TPM we keep things simple: How do we get better at living up to our mission statement, year in and year out.

It's very easy when running a business to get lost in jargon. It's even easier to lose sight of what the company exists to do. Unfortunately, concepts like "mission statement" and "company values" have been captured and repurposed by corporations and their messaging apparatuses to serve not as internal guideposts but as external propaganda. How often do we see a press release where a corporation, within the same paragraph or even the same sentence, announces something objectively bad for the world (layoffs, some kind of corporate malfeasance, maybe even some deaths) next to some gibberish about how they are rededicating themselves to their values, which are always milquetoast nonsense such as "excellence" and "integrity." What they are really trying to say is, allow us to save face while getting back to the important business of profit-seeking, regardless of its impact on anyone who isn't a shareholder.

Not at TPM, though. And I want to just provide one example that, in my opinion, shows how deep these values run. Once, after giving me a promotion, Josh bought me a book and left it on my desk. That book was "The Essential Peter Drucker," an anthology of writing by the management theorist and philosopher. Now I don't agree with everything Drucker says and even the idea of "management" as a discipline makes me uneasy, however, there were a couple lessons in that book that I'll hold onto forever and that I apply to TPM. The most important of which is this:

"Asked what the purpose of a business is, the typical businessman is likely to answer, 'an organization to make a profit.' The typical economist is likely to give the same answer. This answer is not only false, it is irrelevant […]

"To know what a business is, we have to start with its purpose. Its purpose must lie outside of the business itself. In fact, it must lie in society since business enterprise is an organ of society. There is only one valid definition of a business: To create a customer.

"It is the customer who determines what a business is […]. What the customer buys and considers value is never just a product. It is always a utility, that is, what a product or service does for him."

This isn't a "perfect" explanation of a business. I personally recoil at the word "customer." It sounds informal and cold. But these ideas were formative beginnings for me. The keys were:

1. Business can't just be about profit.
2. Business is an organ of society, which I interpret as should make society better.
3. Whatever product or service a business offers has to provide utility to its customers (the word I hate.)

I started off talking about investing in TPM's future: What I'm talking about here is how we take the profits we may end up with and use them to increase the utility to our "customers" with the aim of improving society.

This is in stark contrast to the ultimate motives of a corporation that is driven by increasing shareholder value or desiring returns for their venture capitalist investors. These can be boring, almost mind-numbingly droll conversations, but they matter. Purpose matters. A very specific example of one related conversation that Josh Marshall has written about: If you are a publication funded by advertising, who are really your customers? Who are you providing the utility to? Well, for us, it's the readers and members.

The point is that when you become a member at TPM (or when you contribute to the TPM Journalism Fund) you can rest assured that the way we think about money adheres to this idea that a business — and I'd say any organization — is to provide some kind of service to the people who pay for it, with the aim of bettering society. For us, that service is good journalism that helps people understand what's going on in the American political landscape along with a sense of community. Tack on a sincere belief that organizations of all sorts should improve the lives of their employees, volunteers or otherwise, and you have the makings of an organization worth supporting. At least we think so. We hope you do as well.