The standards and structures that we set for our world are sometimes difficult to maintain. We see our world as a fundamentally impersonal one at times, even to our own disadvantage. This is by design as well and the people who make the rules know this. They know that there is more advantage in the public seeing the world as fixed by some omniscient guiding hand that erected things in a certain way that can never fully change. It’s more comforting to us as well because it implies a certain order that, honestly, just doesn’t fully exist. That’s not say there’s no need to follow the rules. Rules are fundamentally a good thing that keep social systems in place for the greater good of the most amount of people. Everyone from business brokers to acquisition services to lawyers to plumbers to those looking for businesses for sale need rules in order to somehow structure their lives. Where we as humans could once live as if there were no rules, this is no longer the case. For whatever reason, evolution, mistake, biology, psychology, we humans have developed rules to build our lives around and that is simply the way it is. But, and this is the big but, these rules were built by, for, and around people. And people are people are people, no matter what else they are. They feel, they get hungry, they get tired, they have families. From business brokers to the prime minister of Japan, people are people.

Thinking about business in a different way
Let’s take a bit of closer look at one macro process in culture and how this idea affects it in another macro way. Business, specifically modern capitalist business, is one of if not the driving force of culture. I would say specifically of the western world but, at this stage in global culture, that’s just not true. Not anymore. There can really be no distinction between eastern and western culture when it comes to business. Every country relies on every other country, from China to France, for certain goods and certain imports that they just can’t get anywhere else. There’s actually a theory, slightly off topic, that this growing network of trade is the primary reason for the lack of large scale war in the last half a century. There is no need for large conflict when there is no benefit to it, especially speaking in terms of resources. When there is always a business for sale, there is no need to fight to acquire it. But, politics aside, what does this idea have to do with the idea of human systems as fundamentally human?
Buying, selling and humanism
See, there’s a quality that even a lot of CEO’s forget when dealing with business brokers and interacting or exchanging these businesses and that’s that these huge, international businesses rely on people to survive and thrive. That means primarily two things. First, that they bear a responsibility to the people who they are serving. If these companies find out that something they are doing is harming those people, than they have a responsibility to take action to stop it. While some would argue that this isn’t necessarily the case if it undercuts profits, that’s not exactly true. It’s better for a business to go under than continue to harm the people under it’s care. Of course, there’s wiggle room for that idea as well. But companies are dependent on people and so, when brokering them, it behooves people to remember that.
The second responsibility
The second thing to bear in mind between companies and humanism is that companies are made of people trying to do their best. When brands interact with people, that is humans interacting with other humans. When companies exchange hands, that is humans interacting with other humans. Companies are not human, they are made of humans and therefore they have weaknesses and strengths. They are not infallible and they deserve no loyalty beyond being loyal to the humans who work inside them. Business brokers would do well to remember this when working with any type of company out there.