Example: McDonalds. Brilliant business model. Awful product.
A relevant example of this is organizations who are CMM Level 5 certified.
However I have to agree that others do it better. Hardees has the best fast-food burger around. Also the best ads :)
And just to make it clear, I am not trying to criticizes capitalism per se. I'm only basically stating the same thing the article is stating; that there is an inherent paradox in capitalism that makes it more complex to deal with than is directly apparent. Everyone that goes into business or deals with business indirectly through policy-making should be as aware as possible of this paradox, simply because it will prevent us from collectively ending up in a world with great processes but awful products or with great products but awful processes. Neither of which are very tempting scenarios.
I am not stating anything extremely controversial, simply the same thing the article is stating, but with a slightly different wording.
Don't down vote me because you disagree with me or because you think I am bashing capitalism (I am not, I love capitalism). If you think my argument is weak or lacking, please tell me so in a comment instead.
The article is just saying that running an X business means you spend a lot more of your time on the "running a business" part than the X part, for any value of X. It doesn't mean you can't do a good job at X — just that you get to enjoy X more as a consumer than a producer.
But to be honest I thought I was being very careful in my wording about something that should be self evident, e.g.
"...will most likely not be as inherently good as it could be."
Running a business implies a trade-off. The trade-off is that if you want to be successful (i.e. sustainable) you need to focus on the business and not the product. Which is exactly what the article is stating.
Maybe a better example to support my claim is Apple. They make great products. But the way they do that is by focusing on the process of creating great products. Jonathan Ive specifically talks about this in the Objectified documentary. He says that most of their time is spent on designing the manufacturing process and the tools needed to mass-produce the products, only a very small part of the time is spent on the actual design of the phone or computer and that design is almost always a direct implication of the manufacturing process rather than something they magically dream up in some creative haze.
Although I suppose I'm on the verge of becoming somewhat of a troll right now.
Pointing out that your argument is a straw-man is not a disagreement. It's saying that you are misrepresenting the article's position, and that's an objectively bad post.
Also, I'm not sure if downvoting when disagreeing is discouraged. Spam should be marked by flagging, not downvoting.
The author used a low margin, low sucess business example to make a point about what mindset someone should be in to successfully run a business. You took from that the message that anything enjoyable is not sustainable.
"Focus on creating something inherently good --> it will not be sustainable"
You also less directly imply that focusing on profit will necessitate producing an inferior product, again using a specific example to provide a generality.
You have to employ people to make coffee manually, and quickly. You have to buy a machine to aid them in this, and keep it in good maintenance.
Additionally, you have to supply perishables like milk to go in the coffee.
You have to keep them in your shop buying coffee, or incite them to buy coffee here when they're hungry instead of going to go to dunkin dounuts.
You can do this with nice decor, or by placing yourself in an already attractive location, or taking a margin loss on selling bake goods in order to bring in coffee customers.
In any case, your high margins for coffee product have rapidly vanished.
Rather, the distinction I was aiming at was between "process" and "product". But I suppose that wasn't very clear. My intention was not to start a flame war on capitalism.
In my opinion a process can be sustainable (and thus very likely profitable), but a product can not. In this case a business model is a process and the thing you put in your mouth (the hamburger) is the product. For the hamburger to be perfect we would need an ever escalating process. Constantly adding more complexity or work to refine the product we can create thus creating an unsustainable process.
If you want to create a hamburger in a sustainable and profitable way. The McDonalds process is most likely one of the best ways to do that. But it will NEVER create a perfect hamburger. The same is of course true with the opposite. A tiny connoisseur coffee shop can conceivably create a perfect cup of coffee and push the boundaries of the state of the art. But it will NEVER be a sustainable process. You need to make compromises in order to achieve that.