Albini contrasts this approach to how he runs his business. “From an entrepreneurial standpoint, from someone like me — someone who builds a business for a reason — the reason my company exists is to make recordings of music. And in so doing, every now and again we’ll turn a profit. But that’s not why we’re in business. We’re not in business so that we can make money. And there’s a pretty strong argument that most businesses that are not part of the public sphere, not part of the investment transaction or equity management or whatever, most businesses operate on that level,” he said.
“Like a bakery opens because a guy wants to make bread. A tavern opens because a guy wants to serve beer to people. That’s why people start businesses. It’s because they want to do something with their time. They want that enterprise to be how they spend their days. But from an academic standpoint or from an analytical standpoint or from the standpoint of publicly held companies and investment class and everything, the reason the company started is meaningless. All they want to know is the share price going up. And for people like me that seems insane.”
“It’s like defining a marriage by the size of the house it occupies as opposed to defining the marriage by the love between two people and the life they build for themselves and the experience they share as part of the marriage. That’s the difference between the people who don’t get it (that you’re talking about), business people who can’t seem to buy into the greater culture of their business, and entrepreneurs, who started the business because the business itself means a lot to them.
“And there’s literally no way you can turn the second type of businessman into the first type. If somebody is hired to run a company and that company has investors who have expectations, then it is already impossible for that company to mean more to the employees as a concept than a paycheck. Because the value of the company has already been defined by the investor class. Now it is possible for somebody to start as an entrepreneur and then eventually sell off his company into the publicly held market and then he’s transformed from an entrepreneur into that second type of businessman. But it’s literally impossible to go the other way.”
For Albini, the standard corporate structure does not lend itself to the type of communal approach necessary for his business. “Think about it this way: My business is a business of the first type, where everyone involved feels like they’re working on a common project. Everyone involved feels like we are equally valuable. When our clients come in, and they don’t see that there’s a power structure or a hierarchy; nobody has the big office or anything. Everybody is working together as comrades on this project.”
“The remuneration is very equitable. Everybody gets paid the same. I make the same amount of money in a month as the newest employee that we have. So there is a fundamental difference between that and virtually any corporate structure. But you can’t expect people who feel like they are less valuable to a corporation, who feel like their effort, their input, and their opinion means less than someone else in that corporation. You can’t expect those people to jump in and all be pulling for the same results, team players. Because you have defined for them that they are not all pulling for one thing, that they are not team players. You have defined their role for them as subordinate.”
Moreover, this approach translates into how Albini deals with “competitors” as colleagues. “In general business practice, those are considered structural advantages that you simply must not abandon. Like if you know more in the information war than your competitors, then in a conventional business scenario you have to exploit that advantage. In a community-based thinking, or in a collective feel for our interactions, then if another studio that’s a ‘competitor’ of mine, I don’t actually feel like we’re competing, but we are working in the same field in the same place, so I’ll use the term competitor, even though I don’t believe we’re in competition, but I’ll use that term.”
“If I see a competitor studio that’s having trouble with something that’s a problem that we’ve solved here at Electrical Audio, I’m not going to keep that information to myself and watch them flounder. I’m going to share that information with them. And that from a ‘business’ standpoint is a mistake — from a corporate thinking Art of War (link is external), Sun Tzu bullshit kind of scenario — that’s a mistake."
“But from being a decent person seeing someone else in trouble and helping them out standpoint, that’s just being a decent person. And that’s where I feel like if your basic principles are based in these business precepts, you’re prevented from being the best possible person. You’re prevented from being a good guy.”
“I think that it’s an ethical way to conduct myself; otherwise, I wouldn’t do it.