When big becomes all-encompassing

Conn Carroll has a great piece at the Washington Examiner this morning on the entirely different relationship that America's small businesses have with government from that of large corporations.

We all know the prominent examples of the coziness of the government - megacorporation axis: Jeffrey Immelt of GE and his role on the MEC's "jobs council."  (By the way, is that body ever going to meet again?  It's been over a year.)  Google's long-acknowledged bias in the way it sets up its search mechanisms.  The obsequiousness with which engine and vehicle makers respond to ever-more stringent environmental edicts.

By their very natures, small businesses and large corporations are going to have different organizational cultures.  The sprawling leviathans see themselves as being in the business of "making this a better world."  Again, I refer you to the world's premier diesel engine maker that has its headquarters in the city where I live.  It has a policy of expecting employees to "give back to their communities," and even devotes a page on its website to examples of how its staffpersons in such far-flung places as Brazil and India are helping villages with clean water and schools and such.  The big companies are the ones pushing "green" initiatives and "diversity."  If their small suppliers seem to be getting on board, it's because such activities are now as much a requirement of doing business as having satisfactory prices, or assuring that their processes are stable within the six-sigma parameters.  Left to their own devices, small businesses are much more concerned with matters such as getting the raw material in on time, and the finished parts out on time, and making sure the finished work measures out like the blueprint calls for.

Another interesting factor in all of this is the role of trade associations.  Small businesses band together in order to ry to counteract the regulatory onslaught from Washington and state capitals.  Such associations for the large corporations are more inclined to see things in terms of "partnership," to the point of taking a cue from the Beltway as to what's of societal high priority and where it ought to next direct its marketing energies.

At some point - and we're now there - the goose-and-golden-egg phenomenon becomes a factor.  Small businesses, where everybody shows up at a certain hour, and job titles are not much of a big deal, given that everybody pitches in where needed, where birthday celebrations have the personal touch because people actually know each other, do most of the hiring in this country.  Or did.