Think for a moment about what a recruitment agancy does. It's an agency, a specialist agency, standing (or more commonly sitting) in between people who want to hire managers and those people who want to be hired as managers. Why not just contact each other directly you might think?



Well, certainly, people can, but then there's hundreds and thousands of companies in, say, construction, or the automotive sector, so how is any one job seeker to know which are looking for people at present? Similarly, there are hundreds of thousands of qualified directors and managers out there and how is any company to know which of them is looking for a new job? The recruitment agency acts as the specialist that each side can deliver the problem to and then allow them to do some of the pre-filtering before interviews (on either side of course).

Good, excellent, so a national house builder is looking for a land director. What's this got to do with Milton Friedman, our Laureate above? The answer is that he's spent his whole career trying to drum into people's heads the point that it doesn't matter what motives and intentions are nor the process, we care only about the measurable results.

Which is why we have results orientated rules: the recruitment agency gets paid when the putative land director is hired by the national house building company. They're not sent checks because they are idealists, because they'd like to make the world a better place, rather, that they've achieved the measurable goal we set: recruiting the right person for a job.

This basic point holds throughout business (and how we wish we could get politics to work the same way): whatever the rules and incentives there are in a company or contract or transaction, we want to set them up so that they encourage the achievement of the goals we have set. One of the most obvious examples of this in recent decades has been the introduction of flexi-time. Under previous process based systems it was considered obvious that everyone should be there at the same time, work in the office the same hours and work for a set number of hours too. Now, being more results orientated, we don't actually mind whether someone starts at 6 am, or prefers to work until 7 pm, or four and half days a week: are they performing the necessary tasks to an acceptable standard? Great, carry on then!