The Garden Scoreboard

From The Garden Economy vs Factory Economy Series
by Royce

“What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?” — Mark 8:36

If you’ve read the first two parts of this series, you might be feeling a bit hopeless. We’ve explored how industrialization dismantled community-based provision and replaced it with systems that profit from our perpetual dissatisfaction.

So what are you supposed to do? Quit your job? Abandon your career? Reject business altogether?

Here’s the good news: Business isn’t the problem. The scoreboard is.

Walk into any corporate boardroom and you’ll see the same scorecards on the wall: market share, market cap, Fortune 500 rankings. We treat these metrics as if they’re universal laws of economics—gravity for business, unchangeable and eternal.

But here’s what most marketplace professionals never learned: these scorecards became dominant in the 1970s. Then Milton Friedman’s “shareholder primacy” doctrine convinced an entire generation that the only responsibility of business is maximizing returns. That ideology isn’t biblical truth. It’s not economic law. It’s just one way of keeping score, invented fifty years ago.

And the scandal is this: it doesn’t even work better financially in the long run.

Companies That Chose a Different Scoreboard

Barry-Wehmiller is a $3.6 billion manufacturing company with 12,000 employees. Their stated measure of success? “The way we touch the lives of people.” During the 2008 recession, instead of laying off workers, CEO Bob Chapman asked every employee—including himself—to take unpaid furlough so nobody would lose their job. Employees started donating their furlough days to coworkers who couldn’t afford to take them. The company has posted 10% compound annual growth for over 30 years.

Costco pays retail workers an average of $26/hour when competitors pay $17. Wall Street analysts openly criticize them for “caring more about employees than shareholders.” But Costco’s turnover rate is 8%—the industry average is 60%. Their stock has massively outperformed competitors over decades.

Herb Kelleher built Southwest Airlines on a heretical idea: “Employees first. Happy employees ensure happy customers. Happy customers ensure happy shareholders—in that order.” After 9/11, customers started sending Southwest unsolicited donation checks. One person sent $1,000 with a note: “You’ve been so good to me over the years, I wanted to say thank you by helping you out.” That’s not what happens when you optimize for market cap. That’s what happens when you optimize for human connection.

There’s a pattern here:

• Employee-owned companies show 3.4% higher annual sales growth and 3.8% higher employment growth than conventional firms
• B Corporations—nearly 8,000 companies worldwide—failed at only 4.5% during 2020, compared to 12.5% of American businesses overall
• Worker cooperatives show higher job satisfaction, greater stability, and equal or better productivity than traditional firms

The Trade-off

Here’s the reality check: choosing a garden economy approach probably won’t land you on the Fortune 500 list. You won’t be celebrated in major business magazines. Most of the companies profiled above aren’t household names.

But they’re financially healthy and culturally strong. They’ve been around for decades. They’re building momentum for the next 50 years, not scrambling to make this year’s “best of” list.

That’s the trade: you give up the external validation, the prestige, the bragging rights at industry conferences. What you get instead is sustainability. Loyalty. People who actually want to work for you. A company that can weather recessions because your people would rather take furloughs than see their coworkers lose jobs.

The question is: which kind of success are you actually chasing? The kind that gets you on a list this year, or the kind that’s still standing in 2075?

The choice isn’t between business and faithfulness. The choice is between scoreboards—between factory economics that profit from dysfunction and garden economics that cultivate flourishing. And increasingly, the data shows that garden economics doesn’t just align with the Kingdom. It wins in the marketplace too—just on a different timeline, with a different definition of winning.

Personal Reflections:

• If you could redesign your company’s scoreboard from scratch, what would you measure? What’s stopping you from advocating for those metrics?
• Look at your last major decision at work—what metric were you actually optimizing for?
• Who do you know that’s doing business this way? What would it cost you to reach out?

Prayer:
God, I confess I’ve measured my life by scorecards I never chose. Forgive me for believing the lie that faithfulness in business requires choosing between success and integrity. Give me eyes to see that the scoreboards I’ve been handed aren’t universal truth. Show me companies that prove there’s another way. Give me the holy audacity to choose the garden scoreboard, even if it means I’ll never make a “best of” list. Let me build something that lasts. Amen.