No one doubts that to succeed in business you need to work
hard. But most of the time, having the personal attributes to do so will not
alone be sufficient to guaranty success because you still have to compete
against people who might have the same attributes, and also have an edge of
another kind over you. That is, they could have come into business with a new
idea -- a kind of concept that appeals to the clientele you will be sharing
with them.
A business concept can be as small as the catchy design of
such hand held gadgets as cellular telephones, for example; or it can be as big
as the organizing of a trip around the world on new year's eve using a
supersonic jet that will take the revelers to several cities, getting them in
there just before midnight. The idea would be to give the revelers the
experience of celebrating several new year's eves in many places during a
twenty four hour period. To make the point, there are all sorts of business
concepts, some of which will work well and endure, some will work for a short
period of time then die out, and some will never take off.
In fact, a number of ideas have become so successful, they
turned into legends after a while, and are being cited as examples on how to
turn around the things that seem impossible at first. One such idea is the
story of the Japanese businessman who could not sell enough umbrellas to make a
profit. One day, he surmised that instead of producing all his umbrellas in
black, he should produce them in different colors to attract new clients who
may have varied tastes. He tried the concept and, sure enough, he attracted the
new clients he envisaged; and they flooded him with the orders he so
desperately needed.
Another example was that of Henry Ford who started to mass
produce his cars by making them on the assembly line. He managed to make so
many of them, he discovered that although many people expressed the desire to
own a car, not enough of them had the purchasing power to afford one. And so,
to sell all the cars he was able to produce, he came up with the concept of
giving his workers the purchasing power to buy the cars they were making. That
is, he paid them enough to buy a car, something they gladly did. And this was
the turn of events that prompted other industrialists to do likewise with their
own workers. The consequence has been that America was launched on a journey
to become an industrial superpower.
What this proves is that a concept can sometimes outlive its
creator. This is true of the good concepts that people swear by and try to
emulate; it is also true of the bad concepts that some people copy even though
most everyone else would be cursing. For example, during the decade of the
Nineteen Seventies, an architect came up with the idea of designing indoor
shopping plazas in a labyrinthine confused way to trap the shoppers inside it,
and thus force them to keep shopping while searching for the exit they have a
difficult time finding. The result has been that the shoppers who visited the plaza
once did not want to return to it and relive the moments of frustration they
experienced the first time. Also, to be trapped in a place where you cannot
easily find the exit in case of a fire was deemed to be too dangerous a place.
And so, this concept died a disgraceful death.
And there are times when a business concept is designed with
features that are so subtle, it is impossible for ordinary people to see
through it and realize how they are being taken advantage of. For example, a
can of vegetables may be filled with less vegetables and more water while
maintaining the same outside dimensions and the same weight. You may, however,
call this deception small potato when you compare it to what happens in the
world of finance. This is where you can find instruments sold under the name of
derivatives that should, in all fairness, be called instruments from Hell.
Equally as bad if not worse than the derivatives are the
tricks that some investment firms pull on society. Such firms would be run by
evil geniuses we call corporate raiders and vulture capitalists. The only goal
that these people have is to fill their wallets with money, and do so not by
creating a value of some kind they can sell to others, but by playing a shell
game that is not very different from the famous Ponzi scheme. The two games
only differ in a couple of small respects. It happens that the game the
vultures play is less risky than the Ponzi because it uses other people's
money, most of which would have been borrowed. It is also more of a surefire to
succeed because the original players get paid up front whether the scheme
succeeds or fails in the end.
The scheme consists of zeroing in on an industry that would
be as big as the steel industry, for example. Or it could be as small as the
mom and pop retail stores that would be in the same kind of business: office
supplies for example. In the latter case, the investment firm would buy up all
the stores in a given district and close them while setting up one super store
that will sell not the locally made high quality products that the small stores
used to carry, but the cheaper imports which are of a lower quality. The scheme
is repeated in a number of other districts, and before you know it, there will
be a new chain of super stores selling cheap imported office supplies and no
more mom and pop operations.
The net result of a coup like this is that a large number of
local people in retail and in manufacturing end up losing their jobs. A smaller
number of retail clerks are hired to work in the super stores but none are
hired to work in manufacturing as these jobs will have been lost forever. In
fact, even the machines that used to make the products locally, are dismantled
and shipped overseas to make the same products somewhere else by people of a
lesser skill who ask for a smaller pay. All the while, the corporate raiders
would be making tons of money, the reason why they are also called vulture
capitalists.
This way of doing business is the worst sort of business
concept you can imagine hitting the advanced economies in this age of
globalization. Now imagine someone coming out of this school of thought and
running to be president of the United
States of America while promising to
duplicate on the national scale what he accomplished on the scale of a private
firm. He promises, in fact, to turn the concept from Hell into a philosophy by
which to govern a superpower.