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Great post. But, like all good rebels, I do believe that the cooler heads will prevail and that we will not have to surrender. For the past year, I have been
by tnicola 15y ago
Great post. But, like all good rebels, I do believe that the cooler heads will prevail and that we will not have to surrender.
For the past year, I have been touting that the future of business is benevolence. We are too smart and too savvy to be able to carry on indefinitely in a malevolent way.
Google started it with the whole don't be evil philosophy and whether or not they are still following it, is largely irrelevant. It is, however, infectious. Facebook is following suit and (I hope) it won't be long before we all realize that the doze of benevolence will get you far. And by that I don't mean philantropy.
1) Don't charge people more than you have to. Make money, by all means, even get rich, but don't overcharge just bacause you don't have a lot of competition.
2) Pay your employees well and create positive work environments. Happy people remain working hard and make you more money at a nice and organic rate.
3) Loyalty is no longer a virtue of an employee. It is a privilege earned by an employer. Don't be a DB and expect people to stick around and work hard for your just cause you are putting bread on their families tables. That worked in the 50's. Get on with the program.
4) Share the profits with your employees, share the innovation with your customers and don't be afraid to try new things even if they appear to hurt your bottom line. You will never know until you try it.
5) Vote for a party that will better the world, not the one that will serve your selfish desires (I intentionally did not use a word needs here. (This is where I will exit on this one.)
I could go on. Perhaps I am naive in my thinking, but something (my gut) tells me that if we are in Act III, the good will win in the end. Doesn't it always?
It's either that, or this rebel will need all the force I can get.
- ebaysucks 15y agoPlease don't tell me you think one US political party is all bad and the other one is all good.
- tnicola 15y agoI am Canadian, so no. This was not about one country, but the whole world.
- bo1024 15y ago> Vote for a party that will better the world, not the one that will serve your selfish desires Good luck finding one of those. More generally, it's like this. You can argue all day about "good" and "evil", but what people respond to are incentives. If you have a system in which businesses which do good and not evil are the businesses that thrive, then people will create businesses which do good. If your economic system rewards "evil" practices, that's what you're going to get. If you allow these "evil" companies to continue to re-design the system to reward patent trolling, snuffing out competitors with lawsuits, spying on Internet users, etc etc etc etc etc, then -- you will get a system in which the more that a company does these things, the more they thrive. If your political system allows companies that thrive to pay to bend the rules of the game in their favor, then they will not only continue to thrive but actively accelerate their success, to the detriment of the rest of the world.
- tnicola 15y ago> More generally, it's like this. You can argue all day about "good" and "evil", but what people respond to are incentives. 100% agree, but incentives and benevolence are not necessarily exclusive of each other. An acquaitance wrote a trillogy. She posted all three books on Amazon for a standard price of 4.99 per e-book. She worked hard on this trillogy and deemed that it was a fair price. She sold ~10 copies of each book a month and generated revenue of $150.00 a month. Then she made the first book free and dropped the price of second two books to $2.99 each (minimum Amazon will allow). The next month she sold 10,000 copies of second and third book generating a revenue of $60,000. Had she stuck to her guns that she should get paid a fair price for all three books, she would still be the starving artist indefinitely. Benevolence will not come from a political system or from the top down. I believe that it will come from the ground up. Because the revolution (much like the rebels) are not organized, but they will hopefully sway the trends for the better.
- bo1024 15y agoI agree to a point, but I'm not so sure about this. > Benevolence will not come from a political system or from the top down. Here, you seem to be implying that incentives and benevolence are exclusive. The political (and economic) system can be set up so that it rewards benevolence, or it can punish benevolence. To get more benevolence, I think we must also work on changing the rules to encourage it. (As well as voting with our wallets for benevolent companies/authors/etc.)
- petercooper 15y agodon't overcharge just bacause you don't have a lot of competition. But that partly encourages new competitors. If a market is dominated by a good product at a good price, it's harder to compete than if it is grossly overpriced.
- tnicola 15y agoSo imagine how far ahead a company would be if they were first with a fairly priced product. I believe that this is why price is not a competitive advantage and you need more substance to beat out your competition.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]