We Are Global Business Advisers
If Columbus had an advisory committee he would probably still be at the dock --Justice Arthur Goldberg, 1908-1990 Engage in this thought experiment: The following individuals to some omnipotent body, such as a governmental industrial planning board, with an idea for introducing a new product or service into the marketplace: * A failed haberdasher * A Harvard sophomore dropout * A junior-college dropout * A General Motors executive Which one is the planning committee most likely to invest in? Any organization will naturally gravitate towards the status quo, as it is proven, safer and the least likely to disrupt current fortunes and positions of power. The existing structure doesn't have much incentive to invest in new ideas and radical concepts, and so it will cast aspersions on the first three people listed above. But who are those individuals? The failed haberdasher is Sam Walton, founder of Wal-Mart. The Harvard dropout is Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft. The junior college dropout is Rush Limbaugh, founder of the Excellence In Broadcasting (EIB) Network. All of these entrepreneurs were scoffed at by the existing establishment. This is the history of all revolutions, which are created not by prophets but by heretics. New ideas, inventions and experiments from the tinkerer in the garage change the world, while rendering obsolete the existing modes of production, infrastructure and status quo. The automobile was not invented by buggy whip manufacturers and the slide rule manufacturers never even fathomed a calculator. HOW A FREE MARKET CREATES WEALTH Social scientists, sociologists, political scientists, economists and others are obsessed with studying harms, poverty being amongst the popular area of research. Yet we learn very little from studying poverty, which has been the natural condition of man since we've roamed the earth, with still nearly four out of five people in the world living in abject want. What needs to be explained is not poverty, but wealth--the best known antidote to poverty. Wealth is a relatively recent phenomenon, and by understanding how it is created, we may begin to ameliorate the suffering of billions. Wealth and profits come from risk. Free minds, operating in free markets, who give up the security and comfort of a paycheck, mortgage their homes and tap into the resources of friends, families and other believers in their vision. Bill Hewlett, David Packard, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak experiment in their garages and change the world, creating untold amounts of wealth as knowledge workers are empowered to find ever new ways of creating, disseminating and working with intellectual capital. Hewlett-Packard and Apple were not created by committees, or a majority vote of the population, but were introduced to the world by these entrepreneurs with no guarantee of success, putting their destiny--and faith--in the hands of total strangers, who were voluntarily persuaded to become customers because of the value added to their lives. Yet when Jobs and Wozniak approached Joe Keenan, president of Atari and part of the existing establishment, in 1976, they were told: "Get your feet off my desk, get out of here, you stink and we're not going to buy your product." Even a Hewlett-Packard executive told them: "We don't need you. You haven't got through college yet." Imagine the loss if Akio Morita, chairman of Sony, had listened to his market research and not created the portable tape recorder, ultimately leading to the Sony Walkman. New products and services introduced to the market are an experiment, some succeed, most fail. The free market offers a precise and flawless mechanism for weeding out the ones that don't add value to people's lives, thus wasting a society's scarce resources. That mechanism is the loss of the two-sided free market coin, profit or loss. All profits come from risk. …