﻿Business Lessons from the Rainforest Wealth Lessons from Nature BY DR Nzewi Dozie SMASHWORDS EDITION PUBLISHED BY DR Nzewi Dozie on Smashwords Business Lessons from the Rainforest Wealth Lessons from Nature Copyright © 2012 by DR Nzewi Dozie. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of DR Nzewi Chukwudozie, 48 New York Avenue NW, Washington, DC. 20001. (571)-268-3465. Acknowledgement. This is to acknowledge the owners of the photographs used in the cover of this book. 1.For the photograph Daintree Rainforest originally uploaded by Adz at en.wikipedia. Released under GNU Free Documentation License. Introduction The rainforest is the richest ecosystem on the planet, with half of its entire species, and most of its fresh water. There are more species of fish in the Amazon than all the entire Atlantic Ocean, more in one pond than all of the British Isle. One hectare (3.7 acres) may contain 750 species of trees and 1500 species of other higher plants. They collect by far more energy from the sun than humans consume. My entree into the rainforest was in Cameroon which has part of the Congo Forest. Indelible to my memory was the increasing darkness with every step taken, a canopy overhead, the sun not in sight. It was evening. Inevitable was my sense of the need for us to get out before it became too dark. High levels of rainfall are what make the rainforest so rich. The soils are actually leached shallow and very being washed by the heavy rains for millennia. They lie in the tropical convergence zone where winds from the northern and southern hemispheres having picked-up moisture along their journey over half the planet meet and dump the water. The rainforest is a self-sustaining system of production and consumption. It is big and has no cycles of recession. It’s is very diverse with all kinds of relationships among its players: competition, cooperation, and collaboration. If you are a business you have your equivalent in the bush and it has lessons for you. The scale of the rainforest is massive so it is easy to observe and the inferences made with confidence. I have been directly involved in three business ventures, starting-up and owning two of them. The structure of the rainforest like that of the market is layered. There are four layers: the emergents, the canopy, the understory and the forest floor. There are the animals and the microbes which operate in all layers. They are the equivalent of regulatory authorities. Regulatory authorities operate in all layers of the market. The Emergents. These are the tallest trees of about 50m in height, up to 80m. They are the smallest group, and are exclusive. They are the Fortune 500 companies. They are above the canopy and do not compete for sunlight, but have to stand the wind, brave lightning, endure animals and avoid the chainsaw. The Canopy. This is the second highest layer, where the branches touch from tree to tree so close that it’s a green ceiling denying sunlight to those beneath. It is the competition zone characterized by a day to day battle to see the sun. It is a day to day battle to be seen by customers and maintain the brand. In this market any lag in height could be permanent, even fatal. The trees try to keep up with each other to get sufficient sunlight. There is no worry about the weather; they share the risk, and together “weather storms”. Collectively they constitute a storm breaker. However not all risks can be shared, like the risk of being struck by lightning. An uninsurable risk. The Understory. These are a third layer of plants. They do not try to compete for sunlight; instead they develop strategies to catch enough like broad leaves. The coco-yam has two or three leaves each like a telescopic dish capturing as much of the remaining 20 per cent of the sunlight that reaches this level as possible, well ahead of star-gazing telescopes at space observatories. They are protected from the weather, but being small these plants are vulnerable to animals, so some store their carbohydrates underground in their roots(tubers), some don’t form seeds, they will grow from stems and cuttings. This is the niche market. Some plants climb the giants to reach the sun, twisting around him, sometimes very aggressively; sometimes sinking roots into his stem, there are lessons here for the small business. Some plants are not that aggressive but just grow on debris that gathers on the giant. The Forest Floor Littered with dead leaves and decaying branches this is the recycling business. It is very efficient and work dispatched very quickly. Fallen branches go quick, devoured by an army of microbes which include bacteria and fungi, yielding organic material to reconstitute the soil and supply the higher layers. Here you will see big mushroom growing on dead tree trunks. So recycling could be a big operation. However the microbes do most of the work. The Animals These live and feed on forest products. They disperse seeds and pollinate flowers. They prune plants of weak branches. They ensure the big trees seeds as well as that of the up comer get dispersed. They make sure the forest is well mixed. The gene pool of the forest is well mixed for strength as they enhance cross pollination. More importantly they are the reason why there are no “bubbles” and “crashes” in the rainforest but a stable lush forest in perpetuity. The animals of the forest are the stabilizing factor preventing “bubbles”. If the forest is prospering extra-ordinarily in a boom fashion the population of the animals which feed on its products increases and puts a check on the growth preventing a bubble. This way the animals remove excess liquidity to prevent “overheating”. The temperature of the forest is pretty stable. The canopy blocks out the sun keeping it cool. In some forests debris still accumulates over a long time and it takes a major event to restore balance like a spontaneous forest fire ignited by lightning, or heat on tinder. The rot is burnt down and the forest starts afresh cleansed of its inefficient parts. This is the only way the seeds of some plants get to germinate: after burning! These fires are the recessions and depressions that happen once in as century. We do not allow the full effect of recessions to cleanse the market, so our markets are not optimal but full of dross, riding from crash to the next crash. Humans Humans have lived in equilibrium with forests and still do in many places. However forests in general are under threat from human activity like illegal logging, poaching, and change of land use for agriculture (e.g. to grow crops for “green’’ fuel or Amazonian soybean) or for settlement. This is equivalent to the cataclysm of changing the economic system, like the Bolsheviks did in Russia early last century, a failed project that neither provided enough food nor fuel but left a gullaged dissatisfied populace who went back to “natural use” in a reverse revolution that sank the artificial enterprise, the Soviet Union. The forest is a natural enterprise. Capitalizing it kills it. It should be run as a mixed economy with clear regulations if it cannot be left alone. Part One Shared Risks. In the forest like in the commercial market there are risks common to all players. Human Activity. Human activity is a nonspecific stress on the plants and animals of the forest. The loggers create routes and move heavy equipment to get to the big trees. They kill a giant that has been growing for hundred years dislodging the birds and animals that nest on it. They move the log and heavy equipment killing more plants and animals. They change the topography by making roads and might cause erosion. Who knows what the effects of the sudden gaps in the forest cover are on the equilibrium of the rainforest? Government intervention in the market place could be as disruptive as unregulated logging in forests. Business wants stability and dislikes uncertainty. It enables it to plan into the feature. Changing market policies make it impossible for businesses to project into the future. Frequent government incursions into the market with policy changes kills businesses like illegal logging kills trees Friendly tax schedules brings in investment and has been used to unleash specific industries like IT and green technology in many places, or promote an economic zone like Dubai in the UAE and Cotonou in West Africa. Conversely many businesses have left Cameroon in central Africa because of extreme taxation. Just like human encroachment forces animal life to migrate from the forest, government policy may force business to migrate to other markets. Human activity was going to kill a forest in the Dust Bowl but for tree planting. Disease. Forests are more resistant to sporadic disease and pests than agricultural vegetation. I certainly have never heard of a forest or a species in it failing from a disease outbreak. The intense cross-pollination is certainly protective. The diversity within the forest is also protective for one species may be repelling a pest that afflicts another while benefitting from it adding nitrogen to the soil. Similarly a diversified economy is more resilient, so is a business with multiple streams of income. It is certainly good it cross-pollinate an investment portfolio with as broad set of assets. Fire Fire is a major event in the life cycle of forests. The loss is great but they always recover fully. If they were frequent they could permanently damage the forest. The analogy is with recession in market cycles. Markets have always recovered fully in terms of volume but recessions unlike forest fires are not allowed to run their natural course, so inefficiencies and structural deficiencies remain. After a forest fire the vultures come! Even animals could not run, they were burnt like grass. It is that thorough a purging. An economic depression is like a bad inflammatory process, necessary for healing, but so exaggerated that the patient is threatened to die from it rather than the disease. The Emergents. 1.They operate in a capital intensive industry like oil prospecting and extraction of which Chevron and BP are examples or the aircraft manufacturers. 2.They have been around a long time , for example HSBC( started in 1865) 3.They dominate their market overwhelmingly or had little competition, for example the technology companies Facebook and Google. 4.Or they are state owned. These are often monopolies servicing whole countries with direct government help. State-owned behemoths. These are state-owned companies commonly in the area of utilities or mineral extraction. They are power companies, water supply companies or national oil companies, other mining companies, rail companies, agricultural companies and such like. These were much more common in the days before economic deregulation and privatization. They were staple in communist and socialist systems, and also utilized by nationalistic governments to gain control over sectors of their economies to the exclusion of foreign players. This they accomplished through nationalization. The companies were also attributed a national security function: they were used to exclude foreign persons from “sensitive” sectors with national security significance. And finally they were used to help conserve the balance of payments of the countries that owned them. Imagine a foreign operator providing utilities in a country as a monopoly or at the mildest with great dominance, it amounts to a drain pipe on the foreign exchange of the host country. The solution to this was a nationalized monopoly. The Russian giant Yukos remains a monument of the period of privatization that made the state-owned business model obsolete. The capital intensive sector. Some sectors of the economy are inevitably capital intensive making firms that operate in them large out of necessity. A good example is the oil sector where drilling is very expensive. The terrain for their work can be difficult, with off-shore rigs required in some situations. The volumes of commodity moved are very huge and require expensive infrastructure like pipelines. Further processing requires very expensive plants (refineries). Thus oil companies are huge operations requiring a great deal of capital investment. Airline manufacturers are a second group of companies that are huge by necessity. Their product is highly complex, possessing a great many component parts, with their being stringent regulations to meet. Aircraft are expensive products, so are the plants and processes to make them. Thus aircraft makers like Boeing and Airbus are among the biggest companies in the world. Little competition. A company that develops software has copyright to it for a stipulated period during which it can exploit it for profit exclusively. When there are no comparable substitutes then the company can have very profitable pricing and optimal sales. Thus the company can grow very rapidly, and needs to grow rapidly to satisfy demand. Microsoft and the Windows operating system exemplified this in the 90’s. Secondly the nature of the product and structure of the market means that as massive as the market is there will be only a limited number of companies making products because of the need for compatibility (different products being able to interface and function with one another). Compatibility with the gadgets of family, friends and colleague at work is a very important matter among consumers. People usually consult members of their circle before making the decision about which tech product to buy. So a limited number of companies emerge most popular. If the market is so huge and there will be but a few companies operating it they (each) have to be gigantic. Microsoft grew on shrewd business practices to dominate a new field. No company could take on it blow for blow. For it swung hard and heavy, closed-up distance quickly and the opponent could not swing back. Even using the occasional head butt. Not willing to bite in disgust for reducing the noble sport to a dirty brawl their competitors have avoided pitch battles but gone around flanks to pick up niches. Big business behavior is indeed big predator behavior where competitors avoid conflict by specializing in different game. Actually it’s the looser who avoids the prized meat. Forced to draw on greater creativity Apple “computers” became better known for its mobile phones. Now there is a move to unify titles. Google use to be a browser, now it’s an email service selling books and offering free internet phone calls, also selling software and apps, managing music and running mobile telephony. The actors in the sector seem to seek a model that provides a comprehensive service to their customers so they have no need to look elsewhere. Everything they need in one place. A one stops shop. The competition between the American aerospace company Boeing and the its European counterpart Airbus Industrie illustrates this strategy to accommodate each other rather than mutually annihilate each other seen at the top of the food chain. Competing for the long distance flight market, Airbus was going to make a buzz by making the biggest airliner ever; which was going to convey huge numbers of people to regional hubs from where to continue their journeys. Boeing chose to go farther, providing direct flights to centers for which passengers may have otherwise had to change planes. Airbus offered airlines cheap through scale of capacity. Less cost moving large numbers of ready passenger plus the spectacle, wonder, excitement and attraction of the biggest airliner ever, the A380. Boeing offered airlines cheap through scale of range. Eliminating the need to change planes. Old companies. Some big corporations accumulated their assets over a long time. Some have been big for a century. Modus operandi of the emergent gigantic companies. Like the emergent trees of the rain forest these giant companies are very secure in their finances and business. They deal with competition that is not stifling but mostly about market share. They don’t face a day to day threat to go under. They are relatively sparsely concentrated (yet are in real competition with one another). The threats they face like with the trees come from within. The little foxes that spoil the vine. Historically they have been hit by accounting malpractice-cooking the books, dangerous loss making trading, and bad mergers. Lesson from the rainforest The way the emergent trees carry out business lends lessons to the big conglomerates. 1.The focus of their growth activity is strengthening their stem and root system. Compared to their size their foliage is not impressive as they usually consist of a few branches, sub-branches and unimpressive leaves. Their flowers and fruits are equally bland. They do no invest much in these. This is the strategy: they are by nature tall trees and have their foliage well above the canopy so they get sunlight absolutely without any encumbrance. This is the equator where sunlight is abundant so they do not require too many leaves to catch the sunlight they need. The smaller foliage also minimizes the drag of the wind on the tree. The biggest challenge facing this group is staying- up at that height. So they focus on reinforcing their stems and roots. They are as good as the stem and roots that bear them. The goal of this strategy is to endure, while for other plants that produce beautiful flowers and sweet fruit it is to produce as many progeny as possible before when they fall. The emergent plant is there from century to century, strengthening its stem and roots, increasing in girth by the year… and yes dispersing seed and making progeny. It may not have fruits for the animals but certainly the lumberman appreciates the work done building the great boughs. 2.The giant conglomerates do not face mortal competition. Their market share is pretty secure. In a way they have already beaten the opposition. The issue for them is staying big not staying up. They do so by strengthening their base through mergers and acquisitions and new product offerings. They also strengthen their base by lending out their franchise. Mergers and acquisitions bring economies of scale: the same processes are done at lower unit cost, and capacity is used more efficiently. This amounts to cheaper production costs, greater competitiveness and greater profitability. Scale is advantage and big companies have it. Their best strategy is maximizing this advantage like the big trees of the forest do. 3.These are the pitfalls of being distinctly huge over your neighbors in the rainforest. They could suffer a lightning strike. A big company like a big ship could go down quite quickly and suddenly. A lightning strike could set the tree ablaze or destroy it in a less dramatic fashion. This has been seen in the stock market when a company’s stock goes into free fall, often as a result of a single event in the life of a company. A French bank was plunged into crisis after one it’s traders lost two billion dollars. It is hard for the tall trees to protect themselves against lightning being distinctly taller than the canopy. Huge companies who must necessarily place massive funds under the control of single individuals must set up early warning mechanisms and also take out insurance. 4.The same scenario elucidated could happen following an erratic decision by top management. The British media agency The News of the World sank pretty quick following poor judgment about what is allowed and not allowed in the practice of sourcing news. This profitable news agency had to be scuttled as this one practice it was engaged in proved pretty toxic. It was reverse role play when journalists used Gestapo or KGB methods. I wondered whether the voluntary disbandment of the media house was done to prevent the light being shone long on the whole it was part of. To dispel focus. A gangrenous member was cut off and it would not be known the state of the rest of the body. I was surprised such a valuable venture as The News of the World was preferably sunk as against being sold. It was like the news agency was struck by lightning. 5.A steadier problem the tall trees have to face is wind…sometimes storms. These are quite frequent in the wet season when torrential storms seem to want to tear whole trees apart. The trees weave from side to side wrestled by the rainstorm spreading out its branches like the fingers of one hand as if to wrench the very life out of it. This happening to a standalone tree giant well above the canopy is a ghostly sight…almost sickening. The giants have to put up with storms. Like BP had to do last year with the deep water horizon oil spill in the gulf Mexico. It was a global storm that caused the head of BP to fall and will leave its coffers serial billions short. This was combination of environmental and host community interest beating on a company. It was not a one off but rather one in a series. It is important to note that companies like BP seem to compete more with environmental groups than oil companies. Their adverts are directed at sanitizing their image, announcing their effort at developing renewable energy, their belief in sustainable development, and investment in social development. Environmental activism, labor rights, host community activism and the anti-capitalist/anti big business movement are the frequent winds attacking the emergent companies. The oil giants do not advertise their products they advertise their good works. Social responsibility It is now almost an expected part of the package for companies to be involved in social projects and philanthropic activity. The common coinage used is to “give back”. It’s been long in practice for companies to support social causes. Sometimes in self-interest and a few times without it being obvious what the fit stands to gain. Today it is almost expected of companies to be involved in this activity: scholarship awards, endowments, health courses etc. Some pay a percentage of sales, like a voluntary sales tax. Indeed the practice is now so entrenched that in some host communities what companies are subject to amounts to coercion. I know of incidents when thuggery has been used to extract charities from companies. Agents of the community mounted a roadblock barring passage of vehicles of this company which meets its statutory obligations. How many times does a company have to pay for the cost of its legitimate activities on the environment and the local community’s land? How many times does it have to pay using roads, ports, and power and telecommunication lines? It is important to blow the whistle on this piracy going on against businesses world-wide. These companies are big defenseless ships marooned in foreign locations, flying foreign flags. Being great agglomeration of resources they become the victims of organized buccaneers and thieves often in alliance with local chiefs. Disguised as community activists they extract protection monies from these businesses. Their communities never see the funds so the dissatisfaction continues. Even kidnapping of staff of these companies has been used in the Niger Delta. The limited civil war that broke was due to the privateerism that had been at play in that wild, wild south. This is not to say there have not been violations by companies on the rights of local communities. But where this has happened there are proper channels and due processes for seeking redress. It could be hard to deal with the clout of some multinationals government may not be representative. Yet there is no place wantonry that serves only the interests of malignant elements not the community. Companies must pay compensation when they violate people’s rights. Charges should be pressed where crimes may have been committed. The problem is government who collects taxes and royalties but do not benefit communities. If government did its duty business would not need to pay twice. Charity has always been voluntary, it is wrong for the poor to steal from the rich just as it is wrong for the rich to steal from the poor. It is wrong for society to victimize the rich minority for it never has been a crime to be rich or black or female. The Canopy Here is where the competition is stiffest. The trees compete for sunlight. In the market it is a competition for market share. First they have to be seen by potential clients so they advertise intensively. It is a delicate balance where loss of focus could cause a terminal lag. Falling short at this level of the forest deprives from sunlight and leads to poor tree health. An occasional tree would be seen to be lanky and sickly as it races upward in the shadow of another, sometimes even bent, seeking the sun. The biggest problem facing firms at this level of the market is competition; it is a fight to the death. They compete for customers, suppliers, staffing, location and any necessity or privilege important for that line of business. In the rainforest there are no fanciful strategies than to send the root deep and wide, grow, grow, grow, and make a many leaves. There are some advantages of being in the canopy. It means that many risks are shared: like the risk of a lightning strike, of being felled in a storm: the trees standing together comprise a wind breaker so they protect themselves collectively. They are one continuous layer of such that animals live and move among their branches as if were an elevated field. So they make a great contribution to hosting an element of the forest, animals, which serves a function important to all. Lessons from the forest. 1.Middle-range companies must work actively to increase their customer base. There are two approaches to this. One is directly advocating among potential customers to promote their products. This has been said to be about persuading the audience that they need the product. They may use audiovisual commercials, direct physical campaigns, or sponsorship of sports, television programs or artistic events. They may have a marketing strategy incorporated such as a free trial. There is usually an advertisement department and an appropriate budget dedicated to it. 2.The second strategy seeks to give the customer a better deal than found elsewhere. To offer them better pricing; better value for money. Advertisement contributes significantly to the final price of goods and services so by minimizing expenditure on advertisement prices could be lowered. Or the saved funds could be used to add quality or quantity that is obvious to the customer at the same price. Good wine needs no bush. The customer is looking for a bargain and will buy greater value for money every time. 3.Getting the roots down and wide. The company must secure its supply chain because it cannot afford to default on orders. Lost orders are lost to competitors. It must therefore order its inventory ahead of time, three months ahead is a good period but studies should establish what the trends are. It is also good to secure suppliers down with written contracts. 4. Since pricing is the most important competition point it is important to appreciate that part of the measures to minimize production costs is to minimize the cost of raw materials and supplies. All other costs must also be kept as low as possible working in the canopy. 5.Players in the middle range of business must keep abreast of what is happening in the market, especially what the competition is doing. They then respond accordingly to remain at the edge of business. 6.Finally there is still a place for cooperation among competitors. Firms should cooperate where there is common interest. Some things are best done as a group. Scale is an advantage already high-lighted. If companies in the same line of business cannot annihilate the competition (and the law is weighted against this) they must co-exist. There are always determinants common to all. Challenges they all have to deal with. Working as a herd may enable them solves the problems more easily. Indeed this may be the only way to ward off local government or state and federal regulation. Even warring parties do enter into truces and cease fires, to continue belligerence at a later date. Like the trees in the canopy collectively form a wind breaker canopy companies ought to work together to develop common interests. The understory. This is a third tier of plants. They are shrubs and small trees that have no way to compete directly with plants in the canopy, nor can they compete with the emergents. They have to overcome inevitable disadvantages of being small. These include being deprived of sunlight as they are completely shaded by the canopy overhead and being vulnerable to damage by animals (because of their size). The advantage they have is being completely shielded from storms, and from lightning. They solve the problem of low access to sunlight by a variety of measures. Some are climbers, for example the yam plant. They climb the stems of plants in the higher levels: the canopy and the emergent, by winding around them or through hooks, till they emerge in sunlight. The cocoyam plant solves the problem by having large telescopic leaves that seek to catch as much of the dim light that falls on them as possible. The plants solve the problem of being small and vulnerable to animals in a variety of ways. Some make poisons that kill animals that dare nimble on them, a toxic cassava plant type, and a flowery Cocoyam do this. Some produce irritants: the ordinary cocoyam plant does this and contact on the skin by its juice will cause irritating itching. It is even more irritating in the mouth. Some like the banana plant depend on making suckers for propagation as it wouldn’t be possible to maintain seedy fruit so close to the ground to maturity, especially banana fruits! Hence the banana is a seedless fruit. They banana plant races to a fair height making a largely watery, turgid stem; fruits quickly and dies to create space for its suckers. Among plants in this layer are biennials and annuals. Biennials grow and fruit twice a year; annuals once a year. The hazard of being mortally damaged by animals is so great that these plants elect to race and finish their lifecycle then die voluntarily. Also some would store their reserves underground (the cassava, the cocoyam and the yam are all tubers-underground stores) to prevent them being damaged or bringing damage to the plant by attracting animals. Lessons from the rainforest The lesson from the third tier of plants in the forest is to provide what the bigger businesses cannot offer. Competing with them is out of question. It is clear that plants in the understory layer of the rainforest try to make the most of their prevailing situation and still achieve success. The grasses feed the world. These include: wheat, barley, rice, sorghum, millet, corn, and such. The tubers feed the tropics: yams, cassava and cocoyam. To qualify for a place in this roll of fame the plant must be able to use sunlight to capture carbon from the atmosphere very effectively and efficiently. The grasses of the savannah, the prairie, the steppes and such open spaces do so. But the title goes to the tubers that do the same from under a shade. So the small mama and daddy company have a place in the market and can survive if they copy the little plants of the rainforest. THE GRASSES FEED THE WORLD… and the tubers too: The grasses: wheat, barley, rice, maize or corn, millet, sorghum, sugar cane feed world. The tongue–shaped leaves, tall fleshy stems and the large amount of seed on a very few fruits are their hallmark. Their seeds are used to make flour everywhere. These belong to an exclusive group of plants called C4 plants to which only 10% of all plants belong. The others are called C3 plants. C4 plant captures carbon dioxide from the atmosphere faster than C3 plants. No wonder the grasses feed the world (the animals included). They grow fast and yield a crop in months. Unlike other plants their leaves grow from the base up, so if grazing animals chop off the leaf tip the leaf continues to grow. Other leaves grow at the very tip. If bitten off growth stops. The grasses are energy-capture machine which are not into fanciful flowering, nor permanent structures like strong woody stems or much root. They pack carbon from the atmosphere as fast as they can and are done in less than a year. They are very easy to grow. The tubers: yams, coco -yams and cassava make a good impact feeding the world. They are the carbon packers of the rain forest. Having to compete for sunlight yams are climbers , that way they reach the top of the canopy, the coco-yams don’t go for height, they have two or three permanent broad leaves like telescope dishes catching every light signal. This design precedes the parabolic dishes of astronomic telescopes and satellite TV receivers. The cassava makes no seed; channeling its effort towards storage (underground) of the carbohydrate it makes and like sugar cane (a C4 grass) can be grown from the stem. It does not invest in permanent structures. These rainforest carbon packers cannot afford to make seeds or store carbohydrate above ground as the density of bird and animal life would not allow it. The seeds or stores would be eaten. 1.Offer what the big rival cannot offer. Like hand made as against machine made. Your clientele is small, so take advantage of it. Produce with extra quality, with the level of attention to detail that a machine could never muster and you will sell at a premium. No competition. Indeed the small business and the big business should not be in competition unless it is the small business doing the hostility on a soft underbelly that a big company allows to develop. 1.Offer human touch. A small target of customers means solutions can be customized. So know your customers and give them tailor-made solutions. Follow-up and give them after sales support. Bond with them as you work to see them succeed and they will to see you are fairly rewarded and are around to continue helping them. You have limited clientele, nurture it, groom it and keep it. It is your advantage if you exploit it, your disadvantage if you don’t. 2.Seek every opportunity to increase your customership. Like the cocoyam’s broad leaves or like radar sweep zones in search of clients and let none slip through the net. Like the yam take every opportunity to see the light. Climb on the shoulders of the internet to advertise (operate a web site, market on line) Climb on the shoulders of e-bay. Use word of mouth. Take declassified advertisement. 3.Save like the cassava, expand like the banana. The cassava plant makes no fruits but is spread through cuttings. It saves everything. Do not waste resources. Your capital base is small and can easily disappear. The banana plant makes no seeds, it spreads locally. Do not hurry to set up branches in other locations until your present store/office/workshop is fully maximized. There are linking costs that will develop in running more than one business location. Before you branch out be sure the figures add up. Make sure your profit increases or your business is more secure. 4. No foolish risks that could threaten the existence of the business. You have to be toxic to practices that can cause the business to go under. Of-course like stealing from your business. Remember your capitalization is small and can be easily wiped out. The forest floor Here a general service is provided to the forest turning dead material into manure. Plants utilize energy from sunlight to synthesize organic material like cellulose (fiber), carbohydrates (starch), proteins and oils. When plant material or animals die the forest floor takes care of business. Saprophytes devour the dead plant or animal tissue breaking them down to simple substances that other plants use and eventually animals, up the food chain. The saprophytic sector involves ants, worms, and fungi large like mushrooms and small microbial fungi, bacteria and other microscopic organisms. Ants and worms break down the dead material to finer particles and increase the surface area available for the microbes and mushroom to act. This recycling process is critical to the existence of the rain forest as the soils are very poor being shallow and leached by the heavy rainfall. Nutrients must be recovered from the dead plants and animals or the forest will not be. The recycling sector of the forest is very advanced, sophisticated and rapid. So it should be with human societies especially cities, for humans produce much more waste per head. What a waste it would be not to take a cue from the forest. Recycling is still a novel idea in most of the world (though it’s going on in nature all around). How many recycling companies are listed on the stock-exchange? It is a veritable sector to grow a business in, especially in the developing world. The potential here is like it was in the IT sector in the early to mid –nineties. In the market the forest floor represents the businesses which provide the services for other companies. Who provide bags for retail shops, components the automobile giants, pipes and such for the oil giants, researchers and recruiters, banks and insurers… small contractors that do things for businesses that businesses cannot efficiently do for themselves. This sector has no specific risks. They expand when the forest expands and contract when the forest contracts. When the forest expands, it produces more debris, the saprophytes feed on this and increase, this ensures the saprophytic function matches the need of the forest. There is a negative feedback in operation here. If the saprophytes lag behind the growth of the forest, debris accumulates and disease may break out. Or a fire as tinder accumulates, ignited by heat or lightening. When the economy expands the support sector expands, when it shrinks the support sector shrinks. This concern was one of the reasons why the America auto giants were bailed out during the credit crunch of the late 2000s. Indeed the performance of the support sector could be used as an indicator of the health of the economy and as a control point to stimulate growth or check overheating and inflation. This is already being done through the banking industry by controlling the supply of money or the cost of borrowing. This is done through the instrument of the interest rate. Insurance regulations could be used to remove carcasses from the system, by manipulating benchmark criteria for obtaining insurance. This is happening passively as companies in a bad state would have difficulty finding insurance. Regulations making obtaining insurance by companies mandatory will help protect investor and customers. Veritably, the scrutiny of insurance would help tell the real state of companies and could expose malpractice in accounting or operations. Poor soils. The success of rainforests in spite of poor soils mirrors the success of countries with little natural resource like Singapore and Japan. It demonstrates the importance of recycling for one, the importance of good management and the importance of efficiency. Indeed abundant mineral wealth could be a bane to development as it may produce a single-commodity economy and foment corruption as leaders scramble to steal from the sales of the mineral. This was epitomized in the diamond war of Sierra Leone and Congo DR, and has been said to be the bane of Nigeria. Discovery of oil wealth in Angola raised concerns, a paradox predicated on happenings in other places including Sudan. The Kimberly process to regulate the sale of diamonds and prevent its use to fund wars demonstrates how serious a destabilizing factor wealth in the soil can be. It is striking that those countries low in natural resources have economic centers with housing structured like the rainforest. Skyscrapers, buildings of intermediate height, and low buildings. Singapore has the highest number of skyscrapers. It would seem that depending intensively on commerce and industry (the market) rather than the sale of a natural resource produced this structure, the different heights reflecting different sizes of businesses. Thus this multilayered format may be the principle for any system that allows free intensive competition. The single-resource countries still have rather flat city profiles. They dig deep but don’t grow. While in the market-driven countries spread flat and grow tall. The shallow soils warrant the trees of the rainforest to have expansive buttresses that spread up to 30ft to keep them secure. Roots the sizes of tree trunks that you can sit on are not rare in the rainforest. Lesson 1.You do not need massive amounts of capital to start up off and succeed in business. Shortage may inspire creativity; surplus may kill drive. Leaves The leaves of rainforest plants are adapted to the ecosystem. They have drip tips and grooves in the lower layers to conduct water and facilitate water loss from the plants through a process called transpiration. They are large in the shaded levels but small and dark green in the emergent layer to achieve the opposite reduce desiccation by dry winds. Some leaves are on stalks that turn with the movement of the sun. Lesson Leaves are represent the productive units and are equivalent to the machines or the non- mechanized production processes of firms. Like the leaves of rainforest plants they must be: 1.Fully suitable for the environment in which they are operated to reduce down time. 2.Fully suitable to the uses to which they are put and be streamlined to the production process to give optimal efficiency 3.Like the leaves that follow the sun, follow the business everywhere it goes. How to use lessons from the rainforest to start a business. The rainforest is a free system, it is indeed freer than the market, and therefore its overwhelming success confirms that the free market is the optimal system. Its model promises balance and abundance without bubbles and bursting. These examples illustrate the application of the principles discussed so far. ENTREPRENEURSHIP You want to start a business; the first thing is to determine what part the forest the business you visualize falls. The emergents, the canopy, the understory or the forest floor. Second do you have the resources required to play in that layer. For example Mr. Smith has been working as an executive for a bank for ten years and has been seeing the finances of his clients. It has been leaving a hollow in his belly comparing their profits with his wages. He believes he can do it so he contemplates resigning to launch out on his own. He thinks he could gather a team and muster the funds required to start-up a business making electric cables and fittings. He had been managing the finances of a firm owned by a client his age whom he had got to know at a personal level. This friend was in the electrical wire and fittings business. The first question Mr. Smith has to answer is where in the forest of he wants to enter? Does he have the start-up capital? Can he find the team? How far up would he like to grow the company? There are big, medium and small actors in the electrical fittings business. The realities are that Joe is using his savings for the venture and does not know the business very well. Advice: He has to find a river bank. Here the vegetation is not dense and trees are sparse. So there is no significant competition. However there is no shielding from the wind and the river floods from time to time. The grass is almost choking. But there is sunlight, and plenty of water. Smith decides to start up in a locale where there is no competition but he must trade this off with their being little logistics. He decides to strain against predictable challenges like poor supply networks, poor market links, than combat suffocating competition. If his business dies it would be a slow death and he will have time to make changes or run. In the thick of it, inside the city, he may never take off. The high cost of logistics could easily smother his business. From the periphery he’ll have the time to learn more about the business and possibly develop a niche that takes advantage of being away from the rest. Per chance turn disadvantage to advantage. If he succeeds he’ll have the advantage of a pioneer in the locality of his startup. He’ll be a prominent fixture in its commercial landscape; capable of securing it’s resources like choice locations for himself. He’ll be ahead of any new comers in local knowledge, business connections and political links. It may take a while though to get there. Jasmine is a skilled teenager with bright ideas and great IT skills. She’s had a blog since age nine, has lived a good part of her other nine years on the internet. Maturing she’s having more responsible ideas about using her talents she wants to start a commercial internet company, but the field is obliterated by Facebook, you tube, Amazon and an endless list of behemoths and she has no money. She climbs on the giants. She starts a site where people contribute stories about celebrities, posting pictures. She spends hours daily hunter-gathering celebrity news from the giants’ websites and others and retelling them on her site. She gathers links to freebies and posts them for her visitors, uses word of mouth and every legal tactic to spread the word. Eventually advertisement comes and it includes products from celebrity: their material, memorabilia and events. She entered the forest at the understory level and climbed on the giants there before to sunlight. In the world of telephony Skype is an emergent in terms of the volume of calls being made on their network at any time over (twenty million). This was achieved through innovation as the company made a business out the cheap cost of routing calls through the internet. The telephony business is a playground for giants and Skype took advantage of a single trait to emerge from the canopy. It would not be surprising if they branch out into the software and apps business, social networking, and on-line retail. These are all in her environment. The first step is to find out what level of the forest the prospective company will operate in and conduct it accordingly. A little use of the imagination would be helpful. Imagine you are a banana plant in the understory layer with broad leaves to capture light and you have no seed, but grow by sprouting out new suckers. You produce a sweet fruit twelve feet above ground. What are you gonna do? Advertise or not? You won’t! You won’t spend resources growing a wooden stem. It would take too long. No! You make a stem that is fleshy and watery (that allows you to grow fast) leaving the making of your fruit to the very end of your growth period when you have the most clearance from the ground. At twelve feet above ground you produce bunch of sweet fruit and bow out (giving the new suckers room). This way you are famous around the world. Bananas make no seed but they proliferate through every household and compound, wild bush and farm and a thousand plantations. The banana raises the question of advertising. Must everybody advertise? Even when you cannot keep up with demand? When there is no promise of it increasing sales, like when the competition is far ahead and too strong? Why don’t you just put the advertising budget to use enhancing your product, or developing an altogether new product. This is the strategy of Apple in its struggle with Microsoft. Most fruit trees are in the canopy or understory. The emergents generally make bland unattractive fruit. Trees like mangoes, guavas, and oranges overcome the threat of their progeny being consumed by making lots of seeds in lots of fruit. The papaya plant makes very many seeds in not many fruits, the coconut hide its seed in strong hide. There is only fibrous covering, no fruit. The white pulp is the inside of its seed and you must crack open the hard shell to reach it, in which case you are eating seed. This seed will float on the ocean to germinate when it makes a landing on the shore, sometimes on islands. Thus the coconut is the tallest plant on many tropical islands. The coconut is an emergent, making only fiber and no flesh it needs no seed disperser. Fruit is a form of inducement to have animals a plants seed, just like nectar is a reward to have insects pollinate a trees flowers. These inducements resemble the bribes government officials in developing countries sometimes demand in return for helping Western companies win contacts. It is good that this practice now constitutes a crime in some of the home countries of the companies. Another successful palm is the oil palm. Almost identical to the coconut it produces many fleshy fruits around a hard nut, as hard as the coconut but much smaller. The fruit is embedded in very sharp spikes so the fruits cannot be retrieved. A human cannot do so with bare hands without getting injured (unless the fruit had become so ripe until it was soon going to come off the bunch). Uninterfered with the tree drops fruit as they ripen; a few at a time to maximize dispersal. The fruity flesh around the hard nut is reward for the work of dispersal. The oil palm and the coconut palm are virtually indistinguishable trees yet one requires animal seed dispersal and the other natural forces like ocean currents. Different approaches to solving the same problem. The lesson for business here: seek for best fit as much as possible. Why does the oil palm choose to pay a commission to have its seed dispersed and not the coconut? It is because of the nature of their natural habitat. The coconut builds boats for its seed to sail around the world; the oil palm tempts squirrels to take a bite. The coconut is a shore plant, where there is little undergrowth or the seed falls into the sea. In the forest the seed would not be dispersed because it’s too big and too heavy (larger than many dispersers). The oil palm therefore makes seeds that can be moved by small animals and birds and gives them a reward to do so. So business needs tailor-made solutions. When the economy is optimal and the market free there will be businesses of all kinds and shapes making money out of every kind of advantage: huge tree trunks or broad leaves, many fruits or poisonous stems, underground stores or water stems, last-day sales (bananas) or spiced up shoots( the onion). Something for everybody. Part two GENERAL LESSONS THE SEASONS It is interesting to observe the effect of the seasons on the rainforest. In the dry season activity slows a little because of the scorching sun. When the rains come the tempo increases… there is revitalization. Seeds germinate and there is new life. One would think more sun would mean more growth but sun is not the limiting factor in the rain forest, water is. The real difference between a recession, normal market and a bull market is the tempo. When the prospect of profit is good there mood in the market is high. When the risks are high the market is downcast. How else billions lost one day could be recovered the next day but in perceptions. The value of the market is viewed through the colorful prism of the mood. Good mood gain in value, bad mood loss of value. The mood was bleak during the crash of the late 2000s. With the giants falling in a Titanic cascade, one every week, it was a ground zero in Wall Street and people fled with what remained of their dwindling portfolios. Bankers packed their briefcases. It was literally last day at work. If the mood in Wall Street in 2008 wall set in music it would have been a dirge I did not lose any money though. Surely the next crash is on its way. The next crash is always only a matter of time. I believe managing money is a do–it–yourself thing. How could one hand over his life savings to a faceless group of directors and board who are also in it for themselves? It’s not their money and they will play roulette to make buck. How else is a billion dollars lost this hour recovered the next than by turning a wheel? Of course it is not quite like this. However if your portfolio is too large for you to manage and hold a day job then your portfolio should be your day job. If you do not make as much as your money manager did it is because you are careful. When the next crash comes you’ll hit a jackpot. Manage your money yourself if you can. There no bubbles or crashes in the rainforest. Too rapid growth stimulates the animal population to increase. This increases the consumption forest products so the rapid growth is checked and does not develop into a bubble. Yakub an Afghan refugee was looking to start a business in Pakistan. He chose what he knew: the transit business conveying passengers over distances 50km or less. He bought a bus and registered at the City Council bus station. The arrangement was that bus operators took numbers as they came in the morning which was their turn to load. Turn one loads first, turn ten loads tenth. There were nineteen bus owners not counting those who went for repairs. With only about ten hours of daylight available for loading and it taking over an hour to load one vehicle it meant that about half of all turns lapsed into the next day. So the bus owners worked only every other day or less. This is a recession. Disappointed, Yakub left the City Council bus station to hire a store-front where he ran an independent bus station. It took only ten minutes to load a bus. The passengers no more wary of long waits flowed like a stream. Yakub had only seven buses registered in his company. The buses made a round trip every two hours, spending only twenty minutes at each end of the trip to refuel and reload. With almost thirty roundtrips the seven drivers were fully occupied and the seven buses fully utilized. The seven buses did altogether by far more business than the eighteen at the City council bus station. Lesson: The difference between a boom and a recession is simply psychological: the consumers’ willingness (confidence) to buy goods and services, banks willingness to lend, the willingness of business to invest. The market environment determines the prevailing attitude. The example illustrates how a small adjustment in the market environment can change attitudes. Big government and small government A good way to measure how bloated a government is what proportion of its budget it spends on recurrent costs like salaries. How much of the dollar or any currency is left to directly produces the desired effect is another way to judge it. It can also be judged by comparing how much it costs the private sector to achieve the same goal. There are governments in small countries spending 70 percent of their budget on running costs. Like building a one hundred thousand dollar house and spending seventy thousand on the workers. It certainly won’t go very far. Some of the workers would be idle most of the time and a common sight in the government offices of many countries. This is in sharp contrast with what exists in the forest. Its animal life are its regulators (the regulator is always higher up in the food chain) Yet they are not obvious in the rainforest. It will take deliberate searching to find the animals of the rainforest. Lesson The regulators of the market should not be obvious. Most arms of government should not be obvious. The exception is the police, schools and hospitals. When the regulators of the economy or government become obvious there is need for a review of efficiency and freedoms. Where do I put my money? Put your money on yourself. This is the practice in the rainforest. Plants do not delegate their resources to second or third parties. Lesson I advocate that if you can you should manage your money yourself because money induces extreme behavior. The more direct control you have over your money the better. The more people handling your money the greater the risk. The bigger the amounts they are holding the greater the risk. It is a squared risk; like gravity. It is the 7x7 principle. That is to say if your money was one mile away and had seven chances of being lost, when its 2 miles away the chances of it getting lost is 49. This is just a hypothesis but it should be a good working hypothesis. The implication is to be careful with your money. Anyhow you have to trust people. A second option is to participate in investment cooperatives- groups of laymen investors who jointly supervise their investments. The essence is to avoid middlemen. Middlemen like fund managers taker a premium and reduce your profit, even when they may not be doing a good job. They may not be doing anything you cannot do yourself. Worse they may be doing what you wouldn’t do. Taking too much risk. You should also not grope in the dark but do all you can to improve your competence at investing, like participating in seminars and workshops, and reading books. When in doubt consult an expert, even for a fee. Secondly it is possible to avoid the stock exchange altogether which without doubt has a casino component. There is a lot of speculation going on. In real business with physical nuts, bolts, and an address it is hard to lose everything. If a business fails the proprietor often will salvage some parts of it. Therefore it is good to consider starting a physical business which you run as your second job or your first job, for that matter. Modern technology makes it much easier to manage a company remotely. You could see it’s accounts everyday if you choose to from the comfort of your bedroom on a computer. You could make transactions from anywhere, even from another continent using even a mobile phone. Likewise it is not necessary to be physically present to hold meeting, or to speak face to face. As for Wall Street bonuses, they are very emergent. You don’t muzzle the ox that threads the grain. If these people process billions upon billions it is only fair they should share in it. They do very important work which requires the highest level of integrity. They must be compensated to have a good life to stave off corruption. If someone thinks they are overcompensated he should consider the cost of corruption. And why the fuzz, they “don’t pay themselves”. Someone thinks they are worth the pay. If it were not so others would be in the jobs for less. Look what was found at Westminster were MP’s had been dipping into the public till and making exaggerated claims. See how many people play the lottery. SEASONS: In the rainforest flowering, fruiting and breeding are seasonal. Some plants are annual (complete their life once a year), some are biennial (complete their life twice a year). Most trees are perennial (permanent). The life of plants is integrated with the seasons. The seasonalities are because the rains are seasonal; a pollinator, like a particular insect, breeds at a specific time; because a particular flower is in bloom at a particular time; or a particular fruit is available at a particular time. The rainforest is very efficiently synchronized and its members inter-woven. The main determinant of when events happen being the seasons. Lesson Some businesses are seasonal because demand for their products are seasonal; their raw materials are seasonal; or the climate allows their activity only during a particular season of the year. Like companies that need the waters of a lake frozen for their trucks to pass, or ships that need sea ice to thaw, or loggers whose roads turn to mud in the wet season. Every business must integrate seasonal trends in its planning to maximize performance. Christmas is a common season for many sectors especially retailers. It is an example of how a season could be exploited to the benefit of business. Businesses must study the trends through the year for seasonal opportunities to exploit. There may be a gain to be made and a loss to be cut. Performance can be notched up a few percentages. Diversity The rainforest is a system which optimizes diversity. There is every possible kind of plant based on every possible kind principle built up in every kind of way. If the rainforest were the market there will be Mercedes cars with Toyota engines right off the line, Fords with BMW transmissions… all kinds of blends. There are all ways of being in the forest; each taking advantage of a narrow advantage to exist and propagate itself. The porcupine survives in the midst of lions by means of protective spines it bears on its back. This is its principle for existing. The tortoise caries a shell by which it protects itself. The elephant is big and unassailable, still another principle for existing. Lesson What is the rationale for your business? What is your principle for existing in the market place? It is important to seek unique advantages for your business… two, three, four or five which give you specific advantage in the market place. This is what will guarantee the success of your business. It may be there as part of your business plan but it may not. There may be nothing unique about your business at all that makes customers come in and not go to your competitor. That would be terrible. It says you are totally dependent on chance to bring some customers to you. If the competitor has unique advantages over you then the odds are indeed stacked against you. You must remedy the situation immediately. Possible unique advantages are: 1.Cheaper prices. 2.Guaranteed high quality 3.Ethical production practices. 4.Good environmental record. 5.After sales services 6.Charitable causes 7.High level of mastery of the field, capable of giving good advice for free informally in the cause of business. 8.Good customer service 9.Proximity to clients. 10.Nationalism. This has been used by the American auto industry. Development There are veritable forests in the ocean: coral reefs where warm mineral and organically rich water from inland mixes with ocean water. Shellfish called coral flourish here. Their shells are made of chalk, which forms a deposit when coral dies. Eventually this rises above Let us examine the effect of introducing inorganic fertilizer in the rain forest. This has inadvertently the sea floor and provides a system of shelter for teeming marine life. When inorganic fertilizer used in industrial agriculture runs off into the ocean often it has produced a red bloom of phytoplankton growing excessively and using up the oxygen in the water so that fish suffocate. If Aid is given to the rainforest in the form of inorganic fertilizer we could expect a similar reaction: one species growing out of balance and suffocating others. The political class of developing countries becoming super rich and suffocating their citizens. Lesson Aid can be deleterious to growth. This is not to say there is no place for aid. There certainly is. American aid is saving lives from HIV/Aids as I write. This is a missed legacy of President George W. Bush. He saved tens of thousands of lives of HIV/Aids, malaria and tuberculosis victims. And saved their countries a good measure of economic and social ravaging. He made Aids look better: adding some weight and dressed in nice clothes. Where went the pictures of skinny bones and lifeless eyes? George W. Bush did the most to put them away through PEPFAR (President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief). He also made a personal contribution, he danced! PEPFAR turned HIV from a death row for thousands to hospital wards of hope. It is still the bed rock of HIV control in many countries in Africa. But apart from the lives saved it introduced a system of financial accountability new to most of the developing world. The standards where so strict there was almost culture shock. An African political leader can assign monies at a whim. He does not need to show support documents for the phone calls and taxi fares or lunch, he certainly does not have to show evidence of a bidding process for purchases worth $300 of more. He does not have to show the programs he put money to produce the desired result. PEPFAR took ‘first world” fiscal controls to the third world and is training a set of professional, though small, in a new better way of accounting and management. Misdirected aid breeds a class of sharks feasting on the populace. PEPFAR is channeled through religious organizations mostly and not at all through government. Lesson The lesson from the forest is to follow every pathway to development. Aid and trade; raw materials, manufacturing and services; free trade in some sectors, protectionism in others. CORRUPTION: Corruption breaks the cycle of money. In the rainforest plants use energy from the sun to make complex substances like starch, oils and protein which they use to build their tissues. They make seeds to propagate the system, and when they die they are broken up and all the entirety of the estate bequeathed to the public. It is a life of service to the forest. If a plant were a business person a tribute would read like this: He worked hard from sunrise to sunset building his company, he worked with as many partners as he could find, he was generous to his enemies, he never slacked at giving out seed money to help start companies anywhere there was one to be started. And when he died he gave all away. Corrupt persons steal wealth out the economy and generally put it to uses that are economically inferior: private as against public, consumptive as against investing. Often they take it outside the economy altogether. It has been said that the purpose of organisms is to pass their genes to the next generation. But what good is that when they die and don’t know about it? What function is passing on genes to the next generation to the parent organism. This is philosophically flawed and illogical. The unit in operation here is the ecosystem not the single organism. It is simply managing the wealth of its gene pool. Even beyond this t he abundance of its phenotypic manifestations. Genes are only a code, the building plan. It is the ecosystem perpetuating itself in strength, wealth and beauty. Every member of the ecosystem serves this purpose in life and in death. Lesson The animals and plants in nature is utterly selfless. This is seen when nature is regarded as one functioning whole. Looking at individual organisms we see violence. Humans clearly not in service to nature. The whole of nature is our prey. We learn from nature (and from the rainforest) of the need to be in service to a greater whole. We need to be in service to our communities. Our superintendence over nature (being able to take it captive and use it to ruin, abuse it) says we are above it and not part of it. Our refusal to use violence against ourselves says the same for violence is a currency in nature. Finally our realization of the need to manage nature to last (sustainable development) confirms we are in possession of it. ALL FOR MARKET: With profit driving almost all ventures it seems the emotional aspects of life been replaced by production, skill set, paying bills, buying and selling. People seem to have become like plants. Sensation is used to compensate for emotion. We tickle the senses rather that the mind; with drugs, porn, and sex. Sex is base product. Anybody can sell sex. Selling products on sex is not creative. It reduces to the lowest common weakness. Sex is not a commodity in the rainforest. Sex is a quintessential biological process. Effort encouraged by reward. Like going to the loo, eating, drinking, sleeping, coughing, and scratching. Without the reward of pleasure none of these things would get done much. But sex has been hyped into a billion-dollar industry. Prisons disease, sex, and war have also been monetized. Social development has been taken to the market as social entrepreneurship. It is the right way as long as we remember we are human with morals and emotions. It is right to copy the rainforest even as we remember we are not trees. Lesson While we take lessons from the rainforest we must remember that people are not plants. We cannot reduce society to buying and selling. We are humans we do not live on id. BUBBLES: Bubbles form in the economy when the economic mood is euphoria. Usually the hard facts about commerce are not known and nobody checks. The general excitement keeps everyone looking to make money. Also the regulations are usually lax or unenforced so that people actually carry out their dreams and not their judgments, which are anyways compromised by inordinate optimism. The price of stocks is pumped up on a good feeling. That is why the sex industry is an everlasting bubble; it is perpetually hyped on a good feeling. The same reason why the narcotic market never slumps-the good feeling. It takes national calamities like war to burst these two bubbles. This is not advocating for war. Bubbles do not develop in the rainforest because there is an inbuilt bubble-preventing system. The size of the animal population in the forest is dependent on the availability of food. An increase in the availability of food will produce an increase in the animal population. This will check the bubble that is forming as it feeds more on the vegetation. Lesson It is high time anti-bubble instruments are built into the economy. An early warning system. Runaway growth of a sector of the economy should raise alarm. GLOBAL WARMING: This is the supposition (correct or incorrect) that the average temperature of the surface of the earth is increasing as a result of human activity. Greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and sulphur dioxide have the ability to retain heat. It is said that human activity including burning hydrocarbon fuels has caused the concentration of the greenhouse gases to increase and so more of the sun’s heat is retained in the earth’s atmosphere. The opposite opinion is that warming and cooling are normal cyclic events on the planet. If the planet warms up the amount of rainfall, among other climate parameters will change. How they may is not known at present. They rainforest may become dry and like the Savannah, loosing most of its trees .Other regions may receive heavy rainfall and develop rainforest. The Sahara desert and other deserts may yet become forests. Who knows what good may come out of this supposed evil? Indeed this may be a challenge that renews the planet. It is possible a warmed planet may end up with more arable land and more fresh water. If Global warming turns to be adverse as is proposed then we are not doing the right things. The mode of personal transport by which it takes one ton of machinery to move one person (70kg/150 pounds) is ludicrous. Spaceship earth is not gonna make under such circumstances. Lesson It is very possible global warming will not turn out that bad. There are too many deserts on the planet which would benefit from more precipitation. Fresh water is already in short supply while sea water is abundant. A temperature rise will definitely produce more humidity. If this results in more precipitation in the right places… bingo! DEBT The scale of human debt on planet earth is telling, but fortunately it is not owed to the planet. The rainforest owes no debt. It replaces what it takes. Man on the other hand has perfected borrowing. It is almost possible to borrow against a lifetime’s production. The mortgage seems to mean debt till death. It is however fair to say that lending and borrowing has evolved to be very helpful towards improving the standard of living of the masses. Many earn enough to be able to buy one house in their lifetimes. The mortgage enables them to live in them while they earn the money. The only bizarre side to this is that you need a credit record to be able to borrow. As if borrowing is now a virtue everyone must partake in. Lack of a credit record because of not having ever borrowed (which used to be a virtue) precludes from borrowing. Not ever having needed to borrow but functioning in society and living a good standard is not good enough; you have to show that you can handle the state of indebtedness. So you borrow not of need but for the sake of building a credit record. Lesson You can choose never to borrow. But if you may borrow need a credit record. As you get about this remember that trees in the rainforest do not borrow. This is the ideal state. Borrowing is buying money: you pay more for less. So maintain a negative attitude towards it even if you need to use it. Pay back on time because the more you keep the money the more expensive it becomes. It is like renting money. Partnership. Some animals select their mating partners very carefully. Some do this through bird song. The female bird selecting a male with a strong voice indicating good stock. Some animals use the mating dance. The male has to strut strong to persuade the female. For others the males fight amongst themselves. The dominant male has definitely proved itself to be of good stock. Where both parents participate in caring for the young these tests have an extra benefit as they also prove fitness and good health. Lesson When establishing a partnership rigor must be applied in checking the potential partner to be a healthy business, and compatible. Compatibility between workforce and processes should be checked. Compatibility between management also needs to be looked into. Differences could be reconciled, kor the partnership or merger botched. INFLATION This is the hiking of the price of goods and services. It could happen that the economy is performing extremely well (too well) that it’s gobbling up goods and services in the process of production that prices go up… the economy competing against itself. The price of food increased when in 2010 when food products were being used to produce biofuel. On the other hand the economy may not be producing enough that its currency depreciates in value. This is made worse if the economy is strongly dependent on imported goods. The rainforest does not have the fluctuations seen in the market. Warranting a close look to see why and possibly remove the fluctuations that mar the market. This book documents these lesson from this examination which are applicable to entrepreneurship, management and micro and macroeconomics. Lesson There are three reasons why the fluctuations seen in the market are not seen in the rainforest. 1.Full employment. The rainforest manages to get all its members working. So there is enough produced that the idea of inflation is not possible. Also there is no possibility of a recession with the extremely high level of productivity that obtains. 2.There are in built negative feedback mechanisms preventing spurious events like bubbles and crashes in the economy of the rainforest. It is the animal life at the top and the saprophyte, (recyclers) at the bottom. Abnormal growth in the vegetation/plant life elicits growth in the animal life which checks the abnormal growth in the plant life. Too rapid death in plant or animal life will cause an increase in the soil quality and result in growth to restore the density or size of the forest. 3.Failure of the feedback mechanism will produce an unstable situation whereby debris accumulates in the forest making it prone to fire. An overgrowth will eventually increase the debris load as plant material dies, if the recyclers cannot handle it. Too rapid death of plant material will do the same. Eventually a fire will result as tinder is ignited. This will thoroughly burn the forest and restore equilibrium. The influence of culture on business. A strange thing it is that a hair-cut in the America is priced twenty times more than in the developing world. Comparatively a loaf of bread is priced about twice. It seems the job of a hair-dresser is valued than the job of a baker. American culture celebrates the barbers shop in film and music. Indeed a barber is expected to do more than cut hair; he is supposed to engage the client in interesting conversation. This is cultural. There are no emotional factors at play in the rainforest. Lesson The lesson is to remember that cultural factors may modify the outcome of business or economic interventions. Growth Probably one of the things everybody knows about plants is that they grow. It’s come to the notice of all of us and we see it’s consistent, the plant growing day to day. Indeed plants unlike animals never, absolutely never stop growing. Do you know many a business do not have growth in their plans and some have no plans at all. As long as the family’s needs are met inventory is replaced and business goes on as usual, then same trod. I find this shocking. The level of passivity in some businesses is scandalous. A proprietor who is disconnected from the business leaving it to the shopkeeper who feels he doesn’t have the power to do run the shop as a shop should be run. Or afraid or unwilling to take responsibility. Content with getting his meager stipend on time. Well this is simply blind business. Plants grow minute by minute, are fully aware of their environment. And respond accordingly. Lesson 1.Active management is the way to run a business. It entails deliberately performing the activities that constitute the business, not passively, not spontaneously, not sporadically. Actively trying to deliver highest quality performance in every department. For example in restocking inventory to sit down and make a draft of four or five possible sources of every item, and invite quotations from these. The customer’s opinions and sentiments are actively sort out. A letter box at the front is not sufficient. Talk to them actively with purpose to know what they want, how satisfied they are, how often they come, where else they go to. And who they are, what they do, their household situation (family size, number in household)… this is called profile. A questionnaire comes handy here. Use it to satisfy the customer more, to get more business from him or her and to plan your business. How could you get the customer more satisfied? What is he or she not pleased about? If she is buying for others in her household how could you get them more satisfied? How could you get her relations and friends to patronize you? What other goods or services does she source from elsewhere that you can offer her? The other businesses she goes to what are their principles for existing in market-their competing points. What are their weaknesses? 2.Finally a company needs a growth plan. Have your team think about it. Study other companies of comparative size and bigger in your line of business. Then sit down with your team and have a meeting in which you draw a growth plan including a time line, strategy, and activities that will lead to its fulfillment. Franchise What kind of franchise do you want to build? An outlet on every street or a depot in every county. Indeed in some forests some trees will seem to be almost ubiquitous while others occur only periodically. The difference is mostly in the fundamental nature of the plants. One effectively invades a territory while the other punctuates the landscape. Lesson Know the fundamental nature of your business. A grocery retail franchise should be on every street. An auto distributor should be one or two for a city. Electronic and home equipment distributors should be somewhere in between. PROFIT Profit drives commerce. Yet it has a bad connotation in some circles. The left wing continues to nag big business. International economic forums are besieged by anti-capitalist protesters. All bemoaning profit- making. There is talk of exploitation of the masses and disregard for the environment. But these are frivolous reasons given to excuse left wing militancy that has only one way to interpret successful profit-making. The concept of profit simply seems unjust to them. They have discomfort at the idea of investing for profit, it seem inferior, unrefined and greedy. The practitioners of the seam base in their perception and next to con men and thieves. They’d rather be involved in high thought and deep reflection about the state of man. It is amazing that they don’t see that business is the machine by which social hopes and dreams are actualized. That business is indispensable. The closest thing to profit for plants in the rainforest are their stores. These are quite substantial in some species. They are for future use. Lesson Store part of your profit. : 24/7 It is uniquely human to sacrifice sleep.The biological functions run on a clock, and all of life keeps time. But man defies, this clock even with the help of drugs,.to maximize the twenty four hours in a day. Artificial light makes has made this possible. There is even complaint of light pollution at night where migratory birds are disoriented. And you hear of nightlife. Well the real nightlife are the night shift workers, some permanently working nights and sleeping day. While this novelty came with industrialization it is an integral part of the rainforest specifically and nature generally. There must be some in the developed world do not know the sight of total darkness. No sight. Inside the forest it gets dark quick, beginning a new phase of the day whereby another kind of life emerges, nocturnal life. The night is important in the rainforest and very active. It is distinctly noisier than during the day with crickets screeching, snakes hissing, frogs croaking and a lot of other specific sounds. Humans are copying the forest with the evolving 24/7 culture. We rise early with the aid of coffee, some more coffee through the day, and stay awake into the night to get entertained. Meanwhile, the night workers go out. Lesson 1.You are only full capacity when your business does not sleep (except Sunday). 2.Why so much noise in the forest at night. It seems to contradict the purpose of emerging when the predator is incapacitated by darkness. He is indeed incapacitated and will not come out. Some however hunt at night. The sounds are calls, saying here I am. It is understandable to emit to sound when visibility is low to signal presence. The lesson here is that these sounds may be superior for sirens and alarms. It would be good to study the physiology of these “organic sounds” SAFETY Modern societies spend much of their budgets on safety. Probably every manufactured good in the developed world is checked for safety. Thus the ubiquity of safety labeling. There are massive institutions ensuring and enforcing safety: the fire department, the police, emergency health services, life guards, air traffic controllers etc. Nature pays no less attention to safety. Big ears that can be moved around like radar, keen eyesight, and strong sense of smell, herd behavior, hard shells, deadly poison, thorns and spikes are nature’s safety departments. The heavy investment in safety by industrialized societies and increasingly so by developing countries must account for a good part of the gains in life expectancy and must have an impact in reducing disability. However many a safety label says the very obvious and are only written to ward off litigation. To what other uses could the cost of writing these warnings be put? Or what a boost it may be to business to have this money freely available to apply in their businesses? How many more jobs could be created? It is important that one’s business has thorns and briars to ward off competition, a hard shell to withstand a burden of regulation, deadly belladonna poison to ward off corruption and bristles to ward off litigation. Lesson The correct approach to competition in business is hostility. He prospers at your loss and to your detriment. Live and let live should only be because there is a stalemate: you can’t eliminate him and he can’t eliminate you. This is not a personal conflict and should not be extended to persons. That is for gangs. It is akin to sport. You are looking for a knock-out. You should always hold your counterpart in respect. Facing outsiders to the business community there should be esprit de corps. Interpersonal kindness is not forbidden. But as long as your two businesses are still separate, seeking the same customers, suppliers, and workers it is safest for you to be in war mode. Regulations are a cog in the wheel of business. This is not saying they may not be just. But it pulls against the direction of the business and imposes inertia. Business should be averse to unreasonable regulation and dissident to regulatory excess. You should not tolerate graft in your business. Fire, recovering all you can. Unless the immediate departure of the culprit is overwhelmingly damaging. Avoid litigation, but if it comes make it not worth the while for your opponent. Do this to deter others. In doing warfare and deterring litigation there is always the risk of incurring a bad image. This is not helpful so strike a balance. Your business should not stop you the fine gentleman that you are. The point is to be pragmatic in business practice and not allow sentiments mislead you. HEADSPRING OF MONEY Headwaters of rivers are often attributed heath promoting qualities. Plants were the first to value living on the waterfront. Their leaves are always green. They flourish in season and out of season. Government is a waterfront and a headwaters of wealth. Thus hanging close to it you will not run dry. It is also an inefficient spender so there is a better chance of landing good deals supplying or servicing it. Follow the money to Iraq or anywhere the spending is happening. If you can win a woman’s love, you can win government-love. Government buys almost every kind of good: from groceries to buildings, from tooth picks to missiles. It also buys in scale. Lesson As much as you can try to get government among your customers. 1.Register a company. Government does not deal with nameless parties 2.Get a premises. 3.Make sure all your taxes are paid. How do you expect to get paid when you do not pay your taxes? 4.Learn a bit of the line of business you will push. 5.Make the rounds. You make calls with the heads of ministries and departments, and directors of parastatals. 6.You get familiar with the middle bureaucrats who process money and verify supplies and performance. 7.You get familiar with the field people who generate purchases. Let them know what you make available. Treat them good, they are making you rich. 8.Make yourself dependable. You deliver every time irrespective of the circumstance. 9.Get familiar with other contractors and steal(copy) their act. 10.Hang in the circles. Socialize among the directors and fellow businessmen. Show appreciation in every legal way. 11.Government is a bad debtor. Beware. RUSH! RUSH! There are forty-eight to seventy-two rush hours a day. Rushing to work, rushing for lunch and rushing from work. There are three waves of rush hour running from Tokyo to Los Angeles every day. This is a signature of the planet. Like warring cavalry galloping in a past age of conquest. This rushing never stops. As it settling in Tokyo so it’s picking up in Seoul, as it’s settling in Seoul it’s picking up in Shanghai, then Hong Kong, then Singapore and Kuala Lumpur, then Mumbai, the Dubai, then Mombasa, then Cairo, then Paris, then London, then Reykjavik, then New York, then Dallas, then Albuquerque, then Los Angeles, then Anchorage. From space it will look like ants busy at activity on the forest floor. It never stops. Lesson 1.Don’t get bogged down in anything. 2.Don’t get bogged down in traffic. It’s loss of time and resources. 3.Start ahead of the pack 4.If possible follow customized routines that are more efficient and effective than the general routine that every follows. If you do what everybody does you are probably average. LEAN TIMES and WEIGHT CHECK The wet season in the rainforest is a time of growth and the commencement of the rains is a time of planting for humans. The planting season is a time of leanness for farmers in the developing world as they have to put their reserves in the ground. Food becomes acutely more limited in supply, even as the people work the earth. This could be a time of cleansing; shedding of accumulated weight and bad fat. Along with the diet which is more fresh and less refined this period of increased physical activity and less food may be an annual restoration to optimal health. Somewhat an annual period of fasting. Could this be related to religious fasting? Today we have found ways of breaking free from natural factors limiting food production (a good thing) and developed efficient mechanisms for food storage and distribution. We have been able to produce food all year round for many years now. The bad side is that these improvements were achieved through more mechanization and less manual work; and more of food is refined and industrialized, so they can be eaten far away from places where they were grown. With more food and less physical activity, and indeed a very low percentage involved in agriculture obesity explodes into a pandemic. On the other hand some populations don’t get enough to eat because of natural disasters like drought and floods or man-made events like war. Also poor storage causes a great proportion (a third) of the grain produced in sub-Saharan Africa to be lost. Poor transport infrastructure also hikes the price of grain that gets to the market. These plus a population which has a large segment living on less than two dollars a day turns what should have been an annual period of revitalization into more of an annual period of nutritional deficiency. Fungal decay goes further to cause cancer of the liver from spoilt grain that is eaten. Lesson 1.It should be of benefit in affluent societies where food production is abundant to restore the annual period of leanness. A kind of Lenten period in the general culture where less food is consumed and people take up gardening. You are very unlikely to grow fat if you have to grow what you eat 2.Second: to work more on improving storage in the developing world even as effort in emergency food aid still has its place. If more of the lost grain is salvaged populations would be in a better nutritional state going into crisis and weather it better, the crisis having a milder toll. Perchance they may even be able to stock up more during times of normalcy against the day of disaster. 99 CENTS SAVE 1: $9.99 at a glance really looks less than $10,00, and it is. “Buy one get one free”. “You save $x”. “”Unlimited” Above are some marketing gimmicks in current use. Whatever the gimmick it is certain that it is part of a strategy that is meant to accrue profit. The company has done its calculations. It is like flowers and fruits in the plant kingdom. The flower is decorated in beautiful attractive colors and fine scents that beckon to come. It is like fruit: fleshy, tasty colorful and refreshing. But it is a calculated bargain and covert. The vising insect takes up pollen upon visiting the flower and distributes to others of the ’kind without even knowing it. The animals that visit the fruit-tree disperse the seed in the fruit as they handle it or in their guts after swallowing it. Like drug moles. And they don’t even know it. Is the offer presented to you a real bargain or just a gimmick? Imagine the sales strategy that promises a trial sample absolutely free but to get it you must sign up for further purchased supplies; you can opt out at the end of the trial period but you must return the free sample at your expense. If you do not remember to notify them of your dissatisfaction with the product within the trial period from being very busy you automatically buy more of what you don’t want. The expense and inconvenience of return shipping remaining two more factors working to make it difficult to opt out Lesson 1.Do your own calculations; do not take any sales gimmick at face value. SELLING SHORT What approach should you take in business? Tell lies or tell the truth. The sales encounter is a duel. Generally the seller wants the optimal profit margin. The buyer is trying to get a bargain; he is trying to pay as little as possible for the seller’s effort. This representation may be extreme( for example the fair trade system which tries to pay fair for the labor of farmers in the developing world by paying higher that market price). It depends on the morals system of the individual involved whether to tell the truth. When the businessman chooses the honest approach he must convince his customers that this is his business policy. So he uses it to gain advantage. He should be demonstrably transparent. It does not suffice for him just to be honest. He must be seen to be honest. A few businessmen have even let me into their records just to make a sale. The policy must transcend into a reputation. However even lying businessmen purport to be telling the truth and they may even lie against the honest businessman. You know why you chose the path of truth. You can prove to the customer that the competitor is a liar if this is true and safe to do. TIME: This is one of the shortest resources available to the individual in the modern society. While time is scarce for the individual, man hour is in abundant supply with a good part of the world’s population out of work. This shortage of personal time has resulted in good and bad adaptations. For one social time outside work has reduced. Group social functions like weddings are run to the strict order of time. More specifically time spent in direct interpersonal interaction has reduced: whereas in the past people had conversation over a drink at the bar, or in the living room today people interact with virtual people on screens. People even bond with these. It is more reciprocal at social networking sites like Facebook and dating sites. For once in the history of man it is possible to have hundreds of friends without extra-ordinary public status like being a king, a successful politician or wealthy businessman. The shortage of personal time has spurned time-saving solutions like fast food. This has negative health and social effects. For one, obesity that is now epidemic in the Western world. One good solution for companies is to feed their workers good balanced diets at company canteen like the army does. A civilian version of the chow. Lesson Plants in the rainforest work by day and eat by night. They work by day using sunlight to make carbohydrates from carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. At night ( also by day) they use some of the carbohydrate for energy and convert to oils and protein. 24/7. Maximize your time: 24 6/7 is a good formula. Incorporate rest. THE FAKE INDUSTRY The middle class has never been this large. And I believe the quality of life of the middle class today would be considered plush in a previous generation: automated air conditioning, an array of electronic panels: the phone, personal computer, TV, game console, in the kitchen, washer and dryer. Then the middle class travel in tons of luxury. There is more luxury, sophistication and automation in the cars of today than many a king have had. But looking more closely there have also been psychological solutions and short-cuts. Fake jewelry, fake mink coats, and hand bags, shoes, clothing, watches, media, spare-parts, drugs and money. Every valuable brand has to contend with piracy, which is the Robbinhood of modern times. It enables the person living below a dollar a day to watch the movies that rich film goers in the West are watching. It enables the student in the third world who hardly has enough to eat to use the same software as his counterpart in the West. It makes it possible to set up “business centers” that would not be able to afford original copies of the software they use for their work. It creates jobs and starts off manufacturing. It makes it possible for celebrities to be popular all around the world. On the other hand it prevents people benefitting financially fully from their work. It promotes criminal activity that includes smuggling and bribery. Lesson Plants are totally original. Do not engage in criminal counterfeiting. AN ARMY OF ‘NOVELATORS’: New knowledge is a big driver of innovation. An army of university professors freely investigating every sphere of human existence. The university system is one effective arm of the knowledge exchange: it is designed such that the doctorate degree is earned on the merits of contributing to the body of knowledge. Researchers outside academia are another branch of the army of ‘novelators’. New knowledge is the basis of new inventions and new processes. Lesson Plants and animals in the rainforest are very adaptive to environmental changes. Some are drought resistant, others pest resistant… It is because their genes are always changing while the environment is favoring the plants that have gene changes that make them do better. These accumulate from generation to generation to produce plants adapted to the environment. In a way this amounts to continuously trying out new ways of doing things until a near perfect system is built. Do likewise with intelligence that you have as a Homo sapiens. OUTSOURCING Most industrialized countries are outsourcing brain power from the developing world. The USA, the UK and may be others get the crème de la crème of educated brains from the developing world to put finishing touches on. As most of these students stay back to work in these economies it is a jackpot for the host country when it is considered that most of the students pay for their education themselves and a drain on the parent country especially if it trained the student to the point of departure. On the hand these expatriates make remittances to Africa, Asia and South America where they are not going to get the quality of opportunities to enable them put their gifts and talents to maximal use. Outsource goods are a subsidy to the outsourcing countries where it is more expensive to make the same. This benefit is very obvious when the outsourcing country is a poor country. The truth is that it is cheaper to outsource these goods than to make them at home, so there is a savings made. This savings is an opportunity to invest in the area where the country has comparative advantage or reform the inefficient sector. What will the poor masses in the developing world do without cheap imports from China? How will they own personal computers, enjoy surround sound, or HD. How will they treat their sick if not for Indian “outsourced” drugs? Outsourcing is just the western connotation of cheaper sourcing from Asia. It is nothing but the good practice of buying from the best source even if it is outside. Those in the developing world who complain talk of the “dumping of Chinese goods” It is the same phenomenon. Germany however remains very competitive in high tech products against China. A western country is more likely to beat China at selling steam turbines or aircraft engines than television sets. Lesson No sentiments in business, not even nationalism…not in business. Sell anywhere buy anywhere. Look for the best deal, even across borders. Some natural parks get populations of elephants brought in from other park definitely not worried about outsourcing elephants… ABOUT WAGES Wages in the West have been rising for two hundred years. The workers in the West have been getting a fair share of the output of the economy. The rise of competition in China, India, Brazil, Indonesia, and South Africa puts to strain the concord between workers and employers in the West. The cheaper wages obtainable elsewhere will continue to be a threat to wages in the west. The monthly salary of a worker in the west may exceed the yearly salary of his counterpart in China, Indonesia or Vietnam. Plants are generous rewarders for the services of pollination and seed dispersal renders paying generously in nectar and succulent fruit, the workers: insects, animals, man are satisfied and comeback again and again. Not always though: some plants depend on the wind for pollination and have plain bushy flowers offering no reward. Lesson 1.Always endeavor to pay a fair wage. 2.Don’t be shy about cutting wages if it has to be done. MINE vs OURS. In the course of business there would be contact with competitors. It is important to be sure the interests of one’s business are served in the course of these interactions. It said that countries do not have permanent friends but permanent interests; this is true with business to a good extent. So selfish interest is legitimate. It is important to know what one wants in the relationship. What is in it for you? What do you stand to lose not going along? Common interest is not always best interest. Imagine this scenario: a professional with excellent record commits a serious misjudgment in the line of his work. This fellow up till now has an impeccable reputation, but for this one faux pas he becomes pariah in his line of business. Nobody wants him; all blinded to his to his top talent. After he goes out of circulation for a few months and comes back the dust has blown away and he is hired. His first deal for this new employer was the highest ever in the line of business. When common interest lapsed selfish interest prevailed. Mine is mine and ours is ours. Many of the companies regretted not hiring him when they could. In business selfish interest by far supersedes common interest. The rainforest is the sum total of individual plants and animals competing against each other and yet cooperating in subtle ways. Lessons Compete first, cooperate later. THE MISSIONS: EFFICIENT AGENTS OF DEVELOPMENT. The world raves about the new charity-the social entrepreneur. It is not new. It used to be called missions. Churches in Europe and America setting up hospitals and schools in the developing world which charge a little fee for sustenance of the service and by that facility bring modern education and health care to a barely reached population. This is the way the first Africans, and native peoples in many places were educated. Think of two Reverend Sisters in a rural town in Africa with minimal government presence where the nearest hospital is 150 km away. The sisters with the help of the priest rally the people into a construction project, of a very basic type, using the simplest of materials to get two halls built to serve as wards for admitting patients and a few enclosures to serve as an office and store. There goes health care. It starts as maternity service, thirty years later it is the most important hospital in the region. The pioneer sisters went; others came and did their best, trying to live a legacy. The successive efforts of different sets of sisters accumulated. While initially a caesarian required moving the woman two hours to a government hospital over very bad roads, today there is a doctor immediately available to perform the procedure. The sisters do not use chauffeurs; they drive themselves to the city, sometimes outside the region to make procurements. They use an electric generator very skillfully: running it during regular work hours and then three hours at night. And this is the only place in town glowing with electricity for as far as the eyes can see. Their staff of locals feels privileged. Very privileged to be involved in the money economy which supplements their farm work. The money earned is critically important to pay children’s school fees. Staffing the hospital is a critical mass of two doctors and trained nurses working with secondary school leavers who develop on the job. These perform duties ranging from assisting in clinical procedures to cleaning. They are not paid much, but in their economy it’s a lot. From time to time a foreign donor provides a significant capital input for example an up to date laboratory. This little enterprise running on a token makes all the difference for this society. For the fee of one procedure in the developed world the health needs of a community is taken care of. The same social entrepreneurship is put into practice with schools. Under the leadership of a few Reverend sisters or a priest a school is set up charging a token for a fee and proceeds with the most basic of infrastructure, which is added to as the social business grows. Two women in a strange land. They have to deal with traditional authority who may think it’s the prerogative of them and theirs to get treated without paying. They have to deal with rebellious staff: a young lady versus a man in his homeland is a grave match. They have to deal with accusations of impropriety; in such a place a bag of cash is an awesome sight and wonderment could twick the thinking. They also have to deal with insecurity; undue interference by authorities of church and state and they have to generate the revenues to keep the social works revolving. The growth time for trees is counted in years. It is a long steady process. Lesson These are examples of entrepreneurship in difficult circumstances. Be inspired. Face Value. The importance placed on looks varies with the society, but it is universally a positive thing. More important for women than men. It serves for sexual and non-sexual attraction. It has always been as an asset and sometimes a weapon. But no time in the history of man has it carried so much premium. In recent times it has been appropriated and used as a resource. Especially in advertisements, but much more in show business. This intensive use of beautiful faces has not only helped sell an untold number of goods and services, it has shaped part of the psyche of a generation to place a high value on looks, “the look”. A moderate desire to look good is very healthy, but in excess is a harbinger of problems. Anorexia Nervosa is a psychiatric condition related to weight- watching. The patient regurgitates food after eating out of fear of gaining weight. Overtime they become severely malnourished and under-weight. To mitigate unhealthy weight status in young women the fashion industry does not hire women of Body Mass Index below a minimum. A BMI of 18.5 at least or a doctor’s note is now prerequisite for working as a model in France. The exaggeration of the importance of the face has been named as a cause of anxiety about their looks in young girls. The biological and social value the face as an organ must not be underplayed. It is an organ of identity; an elaborate organ of communication capable of expressing a whole range of emotions. It is one of the most sensitive parts of the body and is among the body parts with the highest supply of blood. It is made of mostly muscle. The last part is that it serves in sexual and non-sexual attraction, like a flower, selling the individual by the pleasantness or desirability of beholding it. While beauty has been put to profitable use in the past it is only from the last century that it was sold and bought as a commodity. There is no begrudging the putting of natural endowment: whether beauty, athletic ability or physique, or any other gift to work. The concern here is the adverse effect of this excessive commodification of a human attribute. When such goes wrong humans are hurt. What is in a face? People should definitely not be taken at face value. The content of the character is what counts. But old age may be despised for this self-same reason. Older people may feel low self-esteem in the public space. One way this may manifest is to put up pictures of their much younger selves by up to thirty to forty years in media or physically. If this is not outright dishonest it does not seem dignified as becomes of an older person. But there was a time when old age was celebrated as wise. Now, for certain, older people are generally richer than younger people. The old people of today were the cool people of yesterday. Check out their music, their movies, their cars etc. With every generation more liberal and wilder than the former it is important to watch when the border of insanity is reached. There is more divorce now, more drug use and less respect. On the other hand people live longer now, earn more and have better machines to lighten and sweeten-up their lives. This is not to idealize the good old days at all. But a wrinkled face at the age when it is expected is not a bad thing. Old people may damage their dignity by indulging in degrading activities inappropriate for their, dressing inappropriate for their age and seeking rejuvenation that may bring embarrassment. There is an age appropriate level of look- enhancement that will not be outrageous, for all ages. Exercise is good for the health. It is important to keep up one’s spirits. The elderly must not let displacements of the social order bring them under duress. If you can manage to look as young as your children or grandchildren good for you. Do not spend a fortune in this quest. You could make quite some happiness with your family using the same money. And you should bequeath something to your progeny. Trees and never stop growing. Never!!! Lesson 1. If the business is your own you fix your own retirement age, if it all. 2. Reptiles too never stop growing; this is bad news to some. Don’t be a unpleasant reptile in your business, even though you own it. Power Behavior There is a way of doing for the boss. There is a way of talking, and there is a way of walking. A dominant behavior. It is a conduct speaking of the possession of authority. There is a conduct appropriate for the boss that is not appropriate for the underling. A boss not conducting as a boss will seem out of place. He may even be damaged and loose authority. An underling behaving like a boss will draw ire. Before we examine some power behaviors let me state that pride and arrogance are not what we are talking about. Sometimes I wonder whether power behavior is innocent and appropriate and not born out of pride. But a king sits on a throne, would he be said to be proud? Power behavior at its highest is seen with royalty. For some it’s more of airs, they do not live it up. Some would maintain to the death. Protocol is formalization of power behavior. I observed once that after a fire convoy arrive a site, everybody else disembarked but the General. Does he not have two hands and two feet? Can he not pull a hose? What will this do to his ability to control the men? The vehicle may be a sort of headquarters from where to direct operations. But familiarity breeds contempt. The dress also speaks. Managers, lawyers and bankers use blazer suits which speak of honor, good sense and responsibility. “No craziness with your money y’all…’ The high table is supposed to increase visibility for the main business at a gathering, at the same time bringing the most important parties together. Seating arrangement by itself also speaks. The boss is usually at the head of the table. The boss does not get involved in banter with underlings. He may with a very select group of very senior staff and usually in exclusion of juniors. He does not allow himself to argue with a junior, nor be taught by a junior. The value of particular behaviors is to be assessed for individual situations. Not acknowledging to have learnt a new thing from may pass for arrogance. It may cause junior officers to withhold information. On the other hand opening up to learning from juniors may damage the boss’s credibility. It may very well be that a bit of the juniors want to see this powerful man humiliated. A damaging rumor may be generated from a very innocuous incident. Some juniors need to reaffirm themselves. Who else but the boss man to prove themselves against? The boss takes courtesy. He takes the big seat meant for him, the choice wine at the company gala and allows himself to be waited on. Receiving these advantages distinguishes him from the crowd whose members would therefore recognize him. There may be passive messaging and a subconscious acquiescence. The boss does not drive himself. He takes the back seat. If in a bus he will take a fore seat. The It is important to understand power behavior or authority behavior. Because it is unspoken offence could go unawares. Power behavior is not uniform so it is important to learn the boss. This behavior is very common and strongly formalized in some animals. On the order hand some managers do not display much distinguishing behavior. It is interesting to see how they manage to retain authority. They do not manifest authority in their persons but in the rule and regulations that govern the organization. Hence they are safe. The laws are there to invoke. These are two management styles. One democratic, the other autocratic (for simplicity) but there is a place for both. Where the boss is weak, and does not have much support for example because he is challenged by other managers or strong axes of juniors like unions he may find it better to take a less aggressive attitude. In case of conflict the laws will serve. A popular beloved boss, an owner or his son, where there is no significant opposition can afford to be a lord. In fact he may be most effective this way. No matter how effective the boss is it is always going to be easier to replace him than a critical mass of the workforce. I know of a female manager who went out of her way to serve her company. She joined daily in the production blue collar section. She still lost the job. And the company was doing well and not as well since she left. You can never know where the fight will come from. It came from the host community. America and socialism There is no way not to talk about market systems: capitalism and communism. This was the most important theme of the twentieth century and cost much in lives and wealth. Its historic and psychological legacy is still prominent and effectual in the countries that were most polarized about the way to make and distribute wealth. In America Socialism is near taboo. Attributing it to a politician is about the highest negation there is, next only to outright treason. And so President Obama is disdained by some who judge him to be a socialist. They site his healthcare reform as evidence of this. They state he is trying to make a Europe out of America. Some accuse of his administration of promulgating a burdensome load of regulation. Looking more closely, what is it about the American model that American’s so undyingly cherish. The country is lagging behind some European countries in many respects: education, health care and infrastructure being three. For one American’s are convinced they have the greatest amount of individual freedom, including the liberty to get rich. This is historically true as the country was founded on guarantees of personal freedoms. Historically it has been a place for unashamed open pursuit for wealth. It still makes more billionaires than any other country. Americans dread loosing this freedom to get super-rich. It may not be valid today that Americans have the greatest personal freedoms in practice. But what is so bad about socialism? What is so bad about Europe? What is so bad about the British Labour Party and Tony Blair? Or the socialist parties in France, Italy or Germany. What is a paradox is that a country that is distinctly more religious than Europe is wary of taking up a system that at least openly proposes stronger measures to take care of the poor. Redistribution is almost an abominable concept to some in America. What is more wealth redistributing that Christianity in which the early Church sold property and surrendered the funds at the Apostle’s feet to distribute according to need, not according the size of contributions. This is what communism purports to do without God. But it is not possible without a factor that inspires self-denial and promises to reward it. There is indeed a Christian socialist party in Germany. It is peculiar that it is the party that takes a stronger position for God and Godly tenets that seems to be more selfish. Indeed atheism was a working instrument of socialism in most places and on most occasions by far in the last century. The atheistic attribute alone would be expected to engender concern in a country like America where a great majority believes in the existence of God. Religion is the opium of the masses, this was said derogatorily but that was the mistake with communism. Religion is indeed the opium of the masses: giving peace that passes all understanding. This is exactly what opium does; it gives peace where there should be turmoil, only it ravages the user to destruction and death. It is this peace that passes all understanding, this new psychology that soothes the one who sells his land and gives the proceeds for redistribution. Thirdly is the oppressive nature of socialism. Eastern socialism uniformly oppressive. Being unnatural, irrational and contrary to human nature, and failing in its promise was driven with a stick. Americans therefore disdain such a system. Finally socialism being leftist accommodates liberal views about abortion, human embryonic stem cell research and will predictably do so for new issues that may arise. Some may be seeing this angle too. How have Americans fared under the American model? The biggest weakness might be that there has not been enough shared responsibility on the big social spheres of health and education as there has been on defense. The private citizen is left to fend for himself where the insurance model of collectivism and communalism should be implemented. Everybody making a contribution so those who have need do not find it too daunting. The insurance model demonstrates how the economy should be mixed. Communal sharing of risk for the biggest social issues while people are free to pursue private enterprise to any extent and every extent. The use of the word communism does not include its abusive and atheistic connotations, just the cooperative element. Failure to cooperate at the level of the state to take care of major issues common to all like healthcare leaves young adults with businessmen’s debt of the order of hundreds of thousands of dollars for obtaining university education and some patients bankrupt. Is it really alright for the sick to compete among themselves to purchase treatment? Like competing for groceries. The intensity of the competition for goods, the demand, is a major price determinant. While the availability of groceries, the supply, exceeds the demand (hence the stocks on the shelves) it is the reverse for healthcare where waiting and lists are the norm. So the price of healthcare is what it is. Worse because the short fall cannot be made up by importation as will be the case with almost all other services. Thirdly the sick can hardly defer “gratification”. So healthcare as set up in America is highly imbalance in favor of business. When someone who does not fall sick in a year pay one month of his wages for healthcare insurance there is bound to be dissatisfaction. Secondly the very service may be highly inefficient and so incurring high costs. A friend of mine went through three courses of antibiotics for a cough. The earlier two courses were almost certainly a waste if there was a means of making this third choice of antibiotics in the first place. There is no need to go into further detail as the point is made. Plus the loss in the patient’s productivity. Likewise It is sorry that what should be an inspired pursuit has become a burdensome necessity which is really now the privilege of those who go through it without incurring enormous debt or joggling hardships. The quest for understanding and resolution of mystery has become what it used to be: a rich man’s preserve like in the pre-revolution era where it proceeded at the pace of the leisure of the self-content aristocrat, more like hunting. If high education is of primary national responsibility and a major fulcrum for national development and growth, if it is critical for achieving success in every other social sphere then it should be funded by everybody. Same with health care. America has been so successful militarily because of the collectivization of its sponsorship. If private individuals were left to go to the moon we would still be skimming at the outreaches of the atmosphere and celebrating it. If Americans can collectivize nation- building in Iraq and Afghanistan it is troubling that it cannot collectivize the health and education of its own. Part Three. The Evidence-Based Life- How to maximize your life. Full pilot. Are you living by intention or are you living by reaction? Are you on full pilot or on auto-pilot? Most people are largely passive about life, coasting along except when from time to time they pause to take decisions. They are only reactionary to events occurring in their drift through life. They are not powered but bob along the right side of the law and etiquette, following the routine of the culture they find themselves in. They challenge nothing before it challenges them. Indeed only those things that present an extraordinary obstacle gets their attention. This work is to teach a better way to live that maximizes all opportunities . Where not much is taken for granted, presumption is minimized and decisions are made as much as possible on evidence. REASON This way of life is based on reason. Rationality and pragmatism is the default attitude. The practitioner applies dispartionate analysis to all personal matters: family, business, money etc. He determines the best possible outcome in any situation and pursues that. So this way of life seeks to optimize the benefits of life by the application of logic. Thinking is an important tool. Thinking as against worrying. Emotions are not a reason for doing things. Say a colleague of yours out of envy for your Mercedes buys a Porsche or a Mercedes of a higher class. You feel a seething urge to answer with the purchase of another car. You don’t go along with the emotion , you think and analyze like the costs benefits of a new car superior in status to your friends new Mercedes. Your current car runs very efficiently, the mileage is low, it meets all the transportation needs of your small family: you don’t really need a new car though you are genuinely aggravated. On the other hand how pleasant you think it will be to drive the new edition of a car that has been of excellent standing the country. You have driven an older version and it was beautiful. There have been promos of the newest version on TV and magazines. It is wonderfully updated even with exclusive options. And the price shockingly low. You have been dismissing the desire to purchase the car at the very thought of it but now you seem to have a compelling reason. If you are very rich person you can spend a hundred thousand dollars to get a good feeling at the expense of your friend, it would be a good reason if that’s the best call on you for a hundred thousand dollars (plus the fact that you are going to take possession of a car you fancy) and your conscience and character allows. If none of the previous is true then your good reason is to suffer well your friend’s indiscretion or find a positively adjustable way to handle it. My personal opinion about the first reason: just to hurt back the friend’s feelings, is that it is morally wrong and inferior to forgiving him. And it is for me the optimal option because I am Christian with hope of reward for such altruism. In this lifestyle nothing is done without good reason. The good reason is that which yields the greatest value for money or another desired end. That which takes the least money from you or costs you the least of another valuable parameter. The goal that gratifies the individual is the desired end here. For example you could depart a business conference with the first available flight, or stay an extra day to enjoy the city as your company allows. Not taking the day off would reflect positively in your records, the noting of which could be used to your favor in the future. These are two closely competing options and the choice made must be based on reason; the superior option has to be determined and taken in the evidence-based way of life that seeks to maximize all opportunities. What is there to gain in staying back and touring the city at private expense. 1.Recreation and rest that could result in improved productivity on return to work. 2.Personal knowledge about a new place 3.Possibly, new contacts and networks could be initiated on the tour. All of these will not happen if you return immediately. What are the advantages of going back immediately? 1.Favorable work record. 2.Appreciation by clients and staff These will not happen if he embarks on a city tour. The decision can go anyway but the important lesson is that this logical assessment has to take place. It does not have to be written out unless deemed so for major decisions. It is a running thing of which several happen in a day to ensure only optimal choices are taken every time. This way maximal potential is achieved. The 100m dash typically demonstrates this lifestyle. It last thereabouts ten seconds but there is maximum effort to make the most of each of them. The athlete seeks to reduce his reaction time after the gun goes to the shortest minimum. Then the power down when they accelerate face downward, legs thrusting more backwards; then top speed around midway face forward, and lastly throwing the head forward at the finish. Of all the examples there may be to illustrate the evidence-based life, or maximizing all opportunities, is this event where the sprinter throws his head forward (to reduce his overall time down by at most a few milliseconds by this single event). But he is maximizing every opportunity and letting nothing slip under his armpit. The process has been thought through and analyzed and a methodology to maximize every millisecond developed. This evidence-based life does this for a lifetime. There are many theories put forward on being successful but this has the greatest guarantee of success, only barring circumstances beyond the control of the practitioner. I believe God has the ultimate prerogative. He admonishes diligence repeatedly, and there is no diligence greater than making every second of your life count. What school should your child go to: one in the highbrow part of town where the diplomats and CEO’S place their children or the community school of the type you went to and are satisfied about because it prepared you adequately for the further education you undertook to achieve your dream? You wonder. They pay so much at the diplomatic school. You look closer and find there is extra-curriculum like ballet, musical instruments and such that the children learn. Their learning environment is posh and basic activities are enhanced with tech. The food is priced with exclusivity, there are expatriate teachers and there will be an excursion to a foreign country. The community school is basic; the teachers are hardworking and firm and insist on seeing progress by the day from their students. The children don’t learn guitar because it’s not core-curriculum. In all the top range of performance in this school matches that of the diplomatic school though the low end of performance is worse. You are concerned about character formation at the rich school and exposure to drugs. Where do you send your child who is a disciplined self-aware hard-working kid? He has always been in the top ten percent of his class. You may decide to send your child to the community school and watch his progress closely in the initial period. You save money. The diplomats have their governments paying for their children and the CEO’s their companies. In exchange for ballet your child may learn some useful street sense. The lower end of performance at the community school very likely comprises children with problems who do not go the diplomatic school. The evidence-based life requires one to be self-aware. This means that the senses are set to be fully observant of oneself and one’s environment, the information gathered being applied to logic and used to dynamically adjust decisions and actions. TENACITY It’s been said that winners don’t quit and quitters don’t win. Tenacity is about persistence. Not stopping. Refusing to be defeated. Well good tenacity knows when to stop and change course or stop altogether to cut losses for some ends are dead ends and a few ideas are unworkable. Most of persistence is shear grit, stamina and determination. Endurance! But it has to be maximized by basing the decision to continue on evidence that there is a chance of success. When it is so the opportunity to change cause will not be missed or resources wasted by trying too long or too much. It is important to remember that there could be amazingly simpler alternative methods that leave you shocked and others disappointed that waste was incurred in the multiple persistent attempts. Chance also has a role to play. Letting sometime pass may cause you to choose more workable options when you resume the process. Also you will be rested, freshened and clearer. Tenacity implies persisting for as long as you should, changing strategy when you should and stopping altogether without undue prolongation. In military parlance, when do you halt an advance and when do you retreat? How do you relaunch the advance? Fighting to the last man is defeat unless it helps stave off a wider defeat. CONFIDENCE Self-confidence makes a man. A man has got to do what a man has got to do. You don’t let yourself fret. You don’t let yourself be intimidated. Think of the worst thing that could happen if you take the actions you need to take. Not bad at all. Or go the place you have to go, not so bad at all. Think of what could happen if you don’t act. There be less capable and less honorable men than you are taking risk: gangsters, thieves, truants and crooks. There be children in war fronts, single mothers taking it on, and prostitutes out every night with people no one knows to places no one knows. What are you worth? What are you made of? Act now or circumstances will force you to act. If you consider that people do these things to get by then you will not be stopped from pursuing your legitimate ambitions. If you were stranded in the desert wouldn’t you do all you can to survive? What is this round visits you need to make to get publicity for your product? Preachers do that very easily. You think it will be so embarrassing. Think again. The people will certainly behave nicely, society requires that of them. They will be welcoming because they are good people. They will offer you some refreshments and strike up a good conversation because that is what they do. They understand what you are about because their experiences are not much different from yours. To overcome anxiety meeting unfamiliar people the best cure is to go out and get used to it. As you mix and mix you will learn that your fears were baseless. That it is the very life of some: street vendors, salespersons, some security people and even street children could get fully familiarized with dealing with new people all the time. You are top dog, as good as they come, and so you go out and play. SELF-BELIEF Believe in God and believe in yourself. Believe in your ideas. What is your track record of ideation? Have you been scoring hits with your ideas? Are you reasonable? Are you temperate? As long as you don’t dream the far-fetched, and have been told so and it proved to be true you probably have a workable idea. The scale to which may succeed is what may be in question. If you can navigate an hour of dense traffic and come through you probably can execute your plan. If you can organize yourself well and go through college you can organize a job. If your current job is your business. You focus. Self-belief is valuable because many people are in the safety zone. Like plants they cannot change course. Unlike plants they cannot pursue multiple growth tracks. They find a job and stick to it even as they cheer or envy those who have taken their lives into their own hands. It is advisable to keep your ideas to yourself. Very much so during the process of development when it’s still thoughts. You may sound out aspects of it without giving away the story. But when you are going to commit resources to it or get into contracts with others it is important to get your family and backers in support or at least aware. It is sad that discouragement could come from very close sources. Sometimes it is risk aversion; they sincerely don’t want to put what they have in jeopardy. They may not believe kin the project because it does look very good. They may sincerely believe you will not be able to pull it through. It is important to give due thought to all concerns raised about your budding plans. Make adjustment if there be need. If there be a case for it abort. Otherwise carry on. Everything you do apply good judgment and due diligence. A. M. got the idea to start a TV station but had less than ten thousand dollars in the bank which were saving s of many years. He told no body as he got about seeing what is required for a TV station. Just the electricity bill alone was daunting. Now he knew he must not let his wife know until he checked further. They had three children of whom only one had started school. Her case to stop him would be just too easy. One call to A.M’s parents will suffice. A.M scouted for a site for his station and found a suitable place. He was frightened about going to see the owner. Then considering that someone else may get the place while he hesitated he went. He was shocked. The story was that the place had been put up for sale at a very high price many years before. Offers came a little less than the owner wanted but wouldn’t sell. Then months passed without any asking. He stepped the price down. Offers came, a little short, no show. Some months passed and he reduced the price once again. Months passed, years passed. The owner had had enough. Then comes A.M. The owner at this time had two things to put away: the piece of land and the embarrassment. By now people did not come to him to ask and A.M might not have if the grapevine had got him. Anywhere in the city someone indicated interest on a piece of property this goes the conversation. “which property, 15 Kelly street?” ‘Which is that?” “Oh someplace been up for years. They say the owner is not sure whether he wants to sell or not.” “Tell me about it.” “Don’t waste your time.” She dismissed with such confidence you would think she had been there and made an offer for the place. The price was so low that the dream for a TV station was threatened. Ideas were flooding A.M’s mind about reselling the placed and making a buck. Now he could tell his wife or anybody. Certainly nobody is going to be thinking about his credentials in TV ownership. In fact his wife responded in the collective from her first response. “Honey it is such a wonderful thing to think of us operating a TV station.” “It sure is, honey” “I could do the news, you know?” She said, checking herself up. No response. SELF PROPULSION. How do you go on with your idea in the gaze of observers who don’t believe in it. How do you govern yourself? You can govern yourself by policies that you declare privately to yourself. When A.M. was looking for a site for a TV station without money in his pocket he could have compelled himself to finish the list of places to check by making a declaration to himself saying it is policy that he fully investigate the list of places he had made. He could have given himself an order. We are trained to obey orders. From birth we take instructions from parents and family and construct and reinforce a neurological pathway for taking and executing instructions. We develop the concepts of hierarchy, responsibility and accountability; of reward, punishment, dignity and fulfillment. The pathway for processing commands/orders is stronger, more executive, and less susceptible to our desire for convenience. The pathway for processing personal wishes is weaker and more susceptible to our desire for convenience. By channeling our day to day personal intentions through the command pathway our performance is enhanced by adrenaline and other substances so that we don’t fail at the task. This happens before an exam and before a race to improve your performance. It is better than taking coffee; it is fast and permeates all the right places. When facing a task requiring overdrive give yourself an order. Your body will obey as if it came from a superior. It could be as a thought or spoken softly or aloud in a private place. You will notice an instantaneous mood change towards determination. I abhor the use of foreign substances and do not even take coffee, so this passage must not be misconstrued as encouraging the use of performance enhancing drugs. Your body has stocks of them, tell it to release some more because it is now a more intense world than the days of relative ease and much space on farms. Managers can exploit this same concept by giving direct orders when necessary rather than advice and insisting on success at tasks or adverse consequences. It switches the physiology of the worker to a high performance mode. It must be done correctly, because of the risk of hurting, even damaging, another person and valuable worker. A similar mechanism can also be switched on using a promise of reward or extra reward. This is the mechanism behind the million-dollar jackpot for athletes who win all their competitions on the IAAF circuit. HAPPINESS THE HIGHEST GOAL All effort of man is to maintain or achieve the happy state. We work to earn money and supply our needs and of those we are responsible. Lack of these things will bring distress and unhappiness. It is important that happiness is seen to be the ultimate goal so as to be efficient about reaching it and not work in endless circles. What will it take for you to be at ease about your life? All your material needs met, you being in good terms with your loved ones and some money in the bank in case of uncertainty. If this is good enough for you then you know what you need. You go for it. But you don’t have to be unhappy because you lack things, because happiness is indeed a choice. Unhappiness when it is possible to be happy is not optimal. In the absence of physical pain, ill-health and sleep deprivation and in the presence of a sound mind everybody should be happy. By proper cognitive processing- through proper handling of issues. This is how: 1.The only thought you should give to a problem is about how to solve it. Only thoughts that are directed towards solving the problem are allowed. 2.You think and finish. No going over and over, this is worrying. Worrying is useless and harmful to your body and your mind. It causes stomach ulcers, makes you weary and can spiral downward into depression. 3.You take action at the appropriate time. 4.In the meantime be happy. Is anything stopping you? The ultimate score report of the physical life is how much happiness was had not how much money. What good is money if it did not help towards getting happiness? And we hope for a life after this where there is “no more pain and no more sorrow” and a world “free of sorrow and pain”. Happiness is the highest currency and the greatest value. Don’t ever forget this. Look for happiness; look for money as a help to happiness. What good will one trillion dollars do you if you can have it, unless you give much of it away? So money is a help to happiness and a guard against distress. What is your happiness account reading. Open yourself a happiness account and use every opportunity to add to it. Without physical pain, hunger, sleep deprivation or ill-health be happy, even by choice. You make the choice to be happy now. If you can be happy now then worry or fear about the future (near or far) is what keeping you from being happy now. So you do what can be done about the situation today, when you finish you be happy. This is the right thing to do. You maximize your happiness. At the end of life how much happiness you had is what counts most at personal level and is the closest to anything you will be taking with you. Take every opportunity to be happy. It is a good for your health. If you can be happy now but you are not, you are wasting the opportunity. Independence. Never forget you that you are unique and distinct from everyone else. You are uniquely you. You can embrace this and not have to be uniform with everyone else. If you are indeed unique yet you do all same as everyone one else then in some points you are not being true to yourself. You should customize your solutions when necessary. This is not talking about “craziness”. Well if you’re looking to be in the highest possible balance of happiness you couldn’t be “crazy” because like a hippie you may have to leave ordinary society to go and live in a commune. People are all deviated about an average, a little this way, a little that way. For those who are aberrant, like criminals, the first step towards maximizing their happiness in the long term is to desist from aberrant behavior. For all other folk be yourselves as much as you can. Dependence Get contacts, it gives you reach. It’s like having tentacles. It is also having many eyes and many ears. It is a cooperative. A group of persons who have a mutual understanding to look out for each other. It’s an opportunity to employ yourselves more fully, looking out for the interest of others who pay you back by looking out for your interest. It is very helpful to have a rich network of contacts. Give and it shall be given unto you. Spread your bread upon the waters for it shall come back to you. There are kindnesses you show that will comeback. Like kindnesses to people your peers or above. It is a good investment for the importuned time. Helping someone at a time convenience is an investment against a time of your inconvenience. It is money or service given in trust. Indeed it could be buying into the stocks of the beneficiary of the kind act; you could choose your time to cash in. It is also important to give to people who cannot give you back. How do you work best? As an individual or as part of a team? Which do you prefer, specialization or division of labor. How do you like learn a process, in part or in whole. Do what you do best and what suits your situation best. Teamwork is good when the members give of themselves full-heartedly and there is no competition for credits. When there is competition for credits it’s best to work alone. Recruiting a team. If you are not a hermit you are gonna need people. If you have not needed people in your work you may be working too hard all by yourself. Don’t be in the error of thinking other people cannot do it as well as you do. For one they can beat you in a board game or a card game. It’s the same skills. Aptitude tests are used for recruitment, indeed board games and card games could do the same or complement. Even better! Try your prospective employee at a board game and see his intelligence, character, coordination, or respect. Games cover more situations than verbal reasoning and quantitative tests and are applicative. There are different kinds of word games, money games, aggression games, races, story games, coordination games to choose from depending on what qualities you want to examine. You could have prospective employees play against themselves. Board and car games could be used among the employees of a company to examine compatibility, leadership and balance within teams. Well this is a subject for another book.