MLM AND MORALITY.. ..

(Continued from the last Blog)
In this blog I would like dwell on why an ‘employee’ would be bogged down by morality concerns. A person whether he is a professional or otherwise receives a salary in return for services rendered. His life depends on the payment received. So, he tries to distinguish himself by remaining loyal to the employer and the duties enjoined for his job. Thus he is used to a situation where he is close to the “product” and the quality of his produce will eventually be of utmost importance. This habit rubs on to all the decisions he makes even as he rises higher on the rungs of management. Thus he is concerned more about the way the product is made and placed in the market. For the business owner the return on investment is of the highest importance, he is not likely to be tied to the product. If a product doesn’t deliver his ROI he will simply replace it with another!
The case of a business owner being in love with his product is only a possibility with may be the first generation entrepreneurs like Thomas Alva Edison or Graham Bell. As the inventors of the idea they were close to the product. They identify their company with the product rather than the earnings it generates, perhaps. It may not be so for the inheritors of Edison’s legacy, unless by some quirk of fate they were also inventors!
What is true of inventors is also true of “employees”. Even if circumstances goad them toward entrepreneurship, it will be quite a time, may be up to the next generation, that their interests cease to be the product or service that they started offering to the market. At the same time many may be egged on to metamorphose into entrepreneurs by their economic conditions which force them to change their line of thinking. To such people the prospect of losing touch with the product or the product itself becoming secondary or the product just being a notional presence in the background is not at all a comfortable situation.
One who had always been an entrepreneur for greater part of his life would think and act differently. For such a person to shift from one product to the other is just a child’s play. It is the norm rather than an exception that businessmen have their fingers in several pies. It is like the monarchs of the bygone era where the advice is to keep expanding their territory by conquests and marital alliances. Here entrepreneurs enter into all sorts of business deals that could even get murkier, as the drive to ensure a steady flow of money into coffers gets the better of the discretion of the entrepreneur.

An employee turned entrepreneur would be paralyzed by such movements, should they only occur too fast. He may be having a product or service to show as the main thing, but might be making most of his money by cross investments and sometimes by landing some not so honorable deals on the fly. This is difficult for a employee for he doesn’t move in such circles. His morality concerns keep plaguing him. I had fallen out of every MLM opportunity to the extent of even dreading them, even though like other entrepreneurial entrants into such things this was supposed to be a revenue generation idea to later get into something respectable, or honorable. The question is for one who had such beginnings is it ever going to be possible to shift into honorable money making. If there is a trouble free and effortless way of raking in money why wouldn’t one do it? Take a look at the number of Internet outfits, that keep marketing this or that most of them just throwing in vacuum we would know how many charlatans hope to make it big in this illusion called a dotcom company. After the dotcom bust of the 1994-2000, honest people have been wary of even taking a second look at them. Yet they keep popping up like termites the entire world over. Email frauds, lotto company’s giving away Lottery wins in charity, what have you?