(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?
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
Thursday, April 22, 2010
ON MULTI LEVEL MARKETING (MLM) & MORALITY
There have been a few instances when I had considered joining MLM groups for generating additional income instead of the usual moonlighting ideas that I had been practicing. The main attraction was of course that unlike in moonlighting jobs you needn’t be constrained by a fixed timing and place.
More often than not in MLM opportunities, what is being marketed, what is our gift to the customer is never clear. One is rather encouraged to skirt the issue. There are MLMs for physical products like in the case of Amway, and virtual products of some Marketing Techniques’ e-books and the like. Here the protagonist tries hard at diverting the listener’s attention from the product per se often using long winding arguments to say how an interest in the product will take your concentration away from the main goal of that kind of marketing viz., generation of residual income. Attend parties or group presentations or sit with individuals to listen to their apparent dreams of making it big in this bad dog-eat-dog world, you will still come up with the same nagging doubt in your mind. Do they really believe what they are preaching? Are the promised earnings trickling into their accounts, and really has the trickle ever grown into a flood?
I am yet to see one who has become a billionaire, why a millionaire by being in such an MLM arrangement. Claims galore are made. Some firms announce incentives, even lower down the line, may be to keep the people motivated.
One of the main and persistent advices in MLM is not to get wrapped up with the product as a user and miss out totally on the business opportunity. Excellent pictures are drawn about how one’s income would grow. There are several ingenuously designed schemes of payouts, each one trying to beat the other. Are these conceived by actuaries? We see pretty soon the product (real or virtual) vanishes into the background, soon to be forgotten. You find that you are only left grappling with and chasing this dream of getting greater and greater payouts, getting appreciation medallions like Silver, Gold, Platinum or whatever, and gnawing doubts whether this ever happens.- more so, if the whole thing is happening in virtual space, with websites displaying photographs of successful executives in the network.
Recently, setting aside my doubts about MLM in general and resolving to vociferously deny any interest in MLM concepts, I happened to attend a friend’s presentations. I was lured in by another friend of mine, with the bait of my chief interest being part of this MLM exercise. The whole idea unfolding before me was like the way Allu Ramalingiah trying to convince the hero of the movie Shankarabharanam to accept an invitation to be felicitated. Concepts and ideas dear and appealing to me and those about this MLM concept were skillfully interwoven camouflaging the true intent of the whole exercise. My protestations of not wanting to be part of the MLM saga and wanting to be able to do something more than mere selling were drowned in the repeated brainwashing against being the lower-end user. The product-focus was either lost or was getting lost frequently. There was always this plan of a paid service portal that was being projected as the real idea for which all this income generation was being thought about. Thus the two presenters were vying with each other in skirting the issue of where the concentration must be: in the MLM part of the project or to a part of the project where this MLM opportunity would be the side attraction. That part of the project where the virtual product of this MLM would facilitate people like me indulging and earning through engaging in my area of interest.
In order to force a logical end to the two hour long presentation I had to say I will scout for suitable candidates to be enrolled. I had already been tricked into “buying” the product that apparently had a use which I could put it to. When you make a risky buy won’t you be looking for the worst case loss? That was what I was doing. Well there are no gains without taking risks either calculated or bearable. In the event of everything evaporating, even if you are left with something to do on hands you could somehow satisfy yourself that you have a product to use.
Now, let’s delve into why MLM selling is so painful for the employee-turned business aspirants. As the logic of MLM was unfolding, it was plain that the difference between the employees/self-employed and the business class is the difference in perception. The business class never gets interested in the product, its usefulness or its technicalities. They look at ROI. For all the other services they “employ” people and reap benefits of the full contribution of the employees. That is fine. At least when there is a hardcore product and the businessman is exploiting the OPB, OPM, OPE etc.,[Other People’s Brain-Money and Efforts ] he is paying them, and there is someone who is dedicated to really making the product see the light of the day. Thus in the end the customer is not cheated out of anything assuming the company in question has that minimum scruples to see that the product is of the requisite standard. But in MLM the product is soon going to lose focus. None in the network is going to be bothered about the product per se. It will be virtual sales of a virtual product to real people paying real money (sometimes earned by the sweat of the brow) the people up the line getting benefits of the labors of others. After sometime people higher up theoretically must be getting the money they are sweating for.
Where is the hitch? This apparent process of the growing branches of the tree will terminate at some point of time. The last leaves are the losers of the total value. It is to them especially it makes sense, to be left at least with a usable product. That is the least moral obligation for anyone who claims to be an honest businessman. Or is an honest businessman a contradiction in terms or a chimera? More on this in my next post.
More often than not in MLM opportunities, what is being marketed, what is our gift to the customer is never clear. One is rather encouraged to skirt the issue. There are MLMs for physical products like in the case of Amway, and virtual products of some Marketing Techniques’ e-books and the like. Here the protagonist tries hard at diverting the listener’s attention from the product per se often using long winding arguments to say how an interest in the product will take your concentration away from the main goal of that kind of marketing viz., generation of residual income. Attend parties or group presentations or sit with individuals to listen to their apparent dreams of making it big in this bad dog-eat-dog world, you will still come up with the same nagging doubt in your mind. Do they really believe what they are preaching? Are the promised earnings trickling into their accounts, and really has the trickle ever grown into a flood?
I am yet to see one who has become a billionaire, why a millionaire by being in such an MLM arrangement. Claims galore are made. Some firms announce incentives, even lower down the line, may be to keep the people motivated.
One of the main and persistent advices in MLM is not to get wrapped up with the product as a user and miss out totally on the business opportunity. Excellent pictures are drawn about how one’s income would grow. There are several ingenuously designed schemes of payouts, each one trying to beat the other. Are these conceived by actuaries? We see pretty soon the product (real or virtual) vanishes into the background, soon to be forgotten. You find that you are only left grappling with and chasing this dream of getting greater and greater payouts, getting appreciation medallions like Silver, Gold, Platinum or whatever, and gnawing doubts whether this ever happens.- more so, if the whole thing is happening in virtual space, with websites displaying photographs of successful executives in the network.
Recently, setting aside my doubts about MLM in general and resolving to vociferously deny any interest in MLM concepts, I happened to attend a friend’s presentations. I was lured in by another friend of mine, with the bait of my chief interest being part of this MLM exercise. The whole idea unfolding before me was like the way Allu Ramalingiah trying to convince the hero of the movie Shankarabharanam to accept an invitation to be felicitated. Concepts and ideas dear and appealing to me and those about this MLM concept were skillfully interwoven camouflaging the true intent of the whole exercise. My protestations of not wanting to be part of the MLM saga and wanting to be able to do something more than mere selling were drowned in the repeated brainwashing against being the lower-end user. The product-focus was either lost or was getting lost frequently. There was always this plan of a paid service portal that was being projected as the real idea for which all this income generation was being thought about. Thus the two presenters were vying with each other in skirting the issue of where the concentration must be: in the MLM part of the project or to a part of the project where this MLM opportunity would be the side attraction. That part of the project where the virtual product of this MLM would facilitate people like me indulging and earning through engaging in my area of interest.
In order to force a logical end to the two hour long presentation I had to say I will scout for suitable candidates to be enrolled. I had already been tricked into “buying” the product that apparently had a use which I could put it to. When you make a risky buy won’t you be looking for the worst case loss? That was what I was doing. Well there are no gains without taking risks either calculated or bearable. In the event of everything evaporating, even if you are left with something to do on hands you could somehow satisfy yourself that you have a product to use.
Now, let’s delve into why MLM selling is so painful for the employee-turned business aspirants. As the logic of MLM was unfolding, it was plain that the difference between the employees/self-employed and the business class is the difference in perception. The business class never gets interested in the product, its usefulness or its technicalities. They look at ROI. For all the other services they “employ” people and reap benefits of the full contribution of the employees. That is fine. At least when there is a hardcore product and the businessman is exploiting the OPB, OPM, OPE etc.,[Other People’s Brain-Money and Efforts ] he is paying them, and there is someone who is dedicated to really making the product see the light of the day. Thus in the end the customer is not cheated out of anything assuming the company in question has that minimum scruples to see that the product is of the requisite standard. But in MLM the product is soon going to lose focus. None in the network is going to be bothered about the product per se. It will be virtual sales of a virtual product to real people paying real money (sometimes earned by the sweat of the brow) the people up the line getting benefits of the labors of others. After sometime people higher up theoretically must be getting the money they are sweating for.
Where is the hitch? This apparent process of the growing branches of the tree will terminate at some point of time. The last leaves are the losers of the total value. It is to them especially it makes sense, to be left at least with a usable product. That is the least moral obligation for anyone who claims to be an honest businessman. Or is an honest businessman a contradiction in terms or a chimera? More on this in my next post.
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
A friend has my Sanskrit Blog read out..
It was a very interesting happening yesterday[13.04.2010] when my friend and colleague walked in to my cabin and had a chat with me expressly for arranging a talk by me on the coming Shankara Jayanthi[18th May 2010]. I happened to introduce my Sanskrit Blog to him. I discussed the structure, motive and the format of the Blog, and some other subjects of mutual interest to us.
Then I just read aloud for him my last Blog on summarizing the book, Megabrain. Apparently he had not read the English version though it was in our library for more than a decade now. He was thrilled about the revelations in the book. He did have his own doubts about the claims. Skepticism is the hallmark of a good Scientific Temper ain't it? But what gave me a pleasant surprise was as I read aloud the Sanskrit Blog he was able to get the meaning, without my having to translate, again confirming my hunch on the understandability of Sanskrit for an Indian even without formal training, if only he were just taught how to properly read! Earlier another colleague whom I had requested to visit the Blog had done that but had opined that the language used was rather "high" and "beyond comprehension". The difference between comprehension and beyond is a mere "right reading"? It might help me to check on this by trying a read aloud of this to the other colleague. That will serve to confirm my hunch.And give me a strategy for Sanskrit teaching.
Then I just read aloud for him my last Blog on summarizing the book, Megabrain. Apparently he had not read the English version though it was in our library for more than a decade now. He was thrilled about the revelations in the book. He did have his own doubts about the claims. Skepticism is the hallmark of a good Scientific Temper ain't it? But what gave me a pleasant surprise was as I read aloud the Sanskrit Blog he was able to get the meaning, without my having to translate, again confirming my hunch on the understandability of Sanskrit for an Indian even without formal training, if only he were just taught how to properly read! Earlier another colleague whom I had requested to visit the Blog had done that but had opined that the language used was rather "high" and "beyond comprehension". The difference between comprehension and beyond is a mere "right reading"? It might help me to check on this by trying a read aloud of this to the other colleague. That will serve to confirm my hunch.And give me a strategy for Sanskrit teaching.
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