The Intrinsic Nature of Business
What do free range chickens, Jack Russell terriers and the colour beige have to do with the intrinsic nature of business? Well, this: Every aspect and particle of the universe – animal, mineral,or vegetable – even man made – has a nature of its own – characteristics of behaviour.
This morning, pre-coffee, my Sweetheart and I were talking about the move to the new house. We got kidding about how the stand-alone screened room would make an excellent chicken coop and we could create our fortune breeding free range chicks. I told S that we used to have free range chickens – Rhode Island Reds – the whole wheat of chickens, if you will, on our farm when we first moved to King City. The problem with free range is that weasels are also free range and it is their nature to ‘ferret’ out chickens and tear their little throats out.
S opined that clearly our dogs weren’t tough protectors. Not so much. Golden Retrievers are bred to be soft mouthed, obedient – if not brilliant – and uncompromisingly happy and silly! Jack Russells on the other hand and most of the terrier breeds are fearless – chase anything moving despite size – like Mack Trucks; are barky to the extreme – so as to be found by the farmer after they had tunnelled down badger burrow – and in many cases, more cunning than humans give the cute little things credit for as they shove them in a pink Burberry puppy carrier!
It is when we try to homogenize everything or categorize according to face values that we weave ourselves a life of discontent at best and disaster of global proportions at worst. The funnel of the mass commercial market – which includes banks, retailers, insurance companies, governments, media, manufacturers – takes all things bright and beautiful and makes beige – a colour that doesn’t really exist in nature. A shade – perhaps neutral but really synonymous with boring or dull – stultifying – like concrete.
Years ago Muzak got a bad rap (no pun intended). Elevator music was dull, dull, dull – ironically to the point of becoming annoying. Today’s music is equally formulaic, a blend of rap, dance, techno and emo that slops all over us from most pop radio stations. A band gets a hit and writes the same song over and over again. Nickleback leaps to mind. Why do they do that? Because it is a known commodity and no risk to play it. The market wants what is familiar. Ricky Nelson sang about it in Garden Party.
I am a voracious reader of all things, business, spiritual and a range of fiction in between. What I have watched is that the demand for known authors to continue to produce known products has diluted quality work readily available in the big box stores. What started out as well crafted novels by excellent writers has diminished by books hurried through the creative process to feed the hungry maw of the ordinary. I feel for the writers. Unless they are tired of eating they get locked into the mediocrity.
Quality trained artists of distinction – if they are still alive – must compete with those who may express themselves artistically but not necessarily creatively. Not all children playing a two finger version of Heart and Soul on the piano are Mozart – no matter our parental bias. Facebook, Flikr and phone cameras have blurred the impact of photographic art. Allegory and story telling reduced to cartoon. “Here’s me with Ted.” “Here’s me drunk” “Here’s me when he opened the bathroom door.” The intimate and sensational? Boring. Dull.
Is it our nature to be voyeurs? Exhibitionists? I don’t think so. I think it is our nature to be individuals and express that in our choices. I think that in our over stimulation, we can’t be stimulated at all. What’s a marketer to do? What is the next rage? ( pun intended) When our whole commercial edifice is invested in beige – what next? The irony is that we are being teased into thinking we are individuals by documenting in blog and photo every nuance of our every day. “navel gazing’, my mother would have called it. It seems to me that culturally we are being trowelled over by a layer of beige as deadening as concrete.
If the suffocation of the creative spirit isn’t bad enough, let’s look at the deadening of our waters, air, and soil. Our pseudo consciousness of carbon credits and endless global agenda to plan to plan to meet to discuss … merely means that if I promise to plant a tree, I can still pollute your water. Air? There’s lots of it. It’s everywhere. I see conscientious joggers on city streets breaking a sweat and sucking in lungs full of toxins – only to be outraged when products aren’t pure and natural.
One such woman insisted that she wanted a simple regimen with pure products which she paid a premium to have. “I just want to splash water on my face in the morning and put on a moisturizer I can trust because it only contains ‘thus and so’.” Little does she know that unless she’s running to her fridge every morning for her face cream, it has a whole lot more than ‘thus and so’ – otherwise she would be spreading her face with bacteria and mold – also natural.
Years ago when we leased our farm out for crops, we chose to stay away from high yielding corn crops because between over cultivation and the use of Atrazene in those days (who knows what it masquerading as now), the soil inevitably is depleted and must then lie fallow sometimes for years before regaining its nutrients. Even worse, it effects the cycle of ‘good’ insects and creatures which are interdependent. An interdependence that is not about ‘them’ the creatures and insects but about ‘we’. Yesterday, I signed a petition to preserve the wild and domestic honey bee habitat. Our bees are dying which means the natural and holistic (pollen from many sources) reproduction is impeded. Care2 Pledge To Keep Bees Buzzing
Big ‘Farm’ as opposed to Big Pharma is just as frightening is its monopoly on crop production of our prairies – you know ‘the bread basket’, the food belt? Genetically modified crops require genetically appropriate chemicals to even get a seed to grow in otherwise dead land. The soil? Completely dependent on chemical intervention to produce. If there are not balanced and ‘wholesome’ (meaning including the natural spectrum) nutrients in the soil – what is the value of the food to our bodies beyond being a filler? And worse, what imbalance or dependence is it creating in our bodies. We are, after all, what we eat.
This isn’t a rant about all that is going wrong – but a call to all who wish to set things right. It is not the fault of business. Business and commerce is the supply of all the products and services that support life on earth. Food, clothing, transportation, homes, healthcare. The intrinsic nature of business is fair exchange. A producer offers a product of quality and value for a fair price. A buyer supports that continued production of quality products or services of value by paying a fair price and continuing to do so in his purchasing discernment and expectation. Laissez faire and competition assures that ‘natural’ selection and process.
Corporations pandering to governments to protect a monopoly; financial institutions manipulating the very instruments of commerce, and institutions breeding beige are completely nihilistic of the intrinsic nature of business. Sooo – what is the good news?
This: Human nature has prevailed and has found its path of flourishing through the Internet. Through micro markets. The same Internet, you might ask me, that has pornography, racism and recipes for bombs? Yep! Because it also illumines the spirit, consciousness, and individuality of men and women. It illustrates in its trillion of pinpoints of fibre optics that we are all one and interdependent and that our every choice is recorded and accountable. Ask Google. Ask Amazon. They will tell you what book you might like based on what you chose before. They will tell you where you are likely to go in the future based on past decisions. Don’t like the direction? Back to you. Change it. Choose differently. The world of commerce will respond to you. Money is exchange. Every dollar you spend is a vote for or against personal freedom, clean air, pure water, nourishing food. Through our conscientious purchases, we can bring the leviathan of the mass market to its knees. We can break beige into a kaleidoscope! One dollar at time. That is the intrinsic nature of business.
Over the next weeks I will be sharing chapters of my book in progress, Making Friends with the Sky – The Chicken Little Guide to Internet Savvy. Understanding the holistic nature of systems helps us find our individual place and our personal mode of interaction Your comments, experiences and ideas will be really appreciated. Thanks!
Here is a treat of greatest proportion! Viktor Frankel on believing the best of man: Check it out!
