DEMYSTIFYING MONEY AND POWER
For 4000 years, the masses from ancient Phoenician commerce to modern America have sought to understand those few individuals holding great money and power. The wealthier, more powerful an individual, the more attention focuses on trying to understand his success. In fact, attention expands geometrically on ascending the power scale to the presidents of America’s greatest corporations. Yet, a consistent, reliable standard for understanding power and wealth has until now remained a riddle. That riddle is solved by applying two metaphors:
- Knowing the material world around us requires understanding the smallest atomic units.
- Knowing the cosmos above us requires understanding its primordial origins.
Now apply that to money and power:
- Knowing wealth around us requires understanding the smallest money-producing units.
- Knowing the wealth and power above us requires understanding its primordial origins.
Understanding The Smallest Unit Of Money And Power
…Traveling To Great Wealth’s Primordial Origins
The understanding begins by shrinking money and power far below the great concentrations of corporate structures — shrinking away from the plush offices of the presidents, shrinking out of the complex office buildings, out into the streets. By putting a microscope on the raw enterprise structure in the streets, one can focus beneath its few simple layers of money and power. One can focus beneath the factories, past the department stores and fast-food chains down to the simple array of street vendors. And finally, one can reduce the street vendor’s microcosm of money and power down to the smallest and simplest money-producing unit — the self-owned, one-man, one-cart business. From those beginnings, from that entrepreneurial atom emerges the understanding, the indisputable core of anyone producing money and power — from a candy vendor on the streets of New York to the presidents of corporate America fifty stories above.
Let us focus on the nature of making money by putting a microscope on the smallest, simplest money-making unit — the one-man, one-cart business. Once in focus, we can see that to make money, the small one-man business requires deceivingly complex integrations.
The street vendor selling his homemade candy creation, for instance, must develop and then produce the candy, must purchase the equipment and supplies, must attend to maintenance of his equipment, must keep track of the money, account for profit or loss, provide the service with his push cart, handle operations of inventory and sales, advertise (yell), market his product by determining best places and times to sell, innovate and be creative perhaps through appetite-inducing designs on his cart or through special fans designed to blow the sweet aroma in the faces of passersby, and, of course, he must apply his crude form of research and development in order to continually discourage or beat competition.
To make big money, to grow into a mighty empire as did Milton Hershey, the entrepreneur cannot be just a secret ingredient developer, just a money-wise accountant, just a shrewd negotiator, just a tip-top service man, just a marketing expert. He must be everything needed to gain power and wealth.
As his business grows and brings in more money, workers, products, and markets, the need to integrate grows. To become wealthy and powerful, he must successfully integrate everything into smooth control from the cleanliness of his workers’ carts to the distribution system of his candy to the secret ingredient of his chocolate. He must successfully integrate everything into hat magical combination that makes a few dynamic men go down in history as money/power giants.