Pro Commerce

I Told You So

Just today it has become evident that the giant U.S. tech companies that have made much of America so rich have shot themselves in the foot.

Google, Microsoft, and a few other international tech and accounting giants have seen gross revenue and profits decline and have shown a steady decline in the past two quarters.

 

I warned in April that having U.S  companies abruptly pull out of Russia would have terrible consequences for all major American companies because most of the world will realize that American corporations are not reliable entities to buy from.  Future repair and updates will always be in jeopardy, based on the fickle behavior of the American government.

 

I also warned that longer-term Indian, Chinese, Russian and other technically competent nations will fill the void with their own products and services.

 

Sad the level of malice and stupidity that pervades our ‘woke’ society.

Just Do It

Two events provoked this blog.  First was an obituary in the Wall Street Journal about a creative director in a Portland ad agency who convinced Nike to go with the ‘Just Do It’ theme.  The second was a response to an earlier blog that asked how the Seven Laws were formed from an old Chinese system.

The fellow who got credit for the phrase was the founder of a Portland ad agency who convinced the founder of Nike to use ‘Just Do It’  as a company logo.  

I see a connection to the first law of money in The Seven Laws of Money. The first law is ‘Do it. Money will come when you are doing the right thing.’  That law was in response to the most common question I got from people who sought my advice about starting a project.  The ad agency fellow in Portland, Dan Wieden, grew up in the hippie milieu and like nearly all hippies he knew the Seven Laws by heart. The founder of Nike, Phil Knight, was part of a running group I was part of in Menlo Park that was around when I first published the book in 1974.  He and everyone around there at the time knew the book very well. There is a connection.

A reader of my blog wanted to know what the seven laws were originally.  My poet friend, Jug n’Candle, actually a roommate from U. of Chicago, Charlie Roll, told me about them.  They come from the 450 BCE Chinese compilation of wisdom called Guanzi, where it is called the Seven Laws of the Universe.  

The first law, he told me,  was the most important but least appreciated fact of reality.  Based on the hundreds of questions people had asked me about getting started with their project or business was ‘How do I get the money to get started?’  The answer is the first law of money. “ Do it. Money will come when you are doing the right thing.”  Many people picked it up. The most common version was ‘Do What You Love and the Money Will Come.’  ( Not quite my advice.) 

The second law, Charlie said, is the opposite of the first. To me the opposite was “Money has its own rules.” It must be accurately accounted for;  debts and  bills must be paid promptly and there are many others such as keeping tight control of all financial functions.

The next four follow the same structure:

3. Money is a dream.
4. Money is a nightmare.
5. You can never really give money away.
6. You can never really receive money as a gift.

And Charlie explained that the last law was, like the end of a French PhD, an opening to the universe: 7. There are worlds without money.   

Those worlds  include drama, dance and deep breathing.

I Think I’ve Got It

The question that has been bothering me is: ’Why could I buy a big house in San Francisco on one salary in 1964 at age 26 and my kids couldn’t at the same age and my grandkids certainly can’t?’

In the simplest case the wife of one kid came from a working class large family where getting a college degree was sold as a way to succeed. The degree was necessary for the license in her field but her earnings have never come close to covering the interest on the college loan even after 23 years.  There is no insight needed in that case.  College loans have drastically altered lives.

College tuition has risen at a far greater rate than other costs for 50 years; due both to the lack of international competition, and the total absence of any institutional efficiency.  Out of control college costs are the result of government subsidy and regulation.

Our whole society has faced the same problem, not just the population in the bottom seven out of ten deciles. Aside from the college loan issue there are two reasons for the decline in living resources in 50 years. 

First the genuine explosive growth of the economy has occurred after 1960 when the hereditary elite class was replaced with meritocracy.  

The elite class had previously maintained a strong control over the excessive and restrictive  functions of government.

Second, American style democracy got out of control once the restraint of the elite was displaced by union power. Unions, in every urban area, replaced the elites in America in the 1960s.  Union power is the triumph of medieval values where seniority and wage equality triumph over merit and all other modern-commercial values including hard work, personal initiative and innovation.

American style democracy turns out to be a failure in times of rapid commercial economic growth when it is combined with union government control. Suggested originally by Milton Friedman.

I saw the transition when I worked in the California legislature as a campaign manager and legislative aide in 1964. Legislators were always atypical people.  Not too bright, very tribal in their values which gave immense power to the Democrat Party. They are small-minded people determined to get re-elected by passing as many laws, often frivolous and impactful on daily life, as possible. I saw Jesse Unruh use union money and the Democrat Party to take personal control of the California government.  He later handed it off to Willie Brown.

For the past sixty years legislators have passed 500 bills annually on the state level and the same numbers on the federal level.  This has made the successful functioning of commerce nearly impossible.  

It has promoted large business over small business because economies of scale can cover the costs of dealing with overwhelming government bureaucracy.

I have worked as a consultant with a vast number and array of businesses.  I have watched their productivity stifled every day in every way by incredible and obsessive control of commerce by out-of-control government.

The extraordinary power of modern commerce to produce wealth for everyone has been negated, totally, by 60 years of ponderous growth of government regulation.

That is why my grandchildren may have technological miracles in their lives without the ability to buy a house on one person’s income.

Solution

There is a solution that I don’t expect to see in my lifetime: sortition. My book A Citizen Legislature in 1985 (with Chick Callenbach) explains how randomly selected people can serve a three-year term in a legislature and provide a truly democratic governance.  Such citizens would never increase the number of laws that would constrain them.

Moral Problem Has New Consideration

The moral problem of concern to me has been ‘Who has moral responsibility for human-caused atrocities?’

The great slaughters of Genghis Khan, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao Tse Tung and Joe Biden can be focused on the leader or on the people they led.  That has always been a moral problem.  

Joe Biden is on this list because of the tens of millions of people who starved to death and will soon starve to death in Africa, Latin America, Central America and Southeast Asia; just as Stalin and Mao were responsible for millions who starved.  Death by starvation is hard to photograph and measure.

A partial resolution has been to force the German people to pay restitution of sorts, for 70 years, to some of the Jewish survivors of the Shoah and to Jews in Israel.   Poland, whose people were complicit, have not paid restitution.

I am immediately focused on the moral issue with Joe Biden because the British Government is trying to combat out-of-control inflation with domestic policies. Yet Britain’s inflation is a global phenomenon caused by Joe Biden.  Biden as U.S. president personally signed orders that created a drastic cut in American oil/gas production (see an earlier blog).  The resulting global inflation is causing death and starvation by millions in poor countries everywhere. 

Is it morally appropriate to judge Joe Biden for the resulting misery and death?

The new reality of the problem is that Joe Biden is a senile, incompetent and corrupt person.  He is a wooden puppet who acts on behalf of others around him including members of his party and the people who voted for him.  He is only technically the leader. But he leads a very powerful and totally under control government.

Where is the moral culpability in the current atrocity?

Me and Jann Wenner

In late 1968 I took Jann Wenner to lunch on the Bank of California’s expense account.  I was head of Marketing Research but not yet a vice president.  

I was doing research on the future of the music business in San Francisco.  I knew of Wenner as a ski bum who, with the help of Ralph Gleason, had started an every-other-week newspaper called Rolling Stone.

Jann brought me up-to-date on the finances of his fast growing newspaper and told me he wanted capital to expand and to buy out Gleason.  He wanted a loan from the bank of over one hundred thousand dollars.  At the time Gleason had put up more than half of the capital used to get started.  Wenner planned to give Gleason a small percentage of the new cash infusion.

I was offended.  I told Wenner that the bank would not make such a loan; that it was immoral to cut out such an important founder as Gleason who was the music critic for the major local daily newspaper.

The reality was that I could not personally make bank loans nor could I convince a bank loan officer to do so.  Banks, no bank, would make a large loan to a start-up without 200% collateral.

Wenner remembered this offense six years later when my first book, The Seven Laws of Money was published by Random house.  He told a staffer, Ben Fong-Torres, to write a nasty review.  It was the only negative review the book ever got.

Advice for Restaurant Owners and Operators

Who am I to be giving business advice? I’ve never written or said this before:

I might be the most successful business consultant in history.  I have had nearly 2,000 clients over sixty years.  They have all recommended me to each other.  In a few cases of large and very large companies I was recommended by their existing consultants. 

I have published a dozen books, several by Random House and Nolo Press.  One by Nolo, Marketing Without Advertising, is the third largest selling book on business in the English language excluding textbooks.  Marketing Without Advertising made it to the 8th edition before we (Salli Rasberry and I) stopped revising it.

In terms of restaurants I was the first consultant to Buttercup in Berkeley, the origin of the Berkeley foodie world. Suze Orman was a waitress there but I never met her.

I founded Green’s Restaurant 43 years ago and am still one of the owners. Green’s was the first high-end vegetarian restaurant in America. Still going strong.  I was the main consultant to the first Victoria Station restaurant which became a chain of over 100 national restaurants.

I also advised the board of Starbucks on how to open their first and most successful coffee shop in Shibuya Tokyo; their first shop outside the U.S.

Preamble

That is the preamble to giving advice to all the restaurant owners and operators in America. 

Advice

My advice: unless you are primarily a vegetarian destination, you should consider having a separate yellow menu with all your vegetarian, vegan and gluten-free menu items.  Why?

Three reasons. 

• First, the number of young people who try to be vegetarians is large and growing. 
• Second, they prefer to be treated respectfully and that means that having footnotes (V, Vgn, Gf.) on the menu is not adequate. 
• Third, even in a dining party of four or more, one or two are vegetarians and the group increasingly defers to the food tastes of the minority.

Why a separate yellow menu?  Yellow highway signs have the meaning of ‘Notice.”  No other reason.