Greed Killed The New Economy
from the but-now-maybe-we-can-deal-with-sanity dept
An article in Business Week is blaming greed for destroying the new economy. While that sounds a little over the top, the article does make some really good points about how most people were doing what they were doing just to "get rich quick", which led to some very poor strategic thinking. I think this is definitely true. However, I think that the greed had been around a lot longer than the article implies. I know people who went to dot coms five years ago with the thought of getting filthy stinkin' rich as fast as possible. I also don't believe that now that the market has tanked that same greed has simply gone away. I do think that people will actually have to think a little more, and that can't be a bad thing.
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What new economy?
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Greed and the market
It's too easy to say "I told you so", even though most deserve it. Others are being hurt just for their association with the industry, as the article points out, which isn't really fair, but who ever said the stock market was fair? Yes, the greed of VCs may have caused all this to start, but remember, it was consumers and stockholders demanding new products and ever-increasing profits that kept the ball rolling, until it went right over the edge. It's easy to point fingers, but there's a lot of investors and impatient consumers who did contribute somewhat.
I'm not really sure why I'm defending VCs here, I do believe that they caused a lot of problems, but they did have some good guesses, didn't they? And, ultimately, people will forget the fall of last spring, and go back to their habits, recalling it as we recall the stock crash of 1929 or even the late 80's, saying it was pretty bad, but hey, it's past, and it won't happen again. And then it will. Maybe we'll even be writing the same things again in ten or fifteen years. IMHO, the people best off now are those who keep their firms privately owned - sure, you don't have as much capital as publicly owned companies, and you don't have stock options, but my guess is that these companies work to a real end, not just to raise stockholders' earnings, and are therefore free to do more in general.
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Re: Greed and the market
The idea behind Mypoints strikes me as being really quite ridiculous and not really a business in itself, a typical greed play!(I haven't had any dealings with Mypoints, I just think it's a crappy company).
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To live fully is to live without fear, without sorrow
Krishnamurti: You are on this earth to live fully, happily with your whole being, free of ambition, greed and fear. If you are greedy or ambitious, you cannot live fully, because greed and ambition dissipate your energy.
To live fully is to live without fear, without sorrow, without asking a thing of the gods, because you would be a light onto yourself.
When you live fully - a light onto yourself - you will not follow anybody, you will have no nationality, or belong to any religious or political group.
As you would be a free human being it would, therefore, be possible to live in this world richly, whether you have little or much and, in that very active living you would beautify the earth.
Krishnamurti: A Timeless Spring, 23 November, 1963,Talks With Students
http://www.krishnamurti.org.au/
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"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society" - J.Krishnamurti
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