Business Ethics - Integrity Matters

I read a blog post the other day, and just went back to read it again.

It was titled Ethical Internet Marketing. The writer made the point that good ethics pay large dividends. Small minded people cheat, lie, and use black hat techniques to skim the suckers, once.

As P.T. Barnum said "There's a sucker born every minute, and two to take him."

From a purely investment return aspect, that blog post stressed that you make more money, more consistently, by building a list of folks you have treated well. Their satisfaction with a first purchase leads them to trust you with more frequent purchases of higher priced items. You become a business person, not a con man.

I've found that business people I've worked with, not those that buy legislators to create favorable regulations and hide tax loopholes, but real business people -- are honest. Their hand shake is worth more than any contract drawn by any attorney. The don't flash brightly in the flame, but they aren't moths brainlessly flying toward easy money. Their businesses last.

Here is one reason why.

Instead of always hunting for new money to steal, they create long term relationships and value. They end up as wealthy as they wish.

And have no trouble looking at themselves in a mirror.

Integrity Pays!

Government's Irrational Exuberance

When Alan Greenspan Declared there was irrational exuberance in the Stock Market around 1995, the boos and hisses soon got him to change his tune.

The lyrics were right, and we are now ready for another chorus of "It's different This Time."

It's not sock puppets and cannon fired hamsters this time. The silliness that had people proclaiming "the metrics of eyeballs looking at screens have changed the value equation," now has people believing that government is not a hindrance to progress. It's Irrational Exuberance for politics.

The enthusiasm for all projects governmental is a nice rhyme to the dot.com boom. Somehow ignorant and vain stooges with executive hair in Washington are authorities, specializing in everything. And people believe this is a good and enduring thing, negating history. "The metrics of ego enhancement have changed the bureaucrats are wasteful equation."

Not 'arf likely, says I.

Hacker's Eye View Of The World

I had written my hacker novel, spread it's name all around, and yet hadn't really thought about what the name meant.

Complicit Simplicity

Kind of funny for a marketing type guy to use something 'cause it felt right, no market testing, no analysis. So I decided to write a creed for my Hacker Hero that explained it.

I have long appreciated The Apostles' Creed, but have also felt a need for a creed of my own, a personal hacker's creed:

"Without consistent ethics: Thousands of laws create theater portraying protection of the weak, while covertly rewarding the powerful.

With consistent ethics: Ten commandments are enough.

Most laws are enacted, most agencies and departments created; to legally legitimize immoral, unjust, and unethical practices.

I will pursue freedom instead. By placing people above law, freedom blesses all free people through complicit simplicity." - my creed

Laid Off? Start A Business

If you've been laid off, you are in a world of pain.

Just because a slow business climate created by high taxes and increasing regulation has given you cause to sing those laid-off blues does not mean you need to suffer. In fact, in a few years you may realize it was the best thing that could have happened.

Don't shoot me!

The job you were laid off from was doomed anyway, now you have time to prepare for a future where those sort of jobs won't exist -- at least not in a way that could keep you above starvation. There is a reason jobs have disappeared:

The economy has changed, permanently.

The coercive education system that trains cogs for factories and political parties has prepared you for exactly the wrong future. The educational system of the last couple hundred years answered a request for standardized humans. Governments needed compliant citizens, corporations needed obedient workers, and wealthy elites needed worker drones trained to consume and not save.

So they sought to train you to fit their needs. It worked. Over and over again, it worked. But the new economy does not need drones, they will be shoved to the bottom of the heap. But YOU have a head start on becoming successful in this economy. Why? Because you are not bent over a desk or machine continuing in patterns you were trained to call success.

A new future has started. Good jobs are disappearing, good businesses are closing. Middle class cogs are being replaced. A third or more of the country is lying in rusting piles of cogs, cogs buried under the sand, and cogs being used as paper weights (if the government still used the same statistical measures it used during the last depression).

It's nobody's fault the world is changing, but the response governments are making will hurt even more people. Extending unemployment benefits beyond two years for people waiting for jobs that will never return - insane. They should have retained the original 28 weeks of unemployment coverage, offering job seekers training to join the new middle class: technology empowered individuals.

There are lots of reasons to start your own business. You not only have a reason to succeed, you now have the opportunity to advance away from the heap toward individual accomplishment. You may even become wealthy.

Go take a look at some of these real opportunities to Start Your Own Internet Business, compare and choose what best suits you. Being laid off may be the biggest opportunity you've ever had. And it was given to you.

Some people have all the luck.