Pro Commerce

Category: Pure Pro Commerce

  • M & A


    10-20 sunny-side-uM & A refers to the legal and financial category Mergers and Acquisitions.

    Unfortunately for my beloved readers I have not found a competent history of mergers and acquisitions. I have been involved in several myself and I have helped prepare businesses to be sold.

    What happened in the late 1950s was that several corporations began to form conglomerates. The conglomerate was a core entity that bought other corporations that were well run financially. The core entity ran the acquired companies by controlling the finances. Using capital and financial statements the conglomerate was able to manage the associated companies.

    In the process, more and more companies achieved corporate management standards that created a market for the buying and selling of businesses. The businesses on the market began to resemble a supply and demand environment. Businesses, over the next 40 years found it easier than ever to buy and sell other companies.

    People in the M & A field developed an expertise for the buying and selling of corporations that made the market quite liquid. This was a major change in the nature of global business.

    I know of no one who has reliably written about this high level, highly productive change in corporate management.

  • Google is the first universal


    10-9 google-africaIt was awhile ago that I realized I had created the world's first universal currency. I developed the MasterCard financial vehicle that was the first credit card to be open to all banks.  That allowed it to become globally universal.

    I just recently realized that Google is the first universal human commonality.

    Anthropologists have spent many decades trying to find universal commonalities among the diverse people on the planet. Other than a few biological functions, like eating, there are none.

    Google is the first universal human commonality. Everywhere on the planet human beings use Google to find information.

    The only credit I can take for Google is its initial success. Google's front page, from the beginning, has always been blank… without advertising.  Google has always subdued the visual impact of the paid marketing on its information pages. Since I am the most prominent person to have promoted and published a book on marketing without advertising, I will sneak in a little credit for myself.

    There is not much more to say about this except as a disclaimer. I have held Google stock for many years and will continue holding it.

  • Why pro commerce is not conservatism

    Sometimes it takes me awhile to understand what I have done.

    It was many decades after I developed the modern credit card, by sharing among multiple banks, that I realized I had also invented the first international currency. You can use a modern credit card anywhere on the planet regardless of currency.

    I am beginning to think about the reason I am in a category of my own called pro-commerce. I hope to be able to write a complete article on the subject at some future point.

    10-3 commerce shinjukuI have written a book on what I consider to be commerce. It is radically different than the conventional view. You can see some of my thinking in the heading of this blog. Most people do not think of commerce as the source of human diversity. But it is.

    Nor do people think of commerce as the only creation resulting from meritocracy or of commerce being based primarily on the value: openness. But it is.

    One of the reasons I want to be clear that pro-commerce is not the same as any conventional views is because I am occasionally treated as a conservative or a member of the right wing.

    It is hard to conceive of me being a conservative. I am as conservative as a person who believes in Darwinian – punctuated evolution.  Commerce is an evolutionary system based on survival.  

    I accept the real world as it is. That is why I love commerce.

    That distinguishes me from Lefties, Liberals and others who have an ideological dream of future human beings and how they can be shaped by government.

    Commerce is the most radical source of social upheaval that the human mind can imagine. Everything changes every day. It is not like Chairman Mao's slaughter of human beings in the Great March Backward. Commerce is a constant world of reducing costs and improving life using voluntary human interaction and technology.

    Commerce is totally disruptive and could never be a source of comfort for a person who is comfortable with the status quo. You won’t find me defending some local sentimental business against a new superstore.

    Commerce is always based on values. Those values are completely incompatible with conventional political ideas of the contemporary political world. The political world is made up of humans trying to find accommodation to power based conflicts.

    Commerce resolves all problems by seeking new markets and new technologies.

  • Hippies and love of business

    6-24 briarpatch bookMore than just an anti-statist ideology, being a hippie meant you wanted to start something on your own whether it was a commune, health-food store or another form of new business.

    Hippies were fanatic friends of new business and saw the only way to change the world was through new businesses. Not a shred of Lefty love of government in them.

    Again I know this personally because my book The Seven Laws of Money brought hundreds of new hippie businesses to me for advice. They also knew that I had founded MasterCard.

    I created the Briarpatch network made up of more than 1000 hippie businesses at its peak in the mid-1970s. The Briarpatch network was known throughout the hippie world at the time.  It symbolized the hippy love of business.

    I was invited to help start similar networks in other parts of the United States and overseas. I was invited to Western England, Amsterdam, all of Sweden and France. I also spent many years developing a Briarpatch network in Japan where organic farming was extensive. Everywhere I was invited there were small businesses ready to blossom. They simply needed to hear the idea that businesses could be open, honest and loved.

    6-24 WE Truck StoreThe most important part of the Briarpatch was the fact that hippies loved business. Hippies found business to be their only clear and honest vehicle for bringing about change in the world …. and they were enthusiastic.

    The few hippie businesses that grew large included Nolo self help press, Greens vegetarian restaurant, Body Shop, Apple Computer, Patagonia and Whole Foods.  The hippies create the organic food movement, health practices from accupuncture to yoga, rock music, Eastern religions explosion, New Age shops of every kind… and countless businesses and classes that were never seen or imagined before 1970.

    It was hippies anti-statist values combined with their pro-business values that together defeated the future of Leftism.

    I was there, at the center of the storm, I saw it. Today I am one of the fortunate beneficiary.

  • Manufacturers lack retail ideas

    I wrote a blog about Tyvek and complained that this miracle fabric has barely been used for retail products.

    2-29amst10This is in fact a general problem. I can think of very few American companies that are successful on a large scale and are able to introduce small-scale retail products or services. 

    The exception has been 3M. On the other hand, 3M probably has hundreds more products they could have brought to market had the skills been in the company.

    This is not a problem for large Japanese companies. It is in fact the main way that new products enter the market in Japan and it is the reason that there are so many products on the market in Japan. Some of those products are duplicated in the rest of the world after they succeed in Japan.

    I merely point this out because we do not have an adequate institution to intermediate between the incredible line of products and services that are generated in our vast economic output and the entrepreneurial talent that is widespread in our society.

    An example would be for a chamber of commerce to sponsor a public fair in which all large producers of products and services put them on display with appropriate technical descriptions and invited the public to look.