The FINANCIAL — “With each generation new challenges arise,” said Paul Hayward, the seventh-generation owner of The Homestead, a Sugar Hill, N.H., inn established in 1802, to Family Business. “The inn has survived for over 200 years through the Civil War, Great Depression, World War I and World War II,” Hayward says. “I am confident my family will see the Inn through present difficulties.”
There is very little in life as certain as death and taxes, but the fact that people will – in addition to dying and paying taxes – always eat, drink, sleep, sit, wear clothing, worship, learn and do the thousand other things that we take for granted each day is a given.
Taking that next step, no matter what is going on in the world around you, is a sign of persistence. You have to take what you have, regardless of surrounding circumstances, and keep going.
Kongo Gumi offers an enlightening example. Getting in on the ground floor of Buddhism – a little more than a century after it was first introduced to Japan in 467 CE – worked very well for Kongo Gumi. Once conflict with the native Shinto religion was ended, the new religion, which had moved from India to China and then on to Korea and finally Japan over the course of about 2 centuries, really took off. This put Kongo Gumi in an ideal position to grow as the demand for new temples grew. The company did not, however, escape hard times. World War II, for example, was especially challenging but pragmatic management, understanding the changing needs brought on by the war kept the firm going. They went from building temples to making coffins.
“Georgia is small, many of its places have been bombed or damaged and the current peaceful situation is still fragile. Whoever survived could start new marketing strategies accented at patriotic motives and supporting the national economy so that people buy domestically produced goods and boycott the aggressor’s products,” Mako Abashidze, British-Georgian Chamber of Commerce (BGCC) Director says.
As she stated, her tip to businessmen would be to readjust to the new reality by offering goods and services needed during the war.
According to Peter Chiaramonte, Vice president of Academic affairs at Georgian American University, the governments seek to protect their citizens in times of war. For that they will always need energy, food, capital, shelter, and transportation, as well as land, water, and cooking oil.
“Major industrial powers with highly integrated national economies, because they are more urbanized, require a great deal of food imports. They also need raw materials, a cheap labour supply, a great many export markets to buy their goods, and high inputs of energy to keep their factories going,” Chiaramonte said.
In his words, Postmodern organizations, said futurist Alvin Toffler, unlike either industrial or agrarian states, do not require as many raw materials or additional territory. Unlike industrial states, they haven’t as great a need for vast natural resources of their own. Of course they still need energy and food, but what they need most is a process for turning knowledge into wealth.
“You can develop business primarily through the generation of new knowledge,” Chiaramonte said.
As he claims, Knowledge is the key to economic value and knowledge is at the heart of human warfare.
“The ways we create war are impossible to disentangle from the ways we create wealth.
Today, unlike any previous time in human history, wars can we won by tanks, troops, and bombs or… just two soldiers with a pair of binoculars and a high-speed laptop,” Chiaramonte told The FINANCIAL.
Chiaramonte says, given the creation of appropriate knowledge, it is possible to focus energy and create wealth. Having the right knowledge can reduce costs, save energy, eliminate waste, enhance beauty, inspire courage, and reduce the amount of capital needed for the production of everything from sailboats to submarines.
“Furthermore, the growing role of knowledge management also goes well beyond mere economic and military concerns. It includes philosophy, science, technology, art, culture, and religion. Each of these and other realms of meaning are all undoubtedly developed during times of war,” Chiaramonte declared.
“The general pace of life during times of war, including everything from the speed of business transactions to the rhythms of political change, is accelerated. We have to learn how to speed things up to keep pace. We have just seen for ourselves how quickly regional warfare can erupt into global turmoil,” he added.
“Businesses have a lot of risk factors during war: business, political, military, crime, diminishing purchasing power all increase,” the BGCC Director told The FINANCIAL.
War – a nasty but necessary business. “Some people are likely to confuse the absence of moralizing for an absence of empathy with the victims of war. “Surely,” wrote futurist Alvin Toffler, “there are enough cries of pain and anger in the world… if they were sufficient to produce peace, our problems would be over,” said Chiaramonte.
“What’s required is not more heated rhetoric or retaliation, but a cool understanding of the new relations between war and business in a fast-changing society.”
According to Abashidze, BGCC, War is a very big business and lots of people and businesses benefit more during war than during peaceful times.
Businesses that benefit from war, in Chiaramonte’s words might be the military industrial complex that has tentacles that penetrate everything from hamburgers to helicopters.
“It’s not just weapons and uniforms. It’s everything. Soldiers have got to eat, shave, shower, travel, and train. It all costs money. In times of peace and in times of war, some will profit and many will pay.”
As Abashidze claims, lots of military equipment manufacturers do benefit during such periods. But, even companies producing shoes or clothes can directly benefit if they can supply the right product, quantity, quality, at the right time.
“The military industry benefits directly, anything related to it too like fuel or supplies. Plus, food and medical equipment. Medicines are also on high demand,” she added.
Business – a step ahead of politics. Abashidze’s explanation to this is that “Businesses are more flexible and open and less restricted than politics. Business is always one step ahead of politics.”
“That’s where the real decision making powers of the future will be, with new global systems and regional clusters of innovative corporations, universities, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), religions, and so forth,” said Chiaramonte.
As he later added, several transnational business firms are currently creating networks of alliances, which largely bypass the traditional nation-state framework.
“In fact, some analysts have predicted that by the middle of the century, national governments like the United States, Germany, and Japan will have less socioeconomic status than some regional and city-states like Singapore and Silicon Valley. Large corporations such as Exxon and Wal-Mart already outpace the gross national production (GNP) of some G8 countries such as Canada.”
In conclusion, Chiaramonte would recommend: “In times of war and in times of peace, that we seek to find, develop, and retain the most creative talent. All factory-style hierarchical education simply prepares people for routine and repetitive labor.”
“A poorly skilled worker who quits or is fired can be cheaply and easily replaced. Not so with the rising levels of highly developed skills that are required in more advanced sociopolitical economies of the world, where finding the right person with the right credentials is a harder task and, in the long run, more costly to come by,” he added.
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