Thursday, September 20, 2012

Competition and War

The phrase " Business is all about doing what must be done to get ahead." is quite common.  The thing to remember that "competition" is a large category.  War is one type of activity that falls within the category "competition".  Business competition also falls within this group.  The underlying question, then, is do these two types of competition overlap.  Perhaps, for a very very tiny slice of certain business they do.  Here I am thinking of the business of being a mercenary or some types of security firms.

even here, though, violence is part of the business, but it is not how even these endeavors compete with other mercenaries or security firms.  Getting hired means competing on price and qualiy - the overwhelming majority of business activity is like this.  Thus, it is not doing "anything" one must do to get ahead.  Killing a competitor is murder, not business. Only certain types of competitive actions are actually business.  The key in this clas is to figure out what type of acctions count as business and what do not.

Bill