UNCONVENTIONAL THINKING BLOG

We live in a world of naysayers, doomsday predictors, pessimists and alarmists. They always see a theat that will bring us down, end life as we know it, wreck our dreams, play havoc with all we hold dear.

But they always overlook Malthus and the human ingenuity he preferred to ignore. An 18th century English economist, Thomas Robert Malthus predicted that the geometric growth in world population would ultimately outstrip the arithmetic increases in food supply.

End game: worldwide starvation.

What Malthus overlooked was the human drive to solve problems, to invent, to create fertilizers and farming techniques that would vastly increase the availability of food. Malthus rang the alarm bell and the enterpreneurs, the scientists, the doers who disdain the handwringers, answered and put the panic to bed.

Fast forward to the present. Here we are deep in a recession, perhaps on the precipice of a depression. It is just about the only thing anyone talks about. It blasts across the headlines. It screams throughout the talk shows. It is the stuff of dinner conversation and boardroom strategy. It is changing and diluting our capitalist system. It is causing runaway human angst. It is the sound and the color of FEAR. It is what Franklin Roosevelt warned about. It is what is keeping millions out of the Christmas shops. It is causing a growing number of companies to crawl into a bunker and hope to wait it out. To wish it away.

It is time to remember Malthus.

The world did not starve. It will not melt. It won’t blow itself up. The business community, the economy, will not be sucked into a black hole. Yes, there is and will be pain. Millions more will be unemployed. Companies will fail and dreams will be dashed.

But the miracle workers who refuse to succumb to statistics, to the predictions of the college professors or to all of those who move through life from one would-be peril to another, they will develop a path to revival. Fear is contagious but they won’t catch it. They know that every problem is an opportunity in disguise. They will not wait for or rely on a government rescue because there is no such thing. It has never worked. And it never will.

The entrepreneur is the machine of the economy. But she is more than that. She is the embodiment of the American spirit. She dreams in Technicolor. She has the guts of a marine. She has the creativity of Picasso.

The formula for success is really quite simple. Unleash the entrepreneurs. Get out of their way. Give them dollar for dollar tax credits for every unemployed person they hire. Let them dream and risk and build.

Put them in the driver’s seat and put Malthus back in the history books.

Mark Stevens
CEO

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Am I What I Can Be Or Just A Shadow Of My Potential?This simple self-analysis will help you to find the answer and put you on course for a far more successful life.1. Do I influence people to take action or am I always acting at the behest of others?2. When I am in a selling position, do I control the agenda or does the prospect seize the advantage?

3. Am I a leader or a follower? How do I know?

4. Do I ever achieve anything truly original or do I accept cookie cutter solutions?

5. Do I believe that Conventional Wisdom is truly wisdom or simply the conventional way of doing things?

6. Do I ever make time to dream of the impossible and how I can make it possible? Do I know how Einstein used that to create breakthrough thinking?

7. Do I know what marketing is really supposed to do? How to measure it? How to take from mediocre to extreme?

8. Am I in the middle ranks? Of management or sales production? Do I know what I need to get to the top?

9. Do I know my limitations? Do I do anything to overcome them?

10. Do I know my greatest strengths? Do I do enough to leverage them? Do I know how to?

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 24th, 2008 at 11:09 am and is filed under Unconventional Thinking . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.