Creative/Generalist

The first half of this double post comes from a rambling, ranting conversation I had with my girlfriend in the car yesterday; the second half comes from the niggling sensation I’ve had ever since I wrote the very first post on this blog that I never quite made my intentions clear. Depending on whether you’re Gen X or Gen Y, your brain might be running out of hard drive space – mine certainly is. The more crap you read on the internet, the more secondary school French trickles out your left ear, never to be heard from again.  What will you do, monsieur, when your tire bursts on the A-10 from Tours to Biarritz, eh?  My solution to this problem is generally to construct never ending mental summaries which tend to spill forth when anyone is stupid enough to ask my opinion on, well, anything.  As time goes by and more information comes in, I adjust these miniature world views until they are compact answers to some of the world’s trickiest questions.  And so it came to pass yesterday, on the road from Leon to Burgos, after taking far too seriously what far too many people I don’t (physically) know have to say about life, the world and business, I loosely formulated my personal summary approach to world domination.  These are not really my own, original ideas, but more how I understand and conceptualise what a lot of people far more intelligent than myself are currently saying about the way the world works.

First, let me clarify what I’m talking about, and that’s business – business in the widest sense of the word.  I doesn’t matter whether it’s big or small, short or fat, charitable or selfish, employed or freelance, online or offline, full-time or part-time, legal or illegal.  We’re talking about activities that are designed to make money – the more the better.

From the millions of words that have been written about commercial success, and the thousands I’ve read, it seems to all come down to three things (which are so intertwined that they’re really just one thing):

1. If you’re a person, find a genuine niche.  If you’re are a business, find a proper Unique Selling Proposition, then…

2. Be great.  Better – be the only one, then…

3. Find an innovative, honest business model which makes big company execs cry and makes you money whilst treating your customers as human beings.

That’s it.  Really.  I’m tempted to leave it there for maximum impact, but I’d like to expand at least a little bit on each of the above points.  If you like the maximum impact idea, stop reading now and just take that little snippet away with you.

If you’re a person, find a genuine niche.  If you’re a business, find a proper Unique Selling Proposition.

For the sake of simplicity, I’ll consider these concepts as one for the time being.  The question to ask is “What makes me, or my company, different?”.

The more time I spend in business, the more I realise that being different isn’t reserved for Nando’s chicken restaurants where you have to order at the counter but a server brings the food to the table (?).  Being different is your ticket out of 15-hour days, a prolonged cash flow struggle and eventual financial death.

It would be pointless for me to go into USP, niches and value propositions in any detail here as there is already an overwhelming amount written on those topic.  The ground truth is this:  if you’re considering an activity that isn’t going to make people wet themselves with excitement, even if it’s accounting, don’t bother.  If you’re already running an enterprise that isn’t doing something astoundingly different from everyone else, change – or shut down.

All the bad stuff in business comes from ignoring this most fundamental piece of advice.  And by ‘all the bad stuff’, I mean competition.  As any small business owner will tell you, being part of an over-competitive market is no fun at all – you end up slashing margins until you’re making next to nothing and spending what you do make on advertising to get noticed.  It’s a short cut to baldness, divorce and bankruptcy.

Robert Stephens of Geek Squad once said that ‘marketing is the tax you pay for being unremarkable’.  Aside from semantic quibbles, it might be the single most sit-up-and-kick-you-in-the-nuts piece of advice I’ve ever heard, and it turns out to be painfully true.  The newspapers, business press and internet are full of examples of clever businesspeople leveraging their uniqueness to get mammoth amounts of free, prime publicity.  The television news wouldn’t look twice at another new fruit smoothie on the market, but might give you 30 seconds of coverage if your USP was that you were shooting it into your customers’ mouths from the International Space Station.

The bottom line is that real uniqueness creates its own publicity and leaves you with a viable business rather than a massive AdWords bill.  

Be great.  Better – be the only one

There’s a lot of people around at the moment that want a lot of pieces of lots of pies.  The world has turned into a horribly competitive place.  The means that even if you’ve found your niche and are crystal clear about the value you are bringing that your neighbour is not, you’ve got to do it seriously well.  If the only pizza place in your town was rubbish, they might still make some money off their uniqueness.  If the only pizza place in your town had been voted one of the top five in the country…

You’ve got to be the go-to-guy (or organisation) to the exclusion of everyone else.  You don’t have time to be mediocre or even good – even being the best won’t cut it these days.  If you nail your market positioning  right, you should be the only entity worth considering for good or service x.  Of course, if you nail your niche right, nobody else should be around to stop you anyway, but to be 100% successful you’ll still need to offer an outstanding service to your clients.

Why? Because customers talk.  Not like they did back in the day when if you failed a customer, you might lose them and their immediate family, no, nowadays customers Twitter.  If you’re really crap to a single influential player, you could conceivably lose 10,000 potential customers overnight.  If you’re amazing, the reverse can happen.  If you write something mediocre, you might have 5 or 6 friends and your Mum read it.  If you write something earth-shattering and its merit takes it to the front page of Digg, 100,000 people might read it.  The connected, social world of commerce is a meritocracy the likes of which has never existed before.  If you don’t believe me, check out what Get Satisfaction are doing for customer service (and if you’re a business owner, don’t bill me for new pants).

Find an innovative, honest business model which makes big company execs cry and makes you money whilst treating your customers as human beings

Let’s not beat about the bush, most big business have made vast sums of money by treating consumers like dirt and generally ripping them off wherever possible.  We’re so used to it we’re immune.  It’s what we expect.

But anyone who spends any time on the web must have noticed that things are slowly changing for the better.  Look around the trend-setters and you’ll get a good feel for what it means to treat customers as human beings: clear, honest product descriptions written in every day language, no misleading offers, no long-term contracts or tie-ins, no small print, no extortionate pricing.  You might have to look hard for companies doing this sort of thing right now, but you can bet your arm that everyone will be doing it five years from now.  Terms and conditions will be ditched in favour of more human agreements, like the Company-Customer pact.  ‘Offer Subject to Conditions’ will be a thing of the past.

As usual, the web croud are light years ahead of everyone else on this.  Bloggers have already embraced hyper-honesty.  In times past, blogs were full of links which took you to places to buy stuff if you inadvertently clicked on them thinking they might give you some extra info.  Nowadays, bloggers routinely include disclaimers about affiliate links, often disclosing just how much they will earn should you buy something via their site.  Why do they do this?  Because it turns out that deliberately but subtly misleading people to make a sale really annoys them. When confronted with a bit of good, old-fashioned honesty, they’re more like to go for the product.  I came across a currency exchange company recently that proclaimed total transparency.  They would show you the price they were buying the currency at for any trade you asked for and would then show you exactly how much they were making out of the deal.  Madness?  Of course, you might be turned off to know how much they are making out of you and run a mile.  That’s probably why almost nobody is doing this yet.  If they’re charging a fair price though, isn’t it more likely that you’ll appreciate their honesty and transparency and probably consider that the minimal fee they’re charging you is fair dues for a unique and excellent (remember?) service.

Being honest and transparent, means you can’t hide behind a rip-off business model which is going to make you insanely rich on the back of little work or talent.  An 800% markup won’t cut it anymore.

Let’s be realistic for a minute.  Out of the hundreds of would-be-entrepreneurs who quit their day job each week, all but a tiny percentage will be back at the office doing 9-to-5 before a year’s out.  The statistics speak for themselves – something like 90% of all small business are gone within 12 months, out of those that remain, the second year failure rate is similar, and even then, out of the remaining group, the five year failure rate is comparable.

Why on earth do so many small businesses fail so quickly?  Are good business ideas really that hard to come by?  In fact, viable ideas are almost certainly nothing to with the problem.  Success, after all, is often in the implementation, and an average idea, bought to life by a a truly talented team, can trump even the most groundbreaking innovation where the realisation is weak.  The fact is that so many small business founders are just not honest with themselves about what it takes to successfully realise their dreams.  Making money from an idea is hard, but being truly brutal in your own self-assessment is even harder.  Really now, who wants to admit that they probably don’t have the numerical skills to understand pricing or cash flow?  Who could imagine their business failing because their marriage just couldn’t stand up to the strains of debt?  So the first instinct is to just jump in, thinking “I’ll deal with whatever problems arise later”.  Far better, surely, to be honest with yourself from the outset. Do you really have what it takes to start your own business?

This is my rundown of what I think are the key attributes needed if you really want to be a successful small business owner.  Of course, by ‘small business’, I’m referring to ‘Say No! to the Office’-type small businesses – modern, flexible, possibly location-independent, possibly little to zero startup capital, innovative business model etc.  For other types of business, not all of these may apply.  By ‘successful’, I’m talking about getting going and just surviving, not necessarily bringing home truckloads of cash within six months.  There’s a lot of luck in business, but luck favours the bold and, without a doubt, those that have the skills to bring luck onto their side.

Are you multitalented?  Are you smart enough to learn, literally, anything?

For me, and for the types of businesses I have been involved in, this is the number one.

Starting and running a small business demands a range of skills so vast and varied that you cannot possibly imagine what you are getting into until you’re into it.

Some might say that the only skill you really need is the ability to find, bring into your business, and manage people with the right abilities, rather than actually having any yourself.  Perhaps many even start out with that very idea.  For me though, that’s the approach of someone with a limited skillset and an even more limited ability to acquire new skills.  Your new idea isn’t a middle-management company, is it?  At the beginning, when money is limited, or worse still, non-existent, you’re probably not going to have the resources to find people to take care of every little task that’s outside your field of expertise.  Even if you do have access to that much cash, how can you expect to effectively monitor and guide what your team are doing without understanding it yourself?

The truth is, being multitalented by nature is a massive advantage in startup business.  Many people, either consciously or subconsciously, bracket themselves as ‘creative’, ‘numerical’, ‘artsy’, ‘non-technical’, ‘logical’, ‘scientific’, etc., and then put up barriers to anything which falls outside the definition of what they consider themselves to be.  Those are the people I have seen struggle or fail quickly.  Help is either slow or expensive – if you want real success, you’re going to have to depend on yourself, and if you don’t know how to do something at first, you’re going to have to learn.  Be honest with yourself – are you strongly right-brain, or left-brain dominant?  Do you struggle to acquire creative, or conversely, technical skills?  Or are you a polyglot, able to turn your hand to almost anything?  Test yourself – how do you feel about learning 80-100% of the following?

Business and Entrepreneurial

- Banking

- Book-Keeping and Accounting

- Small Business Technical and Legal

- Business Communications – Phone/Email/Fax

- IT Systems and Solutions for Business

- Market/Competitor Research

- Business Processes/Management/Productivity

- Logistics/Warehousing

- Personnel Management

Web Design

- HTML, CSS

- Javascript, PHP

- Web Graphics, Buttons, etc.

- SEO, Website Optimisation, Google, Yahoo, Sitemaps

- WordPress, Blogger, Ebay & Other Template Based Design

Graphic Design

- Photography, Photo Editing

- Logo and Brand Graphics Design

Software, Hardware and Programming

- System Set Up and Configuration

- Email/Web/Applications Configuration

- Microsoft Office Applications

- Adobe Photoshop, Indesign, Illustrator, Acrobat

- Javascript, PHP

Online Marketing

- Ebay, Amazon, Google, Shopping Portals

- Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

- Adwords, Pay-per-Click Advertising

- Affiliate Programs

- Website Optimization, Promotions etc.

- RSS, Blogs, Feeds

- Social Networking, Facebook, Forums

- WordPress, Blogger, Feedburner

- Google Analytics

Offline marketing and Sales

- Leaflet, Flyer, Printed Material Design

- Catalogue Design

- Sales Agents

Writing

- Web Copy

- Proof Reading

- Product Description

- Press Releases, Articles, Reports, Blog Posts

And that’s probably only scratching the surface.  If you’re coming from a non-commercial background, chances are you’ll have almost none of the above knowledge to start with.  That’s OK, as long as you’re able to acquire it quickly.  The opportunities and resources for teaching yourself just about anything are virtually limitless these days – just hit Google or Youtube with the topic you need to learn about for an endless stream of information.  Think about how you have approached learning new skills in the past.  Have you been frightened off?  Or have you successfully applied your intelligence to new fields?

Luckily, most people will never be able to take advantage of this torrent of learning.  We are educated to be specialists, not generalists.  If you are truly multitalented, that works to your advantage.  Those are the barriers to entry that you will overcome and others will not.

Are you persistent? Will you survive ‘the dip’?

I’ve referred to ‘the dip’ before.  If you don’t know what I’m talking about, pick up a copy of the book and read it now.

It’s unlikely your business will work straight away.  In fact, it’s probably going to take a number of years before you really start seeing the fruit of your labour.  At some point into its growth and development, you’re going to hit a dip – a point in time where the initial motivation that kept you up all night designing logos is a fading, distant memory, yet the shining light of success, profit and perhaps even fame are so far in the distance that you can’t even imagine them yet, let alone see them.

Luckily, at this point most people quit.

Will you?  That’s what you need to establish before you even start.  Getting into the dip mindset is almost impossible – that’s why so many people start out blindly on a journey they were never, ever going to finish.  You can’t feel those feelings of despair and distress until you are up to your eyeballs in workload, bogged down in cashflow issues or debt, and facing one customer complaint after another.  That’s the nature of the beast.  You tell yourself that you’ll never be in that situation.  But you will.  You’ll tell yourself that even if you do get into that situation, you will be strong enough to pull through.  Be realistic.  Will you?  Most people don’t.  Getting through the dip takes more motivation, self-control and patience than most people can ever muster.  That’s another barrier to entry that stops the market getting flooded.  Not everyone is cut out for this.  So, you can fool yourself into thinking you’ve got the staying power – but wouldn’t it be better to consider whether you really do before wasting your time.  Look back at your past endeavours.  Have you done anything to suggest you won’t drop out at the first sign of trouble?  Have you achieved something that took extraordinary commitment in the face of strong pressure to quit?

The worst case scenario is that you waste a load of time, effort and money getting to the dip, only to quit when you get there.  Save yourself a lot of pain by only starting projects you are sure you can persist at, no matter what.

Are you patient?

Even if you don’t hit a strong dip, it may take a lot longer than you think to produce the kind of results you want.  If you plan for the business to be fully functional, perhaps even paying you a wage, within a year, what will you do if it takes two, three or even five years?

Even some of the best businesses, with outstanding implementation, still need time to find their niche in the marketplace, develop a strong customer base, and to gain the sort of momentum that propels them forward without the constant grind typically needed to push a startup along.  Perhaps yours is the type of business that gathers pace quickly, but in my experience, most startups are relatively slow-burners and thus their success is mainly limited by the owner’s patience.

When you find that your business is plodding along at a much slower pace than you expected, how will you react?  Are you impatient by nature?  Will you soon be looking for other avenues to explore rather than consolidating what you have?

Are you resilient?

I have never encountered the quantity and degree of obstacles, barriers and problems as I have whilst growing my small-business.  Sometimes I have felt like there was no solution, sometimes I have felt like I was banging my head against a brick wall and a lot of the time I have felt like throwing the towel in.

In the second year of trading with my food import company, we had outgrown the small storage unit from which we were trading and desperately needed more space.  We weren’t able to hold the levels of stock we needed to, which meant we were constantly letting customers down and more often than not, losing customers due to our inability to consistently provide what they needed.  We were, however, still small and not yet profitable, and really needed to find somewhere on a shoestring budget.  I have never encountered such a large obstacle to progress in my life.  We searched for months on end.  We almost quit.  When we finally found somewhere, it took 9 months to get the contracts sorted and move in.  It almost killed the business.  I can’t even begin to describe how close we were to losing it all.  But for some crazy reason we held on.

Business, for me, has often been like that.  I have encountered problems to which I had come to the conclusion that there was no solution, only to find that with time, luck and hard work, one does eventually come along.  At first, I was knocked back by each and every problem we encountered.  It seemed so impossible to progress.  It seemed what we were trying to do just couldn’t be done.  But as time has gone by, I have grown better at standing up to problems, at finding solutions, at being more resilient.

How resilient are you?  Do you have a defeatist personality?  Is the first, fifth, or hundredth problem or barrier likely to kill your business? Or can you turn a problem on its head, find a solution and move on?

Is your life flexible enough to adapt to your new business for an unpredictable length of time?

It’s not only your patience that’s going to be tested as your business takes time to grow and develop – your life, too, will feel the strain.  Relationships, kids, personal finances and social life are all likely to influence whether your business will succeed or flop.

It’s hard to imagine what a drain on your resources setting up a new business can be.  You are likely going to devote a huge portion of your available time, money, effort and love to your new project, and these are resources that won’t be available elsewhere and for others.

If there are others in your circle that depend on you – a partner, children, relations, friends – they are going to lose a large part of you for an unspecified period of time.  Do you think they can cope with that?  Or is it likely to cause tensions so strong that they threaten the development of the business?

Think practically – are your finances in a good state?  Can you afford to live for perhaps three years without a solid source of income?  Do you have another source of income?  Is your partner’s income large enough to support your family until the business is ready to pay its way.  You could bet on your business paying within a certain time frame, but what if that time comes and the business is not profitable yet, or not profitable enough.  Being forced by personal circumstances to leach money out of a business that is not yet ready to pay a salary is a sure recipe for cash flow trouble.

Personal circumstances can do more that put financial pressure on a budding business.  If both your life and business demand a greater amount of time than the sum total you have available, at least one, if not both, are going to suffer.  Make sure you are realistic about the personal resources you have available to devote to your project.  Don’t underestimate the investment that you are going to have to make, only to find six months down the line that your life doesn’t, in fact, permit you as much flexibility as you thought.

Stability and comfort is also a key factor.  I have seen friends really struggle with early stage businesses because of instability in their personal circumstances, such as:

- Unstable, volatile relationship with partner.

- Unstable finances.  No reliable source of income.  Constant unexpected expenses. No backup funds.

- Nowhere stable to live. Constantly moving from flat to flat.

- Nowhere comfortable to work.

- Insufficient physical resources.  E.g., no car, no computer.

None of these are limiting factors.  Of course you can start a business without a car.  But with all the difficulties you are likely to face anyway, wouldn’t it be easier if you could rely on yourself to get from meeting to meeting, rather than having to wait for the bus?  Of course you can start a business without a stable place to live and work.  But you’re going to be putting in mammoth work sessions at the beginning, and aren’t you going to be more comfortable and motivated to continue if you have a suitable, dedicated workspace?

As my own personal life has become more comfortable and stable throughout the development of my business, I have found it easier and easier to leverage my environment to produce better, more professional results.

 Do you have what it takes to start your own business?  Ask yourself the following questions and, above all, be realistic with yourself.  Wasting a load of resources and time on a project that’s never going to go anywhere is worse than not starting at all.

• Do I posses a wide range of skills? Am I able to learn new skills relatively easily and quickly?
• Am I a quitter? Do I have the staying power to work through the dip when times seem rough?
• Do I have the patience to see the project through, even if it takes much longer than expected?
• Do I have a strong, resilient personality? Enough to deal with the extreme difficulties business will throw at me?
•  Can my life, my loved ones and my personal circumstances deal with the investment?

Here’s a quick exercise (actually it’s quite time consuming) that is guaranteed to turn you from a bed-jumping, babbling, raving optimist into a weeping manic depressive in as little as a single weekend.

Collect up the following:

- A stack of self-help/productivity/entrepreneurial type books.  The more outlandish the claims they make, the better.  More or less any will do, but  ‘The 4-Hour Workweek’ by Tim Ferris is the obligatory piece-de-resistance.

- Hard liquor of choice.

- Laptop with internet Access.

Start on Friday after a hard working week by getting good and drunk and partying until it suits you.  Take Saturday to sleep it off and then go for a nice long walk and take a refreshing shower.  This should ensure the appropriate zen-like, the-world-is-all-good state required for the next phase.  After dinner on Saturday, knock back a good few espressos, put on ‘Eye of Tiger’ and start reading. Stay up all night until you’re 100 pages from the end of ‘The 4 Hour Workweek’ and so high you can barely control the pencil you’re using to plan tomorrow’s trip to the Cayman Islands.  Wake your partner/neighbours with jubilant screams proclaiming you have found the answer to all your life’s problems.   So far, so good.  Now sleep.

On Sunday morning, realise that the Caymans will have to wait until Monday and grab that pencil and paper again. Start work on planning how you’re going to make shit loads of money doing absolutely nothing, or at most, half an hour every other Thursday in-between luxury transatlantic voyages. You could go for an online business, probably a blog.  Blogs are like the keys to the mint right?  Hell, you’re a crap writer and don’t have anything to say anyway, but with the right marketing and a content-poor ebook you’ll be on your way to the big time in no time.  Or maybe you could start a product-shipping business specifically designed to afford you this lifestyle.  This should be easy, brainstorm a few ideas, test a few models, manufacture a product, set up a website, outsource all the work to India – you know the drill.  Six figures in six minutes a day.

After lunch on Sunday, come back and read the rest of this article.

I’m really sorry to have to break this to you, but it’s not going to happen.  Of course, I mean that in a ‘you’re not going to win the lottery’ way; so technically, it could happen, but really, it won’t.

For a start, you’re not going to make real money and work an hour a day blogging.  Don’t just take my word for it, read what Darren and Penelope, two people with vastly more experience and wisdom than me, have to say on the issue.  Believe me now?  OK – let’s procede to the ‘why’, which takes less than 5 seconds.  Economists have a concept called ‘barriers to entry’ which explains why you can’t make money doing something anyone can do.  Blogging has zero barriers to entry.  Almost anyone can do it and it gets easier and cheaper every day with free, idiot-proof software being developed faster than a 50MB broadband connection.  That’s right, in 5 to 10 short years, blogging has gone from cash-cow to dead-in-the-water (as a form of quick and easy income).  If you want to make a living from blogging now, you’ll have to develop serious expertise in online marketing and write empty, search engine and advertising driven, garbage for about 20 hours a day.  Thats because 30 million people are trying to do the same thing and 29 million of them are willing to work 19 hours a day.

A Ferris-style muse won’t work either, or at least not for any protracted period of time.  Firstly, really good products, the type that can support an 8x markup are like goldust, and you probably can’t think of one.  Most retailers work on 2-3x.  If you think you can ‘feign’ a luxury product and charge 4 times what competitors are asking for just by printing off a glossy label and adding ‘sex’ to the name of the product – think again.  Noone has any money any more and that’s probably going to be the case for a good while.  Plus, consumers get savvier by the minute and with a quick ‘Is x the same as y in Google?’ anyone can shatter your myth in seconds.  Why is all this happening to you?  Barriers to entry.  What if I can find a product that works, then I’ll look stupid, won’t I?  Maybe for a while, but if you uncover something that good, it won’t be long until zillions of would-be-new-rich come after you – and they’ll get you as well.  Why? Barriers to entry.  Let me say it again, just in case you haven’t got the idea.  Barriers to entry.  Like it or not, resources are scarce and there is heavy competition for them.  If something is easy, requires little effort and makes enough profit to justify outsourcing the labour that goes into producing, marketing and distributing it, there will be competition, and lots.  If not now, then later.

The upshot of an ‘easy’ business is that you’ll spend so much time ‘defending’ it, that you’ll be putting in 15 hour days before you can say ‘VIP lounge at Heathrow’.  Aggressive marketing and competition monitoring, patent filing and enforcement, legal battles, attempted differentation of your product through advertising – whatever your defense is, it’s likely to cost enough that at some point, your ‘muse’ just doesn’t produce anymore.  At that point maybe you drop it and move onto the next opportunity.  If you’re smart and quick enough in the water, perhaps you can snake between profitable opportunities, jumping ship before saturation point.  There’s a word for that person – ‘serial entrepreneur’.  Go and find one of them and ask them if they’ve managed to set up any of their businesses to the point where they can stand back and let them run more or less autonomously in less than three years, or two years, or even one year.  Thought not.  Serial entrepreneurialism is not easy.  Why?  High barriers to entry (capital, intelligence, diligence, experience, knowledge, risk).

In the end it all comes down to this.  There are easy activities which will earn you little money (low barriers to entry, e.g., blogging) and there are hard activities that will earn you (lots) more (high barriers to entry, business set up).  If a low barrier to entry, high paying opportunity exists, it s a temporary imbalance in the system, a quick defiance of the laws of economics.  Of course, you can make a worklife out of chasing these opportunities, but fighting the laws of economics takes more than 4-hours a week, so best come prepared.

Contrary to popular imagination, starting a new small business does not always involve waltzing around in a sharp pin-stripe talking to venture capitalists about start-up funding.

Instead, it quite often involves long evenings hunched over books and magazines, or topping up on facial radiation in front of your computer screen, learning about topics which may have seemed unimaginable, even unpronounceable to your former self. Not many of us understood double-entry bookkeeping, tax law, health and safety regulation or search engine optimisation before starting our businesses, but we sure as hell had to learn them. Sure, there’s a subset of entrepreneurs who are happy to farm out as much as possible to the specialists, but as I’ve argued before, even if you can afford it, you’ll be a much more effective manager if you can understand what the specialists are actually doing.

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Having trouble understanding global economics and the crisis of capitalism? Here's one way of visualising it.

In the first place, a group of kebab issuing countries commence a stealth invasion of the fast-food system of another country, with the ultimate aim of securing full kebab dependency. Kabab dominance is ensured via a careful devaluation of the host county's native gastronomic culture. The indigenous population will lose their taste for 'home classics' and eventually become completely incompetent at preparing or cooking any type of food for themselves. The final stage of the attack is a biological inability of the host nation's population to digest any non-kebab food and a chemical reliance on chili sauce.

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