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Ethics and business have always seemed to be uneasy partners. This is mainly because they focus on goals that appear to contradict one another. The goal of a corporation, for example, is to maximize profits, while the goal of ethics is to ensure just or right action. Ethics focuses on "the good," while business focuses on goods as commodities. While these goals aren't in any way necessarily at odds, they tend to contradict one another in the context of the modern corporation. The Modern Corporation, typified in the form of Microsoft, Coca-Cola or General Motors, for example, is constructed along the lines of a pyramid, with the CEO at the apex and the workers forming the bottom line, so to speak. This pyramid is a hierarchical structure that operates in a mutually reinforcing way from top to bottom and bottom to top. In the fiduciary relation, those at the top draw disproportionately high income as profit gained from the labor of those working at the bottom. In the working relation, however, those at the bottom draw training, experience and qualifications from those at the top.
These relations are highly unequal, however, with those at the top drawing the biggest share of both fiduciary benefits and power. Inequalities of power often lead to exploitation of those both at the bottom and at the top. The company pays the workers just enough to keep them working, depending on the level of supply of those skills needed for the job. When individual workers are easily replaceable, when there is a glut of one or a set of particular skills in the market, then the wages paid those workers will be lower than when there is a shortage of skills. The workers, accordingly, will work just hard enough to keep their jobs – they are, after all, only being paid the least the company can bargain for.
What is wrong with this picture? On the one side we have the company striving to make as big a profit as possible by spending as little as possible in time and wages on those workers that make the company's profits. On the other side we have the workers doing just enough to keep production flowing without losing their jobs. Both sides are in a tug-of-war with each other trying to gain as much as possible while giving as little as possible. With this structure, production will always be at a barely acceptable minimum, as will wages.
But what if there was a company that, instead of paying one CEO 3 million dollars to run it, and 3000 workers 35 thousand dollars to work it, they started everyone off equally, and rewarded each according to his or her effort? (Let's assume that this company operates within a capitalist framework.) What if, instead of each worker giving as little as they can, each gave their very best, and were rewarded by being constantly encouraged by the company with training, support and increases in income that had no ceiling? And what if the CEO started out like everyone else, and in order to gain higher income, had to spend many hours encouraging, training and supporting those beneath him/her? The production of such a company would go through the roof! The employees -- from the CEO through to the lowest level worker -- would all be happy, because they would be receiving rewards in return for effort expended.
Where would we find such a company -- who would build it? While there are some traditional corporations who reward and encourage their employees by giving them stock in the company, such organizations continue to work within a hierarchical pyramid-style structure of the Modern Corporation. Employees are better off, but they are still subject to limited advancement in both job description and income. There is one industry, however, that has achieved the kind of equality described above -- network marketing.
For the past thirty years, network marketing has been chiseling away at the consciousness of the average citizen, sometimes with more than a little lack of courtesy and business acumen. Today, however, network marketing is proving to be what Richard Poe, former editor of SUCCESS magazine, has called the "new wave". In his books, "Wave Three" and "Wave Four", Poe discusses how network marketing has come of age at a time when employees and CEO's alike are becoming dissatisfied with the way modern business works. Executives earning big incomes are highly overworked and have little time for a life, let alone their families and friends -- they have the money but no time to enjoy it. White and blue collar workers have neither the money nor the time, it seems, and many families with both parents working out of necessity, find that their family life is stinted to say the least, and their budgets aren't looking any better.
Many people -- executives and non-executives alike -- are taking to network marketing because it offers them that ever elusive combination of time freedom and a big income. But what is more, it offers them something that the business world has long been denying them -- reward in proportion to effort. So what is network marketing? It's introducing products and services by word of mouth to the end consumer -- no more, no less. Manufacturers don't have to pay for advertising, they take on independent distributors to do it for them. Each distributor is self-employed, and is able to purchase the products, sales aids, and promotional items at wholesale from the parent company. They are able then to retail them to their network of consumers at a profit. Last year, the network marketing industry was responsible for billions of dollars turnover worldwide, and is fast outrunning traditional retail outlets in both price and convenience. But what attracts people to become distributors is the compensation plan -- the plan of commission payouts.
There are a number of variations among compensation plans, but most work in a way that allows individual distributors to "sponsor" other distributors, train them, and in return, to take a small commission from their sales. The potential is huge if you consider these figures: If I become a distributor and introduce five people to my company, I share with them the system we use to train them and they in turn develop their own business, then each of those five do the same, and so on, you end up increasing your sales organization at a rate that itself increases at each level. This makes it possible for any particular individual distributor, through hard work and effort spent, to increase his/her organization into the tens and even hundreds of thousands, and this has indeed been the case -- not just for one or two people, but for thousands worldwide. Network marketing companies such as Amway and Nu Skin have many thousands of distributors earning six figure incomes and enjoying the lifestyle that goes with it -- once they spend five to ten years building their organizations, they develop a residual income that allows them to stop working and still reap the financial benefits of their past efforts.
Network marketing may very well be the wave of the future, not only because it allows individuals to earn what they want, depending on how much effort they want to expend, but also because it discriminates against no-one -- not against race or age or education or skill-level. It's the true leveler in capitalism. Indeed, Poe claims that within the next twenty years, everyone will be into some form of network marketing or other. Whether or not that turns out to be true, the network marketing industry is becoming much better understood, and people who appreciate its true meaning and value realize that it just might be the most ethical and fair business model in existence. |
