MUBARAK SOOLTANGOS, author of BUSINESS INSIDE OUT
The gambling business
« Today, English clubs have their own academies for grooming young talent, and they recruit promising youths massively from new and less expensive countries, namely in Africa. This is an illustration of English entrepreneurship, especially when it comes to generating and managing finance. »
Every respectable business, to be ethical, should be based on producing something useful and tangible. The benefit can also be virtual with very short life as in the domain of leisure activities, and still remain ethical. Gambling business, however, is centered around selling illusion and creating the dream that you can bet small and win big. What is the philosophy behind gambling? Nothing, if you would care to reflect. It is based on sheer luck, not involving effort, without any rationality at all.
Gambling is a trade where considerable money changes hands without nothing being produced. The marketing tool used is to keep hope alive. The only winners are the promoters of the business and there is a very dark side to it, that of fixing matches and races to maximise chances of winning, and this is where gambling also plunges into immorality.
Gambling also has the capacity of making losers gamble on an increasing scale in the hope of recouping their previous losses. This is completely at the other extremity of the spectrum of demand, which says that the more you are satisfied with a product, the more you buy it. In gambling, the more you are dissatisfied, the more you bet
Gambling is an environment where your end of month state of mind switches from the joy of receiving your salary to the misery of how you are going to meet the needs of your family when a large part of this salary is earmarked beforehand to pay debts caused by gambling. It is a business where few people benefit, on the back of the misery of the many.
If a business has such perverse effects, it should certainly be classified as being harmful and immoral. Then, it is legitimate for you to ask yourself why governments tolerate “legal” gambling, betting and lotteries. Simply for the huge tax that they bring in and there is always a polite silence when it comes to why the authorities do not ban a trade having so much negativity in it.
The weapons business
Stephen Covey says, “Begin with the end in mind”. This is an absolutely sound way of triggering an action and a decision because it gives you a set objective and helps you to work straight towards it, without unnecessary diversion along the way.
This is even more of a requirement in production. You must know what is the end use of your product, and it is legitimate that you try to enlarge your market by enlisting new buyers. Have you ever imagined what is the end use of the products of the weapon industry? If this has never crossed your mind, you better become alive to it and measure the extent of the horror of the world we are living in.
Weapons are intended to take lives in their finality. In their reflection on how to enhance the performance of their products, which is good thinking for any producer, weapon manufacturers are in a race to produce more and more lethal weapons capable of killing more and causing more harm. This is the state of mind of their researchers: produce more of small things which will cause more damage to bigger things. Just think how abysmal the animal instinct of such a scientist can be: He spends the most of his God given life researching how to take the lives of others, for the sake of filthy money. He has been made blind enough not to realize that the whole extent of his intellect will never be enough to allow him to create a single human cell. It is the research work of the most perverse nature the world has ever seen. Even the drug business is not intended to kill, but to produce addicts who will buy increasingly, but it does kill, as a corollary.
There is a larger business than the weapon business, and which serves as vector to it. This is the war business. War must always be created and prompted to feed the weapons trade. But wars can only be planned and triggered by heads of state, and for this reason, there are no more than a handful of actors in the world in this business of such a magnitude. This lifts another veil from the true face of some world leaders. They will use lies, false propaganda and their dishonest and subjugated media to sell to their public opinion that they are bent on taking populations of other countries out of dictatorship and oppression, or sell the virtues of democracy, of their own style.
You may ask yourself what prompts heads of state to promote war. Behind this is the implacable reality that the prime mover of the weapons industry is dirty money and that the published intention of making the lives of people living under dictatorship better is nothing but scam. Money is at the heart of war and involves the participation of massive credit providers who, to the outside world, operate normal financing businesses under reputable names. Here also, the same horrid syndrome, the wealth of a few built on the misery of the many.
The English Premier League
This is the positive success story of a powerful business whose birth was dictated by negative circumstances. People with brains and acumen have turned a sad situation into a money-making machine while providing the world with intense satisfaction at low cost for the consumption of football lovers.
Twenty-five years after England’s world cup win in 1966, English football was at cross-roads, compelled either to change or to face extinction in the country which had invented football. It had retained its physical nature and was without a soul when other countries had opted for a more entertaining game.
In May 1992, the newly created English Premier League joined hands with television broadcasters in a new adventure. The plan was to revamp English football and sell television rights worldwide. The main stumbling block was that English football did not have the raw materials (footballers with skill) to improve its offering. So, the industry artfully developed the vision of starting to import footballing talent from overseas.
English football rapidly developed a new style, making a blend of English aggressiveness and unfaltering physical effort, European scientific, disciplined and strategy driven football, and South American natural skills and champagne style. Demand for television football grew rapidly, and TV rights became more expensive and attracted a worldwide demand. Football tickets also became expensive and fans accepted this, as they were offered better entertainment. Rapidly, English football became affluent and went global by enlisting footballers from highly populated countries. These footballers, playing on a new international scale and scene, created huge following in their respective countries, which also boosted tremendously the sale of branded football kits, from which a sizeable royalty went to the football teams.
Today, English clubs have their own academies for grooming young talent, and they recruit promising youths massively from new and less expensive countries, namely in Africa. This is an illustration of English entrepreneurship, especially when it comes to generating and managing finance.
Faced with the difficult situation of not having talent in their English players, they have taken the battle on the grounds of entrepreneurship, organization, marketing and finance. They import raw materials, refine it, put it to use and let it evolve into an organized business generating huge money, all set up by English genius. This is typically production without raw materials and nevertheless creating wealth. It is also moving focus from football to a much larger target market, a thousand times bigger, the entertainment market. Quite something to provoke innovative thinking among our private sector entrepreneurs.