Avarice and the City
I was invited to join in a game called Cashflow by the author of the well-known book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad. It was interesting, something like a more advanced form of monopoly, except that the game was designed to help people learn about the key points that the author made in his book about how to achieve financial freedom.
All in all, this was an interesting game - learning about passive income and how financial freedom can be defined as having a passive income that exceeds your expenses.
This game was played fast - it started at 8, and ended at 9.30 p.m. There were several facilitators who were not directly playing, but assisted as bankers, and to move the game along. Naturally, the presence of these people made me wonder why. If they were not playing, then why were they there? And why was it important for the game to complete on time?
I was not surprised when the organisers summarised the lessons learnt, and introduced this business opportunity that costed very little in capital. Aha! Another network mareting (or Multi-Level Marketing) scheme. I’ve encountered this often enough, and perhaps I should list my objects on record.
First objection is the market saturation - the entire success of the scheme is based on rapid market saturation. The successful ones will not have achieved that without the associated failure of most recruits. The entire structure of the scheme is targetted at recruitment instead of at the product. In fact, the only way anyone can be successful is by recruitment.
Second objection is that the process disclaims responsibility for the product. Here, you are interested in expanding the network, without sufficient attention to the product or its side effects.
Third - the moral risk that I face is that relationships are being subverted into the sales process. Well, this is not unique to the MLM economy because sales of consumer products (like insurance) build on relationships as well. This is a personal reason … although I would not hesitate to endorse a product that I liked, I would not knowingly introduce an associate into a business in which the failure rate is 99% (in the hopes that I would be in that 1%).
Fourthly (and most important) - the primary motivation factor behind agents of this industry is the search for financial freedom. In fact, this reason becomes of primary importance - in the associates they meet and in the targets they set for each other. The primary success metric is how big the downstream can grow.
Enough said. Here are some links to other sites: