The article completly ignores the fact the goods that were sold are highly addictive and quick to build tolerance these combined properties are very rare and really helped the syndicate success.
What works when your product becomes a life or death necessity to people will be much different than what works else where.
Run your business like a business that sells your product. If you're selling cocaine, you should probably run it like a drug lord. If enterprise software, run it like an enterprise software company.
Maybe there's a case again what I'm saying with disruption but let's be honest: running dental practice like an actual drug lord will probably get you struck off.
An example: "Run your business like a cockroach. You're the head: work to make it run without your presence."
A template: "Run your business like a <type>. <insert positive attribute generalised from type>"
http://fair.org/extra/media-censor-cia-ties-with-medellin-dr...
> "Create a Need" Ridiculous. Only in moron anti-drug adds do drug dealers "push" on users. While there's a bit of innovation like all businesses, most of drug dealing is fulfilling a need others won't fill.
> "Embrace Risk" Another ridiculous claim. Drug dealing starts out extremely dangerous and almost all the dealers' strategies are about reducing risk - high security, disposable underlings, etc. A few dealers might "embrace risk" but once they've done all the "hard work" of reducing risk by being ordinary paranoid drug-dealers.
Moreover, it fails to mention important bullet points.
-- Establish a patron. Most drug dealers operate by corrupt authorities on one level or another turning a blind eye. With so much money involved, the temptation is constant.
-- Eliminate the competition. This is a well known and important tactic.
And with these two points added, we see dealers operate with the tactics of other monopolistic businesses - Hollywood or Microsoft in the 90s. Within that framework, they are businesses and make ordinary business decisions as well as decisions about who they need to kill to keep the racket going (and the degree of need to kill varies from area to area).
Hard drugs are excellent at this.