There IS money being made out there by large firms and small firms alike, but it is absolutely NOT based on merit or skill at all.
Whether a business is a failure or a success is 99% based on the relationships and contracts it forms. Typically, unskilled managers and executives will forge the deal FIRST, and then go get the expertise and skilled laborers after.
Startups are an exception to this rule, since the technology is all so new. But rapidly, we all see the "money guys" and the "business guys" coming in to the profession day by day, buying up tech, creating bogus certifications and so on that just add the cruft and bureaucracy that monopolies need to survive.
For every trucker making $130,000 a year, there's 100 truckers making $35,000 a year.
For every trucker making $30,000 a year, there's probably 10,000 unemployed or underemployed people begging for the chance to make middle class money rather than $10 an hour at Burger King
I know this is NH, so skills are viewed as technical with all other skills regarded as "unnecessary fluff", but at the end of the day business is built on human relationships, so I'd argue the ability to make and maintain relationships with the right people is one of the most important skills one could have.
In the ideal world, when you want to buy a product or a service, you would consider the value it brings to you based on hard facts, consider other circumstances impacting the costs - like e.g. product A is a bit better, but product B has support people in your country, speaking your language, etc.
Suddenly, comes product C. It's very much inferior compared to A and B, but the producers of C spent most of their budget on sales and marketing. Your boss knows all about C from on-line ads. A C salesman comes to you, promising you features they know they won't deliver, but also know they'll be able to weasel their way out of along the way. Oh, and he brings some nice "off-the books" benefits for you personally, as part of "building customer loyalty".
Sales and marketing as applied in practice distort the market. What a salesman says can be - and often is - completely disconnected from reality, so in presence of salesmen, products are no longer chosen based on objective value they provide. The incentive structure this creates makes everyone else have to lie too, or go out of business.
That's why many people don't like those skills and practices.
What you’re describing here, sales people lying about capabilities and then failing to deliver, is something that maybe happens in complex business to business transactions, where the product is a set of services and products that defy “apples to apples” comparison.
Again, the sales and marketing are integral to the product. I don’t believe companies will survive if they practice outright fraud on their customers. This is not an easy problem. For the example, simpleminded approaches like forcing government to accept the lowest cost bid on complicated products has tremendous downside.
FWIW, managing people, organizations, setting up deals, marketing...these are “hard” skills. What makes them hard is that the parameters of the “problem space” are almost infinitely complex, the work product is ambiguous, and often the involves the focused cooperation of people, who are notoriously unpredictable.
Managed systems comprises of “soft components” is a very hard challenge.
Personally, I simultaneously appreciate just how hard those skills are (I like tech partly because it's much easier than dealing with humans at scale), despise the way those skills are most commonly used, and understand how some dabbling in dark arts is necessary to even have a fighting chance on the marketplace.
> What you’re describing here, sales people lying about capabilities and then failing to deliver, is something that maybe happens in complex business to business transactions, where the product is a set of services and products that defy “apples to apples” comparison.
> I don’t believe companies will survive if they practice outright fraud on their customers.
Well, outright fraud is illegal, and therefore happens less often. But between that and being fair and straightforward there's a whole spectrum, and from my experience almost all companies lean far towards the dishonest side. Just listen to any discussion of marketing people about their strategies. Would you apply similar methods on your friends and family? Would you skinner-box your niece for extra change? Would you price-anchor your mother with a birthday gift?
I simply believe that, as a society, we have way too low standard for business interactions. We allow ourselves to be manipulated at every way without question, and even praise the master manipulators who are skilled at what they do. I'd love for that to change, but I have no idea how to help - so for now, I just resort to expressing and explaining my distaste for manipulative practices.
No. It does happen, not "maybe", every day and for every kind of decision, complex and simple. If something is "apples to apples", the sales work is to mud the waters.
... obviously unless you happen to work for the company with the good (or least bad) apples, in which case your jib is to spread the word that good apples exist.
Inventing something is a value-added game. If I make us a knife that lets us cut a cactus in the desert for water, and we both survive the day because of that knife, I've added value.
If another guy makes the same knife, and now we have to compete for your attention, distort deal terms and product features to "seem" better than the other knife, etc, then this is not adding value. This is destroying time and money.
Sales is a zero sum game. One company wins, the other company loses. That's ok, but the winner should succeed thanks to price + features (e.g. who makes the better knife), not who "promises" you their knife is "better".
In an ideal world, we all just have a spreadsheet of all the knives available out there, their price, what they're actually built to do, and you just hit buy.
This is old school Econ 101, but I think it’s relevant. Know we have multiple options for knifes. How do we decide the best one? We let people decide for themselves, and price is the signaling mechanism as to where resources should be focused.
So we have a “market mechanism” for discovering quality, thereby making “market” an integral part of the system.
It could be done otherways, and markets have known weaknesses, especially for certain categories of goods.
But for many categories of goods it’s a very powerful system to spur and support innovation and entrepreneurial endeavors. So to call an essential part of a market bases system valueless does not make sense.
Maybe - forming the relationships and contracts and forging the deal - is a valuable skill too, and since I've been on a lot of interview panels - getting the skilled laborers and expertise to work for you is also another very valuable "skill".
For example, "Rich people deserve to be rich because they showed the ability to accumulate wealth." - Well, that was easy...
Or another one "good enough" products are good enough because they are bought. Investing any more, e.g. into making a software have less bugs, or an electronic device, or anything, last longer, are useless, or the market would already have provided that outcome. What a nice and easy circular argument. Imagine Gillette produced razors that last ten years, including blades. Very bad for them! Would it be bad for the mankind overall? If you believe in "the market" then yes, it would be bad for mankind. You can take any other product and company, incl. all the "lemon market" stuff. If the market prevents you from voluntarily doing better (because you will be outcompeted) it must be what is good for everyone or the market would not have produced that outcome, Q.E.D.
I think that while the skill is obviously extremely valuable, also to society, what you can get with it is too much. It always leads to optimal outcomes if you already believe it does (because "market", magic word).
Just like in biochemistry a reaction can be enzyme-limited or substrate-limited, i.e. the path is too hard or there is not enough supply, I think the rewards for being well-connected are oversized because we don't have an issue with too few people desiring to be well-connected, but that the path is hard. Paying more does nothing to how hard it is to become well connected, and increasing the desirability of being well-connected doesn't do anything either.
I think there is a strong case to be made that they add value. One issue they solve is simply the communication of the existence and value of said product in an increasingly crowded and noisy world.
To take everyone’s favorite example, look how Apple has consistently worked on their image and marketing, and how that expense and effort serves as a signaling mechanism to consumer purchasers of very complex products. Of course, Apple delivers the goods, consistently, and has built up a symbiotic system of communication and technology.
The two big differentiators Apple has used are there focus on design and user experience. It’s not hard to see how these areas of attention blur into the boundaries of marketing, customer service, and product development.
There’s something I think of as “coherence” in created things. When it’s achieved, to end user it might seem like nothing, because the effort put into the subtle aspects of the creation become “invisible.”
If you’ve ever attempted doing something even as simple as writing marketing copy, the difficulty of bringing focus, clarity, and effectiveness quickly hits you in the face.
A company that can execute these “non-technical” skills well is at least a good bet for executing the technical apsects as well.
Can anyone think of counter examples? Companies that talk a good game, set up outstanding business structures, and then consistently deliver rubbish?
Edit: your comment about the contined existence of merely adequate products, wouldn’t you say that there is a real issue of cost? A company could dramatically reduce bugs in software putting more testing into the product, hiring better engineers, but if people don’t want to pay the price, the product is not “better.”
There is a fundamental issue in economics, which is how to “value” things. Price is used as a proxy, because it’s inherently quantifiable, and the alternatives lead to highly contentious differences of opinion.
In a perfect world, admin and delivery are nearly 0, the warehouse where it's made is once again as cheap as possible, and the materials and labor will decrease over time as more and more laborers acquire the skills necessary to make the product. This is why drone pilot income is rapidly plumetting, along with database administrators and so on.
Knowing this reality, major corporations and the government have colluded together to "regulate" and "standardize" many industries, as well as creating many burdensome and time consuming processes for all businesses (accounting, HR, compliance).
This admin cruft is the very secret sauce that keeps monopolies and oligopolies alive, while killing innovation and price competition. Essentially, this is the American health care system.
Sales is just part of that cruft. There's a reason I don't need a sales guy to buy a solar panel-- I just need customer support at the most.
Sorry, but you are wrong. The price of a good is not a function of these. Price is a function of demand and supply. And demand and supply are in turn also a function of price.
For example, you cannot demand a salary based on the cost of your education. The market will decide what is the value of your labour.
Also, if you try to find a job in a saturated job market, you will understand the importance of "Sales". If you can't market yourself you wont find a job in a high-supply labor market however qualified you might be.
In a nutshell I think those who think Sales is "cruft" are the those who had it easy all their life, and who never had to compete with 100 guys half their skill.
As someone who has set prices in a small business, that is not true.
Please don't take the simple - and simplistic - models used in trying to study an incredibly complex world as if they are reality.
You get some useful results from the Bohr model of the Atom - that doesn't mean it's "true" or "reality". It's a model. As some STEM professor (might have been physics) once said to the new students: If you want "truth" you are in the wrong lecture, philosophy is down the hall on the right.
So you get some useful results from assuming that this is what determines price, so that you are able to create a model. That does not mean that that's "how it is". The more closely you look the less it is true.
Humanity should not have to waste its time going through the dog and pony show of every company and every vendor.
Wherever possible, goods and services SHOULD be commodities that are interchangeable. A rune platebody will always be a rune platebody from the grand exchange, no matter who is selling it in Runescape.
Obviously there will be edge cases for custom products and services, that's totally fine. But imagine buying a water bottle or choosing antivirus software after being subjected to 8 different sales guys and their "funnels".
No thanks! Let's bring PRICE as close to COST as possible.
That was not what I said - at all! Of course it adds value. Reading through it, it seems you entire reply is premised on something I did not even remotely say?
I edited the post and added a new last paragraph.
That's a pretty broad generalization. I'm not sure I know how to frame that question in an answerable way, much less that I know the answer off the top of my head.
Look at groupcurrency.org
But in most unbanked areas like rural African villages or Brazilian favelas people have smartphones. That’s one thing almost all of them have.
But people don't. No amount of crypto 'disruption' is going to change that.
I would rather live in a system where no one legitimately begs for food, because they have an app that eliminates food insecurity for everyone.
Do you know how much money is donated around the world every day, to hard hit areas, universities and so on? This can be done way better. Look at what GiveDirectly does in Africa. We can do better than that.
Watch the video at https://intercoin.org — this is not theoretical! We are doing it.
Any job that pays $130k/yr will have these sort of dynamics.
Precious opportunities don't come along unless you have some serious leverage up management. That's not just true with trucking but with any job on earth.
I love how on big job sites, they would have their reps, banners and make sure all their guys have IBEW bling to ward off inspectors like garlic for vampires.