Published by Clear Glass Press, San Francisco 1995

© Copyright 1995 Michael Phillips

Introduction To The Big World View

 

There is no single big theory of business.  There is, however, a big picture that can be helpful in making business decisions.

 

Most business owners and corporate CEOs do not possess business school degrees.  They do, however, have a sense of a logic and intellectual foundation that allows them to understand the nature of business.  Of thousands of business people with whom I've worked, there is a nearly universal sense that only other people know the underlying ideas of business. What They Don't Teach at Harvard Business School seems to have succeeded by tapping into this disquieting sensibility.

People who have gone to business school do not have this same view.  What most of them learned from several years of reading business literature and associating with professors and fellow business students is that there are no rigorous, let alone useful, intellectual ideas about business.  Schooling provides skills rather than theory; skills are for analyzing financial statements and dealing with the legal realm of business practice.  In addition, business students learned useful anecdotes, simulated complex business situations and assimilated the technical language of business operations. Together, these experiences afford some degree of confidence in daily business life.

Business is pragmatic, not theoretical.  It is my contention that business arises out of complex social institutions driven by the unexpressed world views of millions of business people. These views have a cumulative effect over time, and as a consequence, business practices are changing.

By a business world view , I mean a view as simple as “Show me the numbers.” Prove it.

The social forces acting on business internationally and over long historical periods have not been the subject of much intellectual or academic examination.  This is slowly being remedied by the work of Alfred Chandler Jr..; , Thomas Hughes , Mancur Olson , Joe Corn , Mary Douglas , James Beniger  and others in academia.  I owe them all a debt of gratitude and am fortunate to have developed my views while standing on the shoulders of a few wonderful men and women.

For the past century, most thinking about business has been in the thrall of the nineteenth-century German who lived in the libraries of London.  Karl Marx  may not seem to be the major business intellectual, but his ideas of bourgeois values , imperialism , capitalism , monopoly  and profit motivation  have been the driving ideas of economics  and business.  Remove Marx's European concerns about class struggle and you have the intellectual framework on which (and against which) most business thinking has been erected.  It is to Marx that the term and the concept of capitalism owe their linguistic power and political influence.

This book examines the notions of business that were prevalent in Marx's life, which he called bourgeois and which we now understand as trade.  It looks at the edifice of industrialism  and recognizes that many of Marx's notions were accurate; we add examples of new concepts that Marx could not have experienced.  Lastly we look at the idea of which developed out of new forms of business long after Marx died.  Clientricism incorporates practices that are very different from the industrial practices of the last century.

Nature and Commerce

This book title owes a debt in part to Paul Hawken , who named his book Ecology of Commerce  and generated title envy for me.  It also owes a part to India , where I met business people and mingled with the exciting gods Kali  and Ganesh  (the elephant); it also owes intellectual lineage to Max Weber , author of the famous Protestant Ethic and the Rise of Capitalism,  and to his less famous studies of Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Tao and Confucianism.

I wanted the title Ecology of Commerce because I see commerce as a pervasive medium, much like nature.  There is that metaphoric overtone of ecology of nature to which Hawken’s and my titles both allude.  Like nature, commerce  is the medium in which we are immersed, which we have unwittingly created (yes, we pretty much created nature too) and which is deterministic about much of our lives.  The ecological notation comes from a simple urban walk in San Francisco, seeing the variety of niches:  the pristine streets of rich Pacific Heights, where commerce is invisible; residential blocks where many windows display United Parcel Service pick-up signs, and autos, all sorts of product and business logos; apartment houses over shops on Chinatown business streets; the Castro and the Haight-Ashbury districts with their mix of gentrified businesses, cafes, apartments, and townhouses rescued from dilapidation by a new, young generation of home and business owners. Each neighborhood is different, reflecting the people who nest, shop and eat there.

In India I found the same wide ethnic variation of business propensity that I have seen in all my travels.  Some regions were lush with open-air markets, shops, factories and small entrepreneurs scurrying everywhere.  Others were devoid of nearly all business except farming and begging.  In West Africa , some tribes were aggressive traders like the Senegalese Fulani .  Tribes in Mali  were purely agrarian.  In Denmark  and the SmarlandSee Sweden  region of Sweden , where Danes settled a millennium ago, small business thrives in every nook and cranny, while in some suburbs of Stockholm, building complexes house 5,000 people and not one shop in sight.  In downtown Moscow , I could walk for an hour without any sign of commerce; arriving the next day in a rural village of a few hundred settled farmers in Japan , I found more than one business for every two adults, including cigarette and candy shops in the corner windows of residents on the village road.  What are the sources of this variety?

Max Weber was an active creator of sociology , both intellectually and as an institutional organizer.  He found that ideas and institutions  are intimately and intricately related.  In order to connect the statistical correlation he found in Germany  at the turn of the twentieth century between the success of Protestants in business in Germany and their theology, Weber resorted to a complex, perhaps convoluted, interpretation of Calvinist doctrine .  He found a way to take the predestination of fate and turn it into a motivation for Puritans to be austere and to openly acknowledge the value of success in business.

I feel no such academic drive as Weber did.  I look at a few categories of business and technology and see widely differing ethnic propensities to succeed.  I am a Jew, so I see my fellow Jews  create businesses out of air, desert sand and stone soup. I do not doubt the cultural propensity to business; it is a given.  I also know the great individual variations in these vague ethnic categorizations.  My father was a failure at every one of five or six businesses he tried; but my mother and all my brothers have done well in business.  My question is the connection between business perspectives, the world view of the business person, and cultural milieu.

In this book, I go from the cultural milieu in which different types of business thrive, which I call the gods, to the types of businesses that currently exist.  Finally, I look at the world view of the people involved in those forms of business.

The Four Gods of Commerce

The ideas discussed in this book are organized under the four gods of commerce:  Urbanus , Ganesh , Horos  and Honestas . Lest the reader search dutifully through an Oxford Concordance for historical references to these gods, I hasten to explain that, with the exception of Ganesh, a reputed Indian elephant god well-documented in both the literature and history of Hinduism, these “gods” are the product of an organizing principle.  You will not meet their like, by any pure definition, in any one culture’s mythological history.  They exist for their symbolic and organizing powers in the presentation of my business world views, and for their ability to shed archetypal light on a long tradition of worldwide business practices.

Gods of Commerce sets out to understand the differ­ences in commercial skill that are apparent among individuals and cultures.  The four major sections examine the three different types of commerce and the ten world views of successful business people.  These gods are the central values of successful business cultures.

This book is not a theory of business.  Rather, it is a big picture to help put business matters in a meaningful perspective. The four “god” sections include a discussion of the big picture that is associated with each god and further discussion of the implications of the big picture in terms of small business and the national economy.

 

The Big Three

Three Types of Commerce

The most impressive traders I have seen are the Fulani  in West Africa .  They have weekly open-air markets with tens of thousands of buyers and sellers with color, music and excitement that makes a trip on LSD seem mild.  These markets were there four centuries ago when the first Europeans encountered and wrote about them.

The most impressive clientrists I have seen are the Japanese .  They have more small businesses per capita than any other people, about twice the number of their closest competitors:  the overseas Chinese , the French  and the Danes .

The great industrialists who emerged in the late 1800s were most often of Nordic origin, descendants of Northern Germany, Scandinavia, Holland and Viking-settled Britain.  Nearly all their great oil , steel  and chemical companies  are still the dominant international industries of these countries.

To what can we attribute these differences?  Charles Hampden-Turner  (and his co-author, Alfons Trompenaars ) in The Seven Cultures of Capitalism  have done reliable research using survey data that supports my personal observations about significantly different business attitudes  in different cultures .  Hampden-Turner's work gets into very specific details of attitude  toward work, friends and ethics.  These attitudes are part of a structure of thought and perception that we call culture .  Clearly some cultures are more adept at some functions than others, and some are less.  Within those cultures individual competencies vary as well.

I have identified four gods of commerce  that relate to the three categories of commerce:  trade , industry  and clientricism .  What I mean by a “god” is a significant element in understanding and using this material.  A god is a tent pole that holds up a large structure of values, attitudes, perceptions and the behaviors that follow from them.  There can be multiple tent poles.

There is not much rigor in this notion of gods but it has an organizing quality.  Like the notion of home, one can communicate an organizing idea, a widely recognized one, but no single definition is rigorous or comprehensive.  One can look at the world view of an individual involved in commerce and identify the ten elements discussed in this chapter and the coming chapters.  You can see that a good tradesperson uses Occam's Sledge.  One cannot examine an individual and find the organizing elements of their perception.  This can be done with groups of people, such as an ethnic group, and can be found in answers to survey questions.  A sample of respondents won't say they believe in the god Urbanus  or any of the other gods I've identified, but they will answer questions about money, selling, time and trade that will indicate a cluster of common values that I have associated with those gods.

Gods of Commerce Glossary

A glossary follows.  Terms such as “clientricism” and “business world view,” while bantered about in graduate business classes, require a definition.

Urbanus: The first god of commerce, Urbanus is an ancient symbol of trade.

Ganesh: The second god of commerce, Ganesh is the god of improvement.

Horos: The third god of trade, Horos is the god of time and efficiency.

Honestas: The fourth god of commerce, Honestas is the goddess of relationships.

Business World View : A business person’s well-established perception of the rules and practices that determine the forces governing one’s daily life.  An understanding of how the world works.

Money: The form of communication throughout the domain of commerce.  The application of numbers and specialized language to business transactions.

Trade: The worldwide practice of buying and selling goods and services for money.  The object of the trader is to price each sale to equal or to exceed a standard mark-up that covers all costs. 

Recourse: The avenues available to a buyer to remedy dissatisfaction with a purchase.  Example: One hundred percent refund and sincere apology from the seller to the buyer.

Industrial: The outgrowth of trading that focuses on reducing costs by using economies of scale.  This is accomplished through gaining a large market share, locating in stable societies, and seeking efficiencies in technology, distribution and customer relations.

Clientricism: The practice of business where the object is a lifetime relationship with known clients.

Competition: Two or more parties seeking the same objective.  The seeking can range from friendly to belligerent.  The objective can be trivial or significant.

Commerce: The human domain of selling goods and services to others and the concern for the success of that practice.  It is different from military, art, politics, governance, education and state.

Social Sorting: The mechanism in our society for individuals to become part of institutions:  finding jobs, joining clubs, selecting stores and choosing a place to live.

Transaction: The focal point and boundaries of all forces involved in a voluntary sale or purchase.  The complete transaction can include information about the sale and provisions for future maintenance and buyer satisfaction.

Urbanus

There is but one god of trade. Trade is an ancient human activity and the proclivity for it is millennia old.  I find differences of real significance in the details of trade ‑‑ the negotiations of a Lebanese Arab in Washington, D.C., versus the negotiations of a Chinese street vendor in Kowloon ‑‑ but the common world view of the trader seems to have some cross-national similarities.  I call that similarity the worship of the god Urbanus, ruler of cities.

Cities  are the by-product, nexus and soul of trade.  They are nearly always at the intersection of trade routes (unless they were deliberately anti-trade, like Brasilia and Sacramento , California).  They have often been the driving force in trade, as with Venice , Byzantium , London , Amsterdam , Hong Kong  and Singapore .  Cities were usually built on markets.  They grew because they offered long-term security for trader storage and security for traders and the craftspeople who made many of the trade goods.

The opposite of urban are rural and nomadic life, which do not support trade except at modest barter  levels.

The god Urbanus is a god of diversity , tolerance  and conviviality .  That is what urban areas are.  That is what the words urbane  and urbanity mean.  Cities are not tied to the crop seasons and harvest or the summer pasturing needs of animals. Cities run year-round with their own cadence of trade. Trade attracts a variety of people from other cities who bring novel ideas and behaviors.  The need for co-existence among these different people creates institutions of tolerance .  Diversity  in ethnicity, language, ideas and behavior is required for the extension of trade as well as the social institutions of tolerance that make diversity possible.  These institutions of tolerance are congruent with some of the business world views such as practicality  and bourgeois .  These two business world views , as discussed below, are uncomfortable with ideology and absolute truth.

Trade has a core and peripheral structure.  At the core, trade goods are manufactured and services perfected.  At the periphery, they are sold.

Conviviality  is part of trade.  The interaction of people at the core is vital.  Conviviality is nothing more than comfortable interaction.  That is what great urban centers provide.  A trader from Damascus can meet a trader from Timbuktu, and they can be comfortable enough to share information, exchange supplies and possibly form partnerships.

Trade at the periphery can occur under strain, anxiety, and distress.  It can occur in joyous, exuberant conditions.  What happens at the periphery is sale of the inventory , if it survives pirates, brigands and barroom fights.

The general state of conviviality  is the most stable long-term state that promotes and supports trade at its core.  Where conviviality flourishes, trade flourishes.  It is no accident that great West African markets have circuses and that the magnificent commercial city of Copenhagen has the Tivoli Gardens circus  in its downtown center.

Diversity, tolerance and conviviality are urban, un-military, un-academic, and usually non-religious conditions.  That is why they are part of commerce, and why Urbanus is the first god of commerce.

The second and third gods of commerce are gods of industry .  Industry requires two gods because its growth and success were an historic accident that is still an anomaly.  From the point of view of population, industrialism is a minority endeavor.  It is my guess that people directly and indirectly involved in the industrial world as producers (or support agents), not just as consumers, still comprise less than one-third of the total world population.  The industrial world's hundred-and-fifty-year history is quite recent and brief in relationship to the five-thousand-year history of cities.

Trade was flourishing a thousand years before the Old Testament was written.  In Ebla , a Syrian trade town, archeologists have found ten thousand clay tablets containing bookkeeping information.  The city is more than four thousand years old, and carried out trade with Gaza , Jaffa , Damascus , Sodom  and Gomorra.  The biblical neighbors of the Hebrews  were the Canaanites , who carried on trade throughout the Mediterranean,  from (modern-day) Spain  to Morocco  to Greece  and Lebanon .

What is Trade?

I've been in parts of central Africa where I could buy cassette tapes, and where there were no government or business institutions, only traditional villages in a political no-man's land.  While tape-recording machines were available, there was no electricity  and no possible equipment repair .  The machines were battery-operated, using tape  cassettes and batteries  from Japan , 15,000 miles away.

These tape players, batteries and cassettes are trade goods.  In the most barren, desolate areas of Arctic tundra, trade goes on.  Even without money, in prisons, trade  happens.

Trade has several interesting elements.  They are:  mark-ups , profit , credit  and price competition .

I followed those tape players from central Africa along the trade route to the Congo .  Mark-ups were the rule.  Each trader marked them up enough so that they could stay in business. 

The marked-up price included new supplies , time  involved, additional related expenses and a margin of profit  to cover the uncertainty  of staying in the business. 

Credit  was extended in proportion to the stability of the situation.  Credit was simply added on to the price, as you probably know.  There are numerous traditional rain forest societies  with extensive credit systems.

Price competition  is what the whole pipeline of trade goods is all about.  The lowest-price final seller wins if he can cover his mark-up .  If no one else is there to sell or be sold to and none is expected, the lowest-price seller won't have a very low price.  The goal of the trader is to make a sale.  Each sale is final.

The business person has ten pillars of percep­tion.  Five are part of trade, and worship in the house of Urbanus.  These are not expressed as ideas but are ap­parent in behavior, forming a world view which is created by expe­rience in a family, a culture and a business.

Pertinent questions for any business person in trade:  What's really going on (what’s the deal on the table)?  What is the evidence (show me the product or service)?  What are the numbers?  What are the re­wards?  What changes will this transaction cause?

The pre-industrial mode of thinking, the thinking of traders, was identified as bourgeois by Karl Marx.  The trader knows the retail prices of many products and finds a source for those products at a low enough price to mark them up and sell them with sufficient margin to cover costs and make a profit.

Today, the mode of the trader is deeply ingrained in American popular culture.  Television shows reward individuals who know the retail price of thousands of items.  These programs have names like “The Price is Right” and “Name That Price.” Such popular culture, in which ordinary citizens know the prices of thousands of items, has not previously existed in most of China or Russia.

The trader has a world view quite different from the soldier, priest, bureaucrat or employee.  What is it?

 “Occam's Sledgehammer”

The title of this paragraph is intended to be humorous. It alludes to “Occam's razor,” the thirteenth-century principle of analytical economy.  “Occam’s razor” holds that a simple explanation is better than an elabo­rate one.  Business persons of all stripes (traders, industri­alists and clientrists) have this cornerstone in their world view.  A group of business people listening to a lecture has several universal commonalities, one of which is that they are listening for a simpler structure than the one confronting them.  Their mental questions are threefold:  What is she really saying?  What are the experiences on which the evidence is based?  How do money and prices move in the world she is describing?

Simple is not a self-evident word.  The brass-tacks nature of  business people suggests that their notion of simple must be rudimentary.

In philosophy there are several notions of simple.  One is the Platonic world of the shadows where we see only representations of the real world, the real world being the simpler but richer version.  Another is atomism, where the real world is a construct of a simple pre-world.  Neither of these fit the business person's notion.

To approach the business notion, it is helpful to consider several non-business perception:  those of the academic, the bu­reaucrat, and the artist.  Each of these has a world view that is in some strange way ne­gotiable.  The academic's is influenced by dialog, truth, fact and knowledge.  The bureaucrat's is negotiable under law or in the face of power and reason.  The artist's is negotiable in response to vision, emotion and talent.  The business world view is a non-negotiable domain.  Everything in that world is built on some non-negotiable structure.

Having described the trader’s world view as being built on a very solid basis, a basis of powerful simplicity that is quite non-negotiable in most circumstances, I am immediately aware that the reader may have a different conception of the trader in mind.

The reader may have an image of interminable negotiations between two traders in a tent over Turkish coffee.  This is a reasonable image, but an understanding of the trading activity is not obvious.

This is not a contradiction of the trader as a person with a core non-negotiable view of the world.

What is probably hap­pening with the two coffee-drinking traders is that each is skillfully playing a game with the other.  Each bases his strategy on the knowledge of a non-negotiable underpinning, an unstated minimum sale price or maximum purchase price.  The coffee and trade talk are the fluff, puffery, deception and bargaining skill which can only arise from the confidence of the non-negotiable underpinning.

The well-traveled reader may have another seemingly contradictory image of the trader.

It might be of a Japanese businessman offering a gift to the god of fortune, or an African trader offering a sacrifice to a local deity.  In both instances, what looks like negotiation with a deity is, I would suggest, the offer of a commission or a bribe, not a negotiation.  Both traders believe that the deity is willing to accept commissions and bribery.  They appear to be saying, "Please help me in my business, I am worthy and pious"; as traders, what they are really saying is, "If you help me, I will be a loyal follower and a generous donor to your shrines and priests."

The non-negotiable world of a business person is very simi­lar to the civil engineer's world view:  accumulated books of information, measurements, and formulas that are sufficient to build a durable bridge.

Unlike the en­gineer, the business world view’s non-negotiability includes ambiguity about the future.  The engineer may be certain he can build an enduring bridge, but the businessman knows with similar certainty that lo­cal politics can stop the bridge from being built halfway through, close it once it’s completed, and deny it maintenance funds in the future.

To visualize “Occam's sledge,” this proto-simplifying component of the business world view, imagine a business person offered a free month’s rent for signing a lease quickly without a final re-reading of the contract.  Very few would do so, not out of a fear of manipulation or paranoia, but because the details of a lease agreement are often the bedrock of business stability.  The stability of a contract is a non-negotiable; it is not to be trifled with even by accident or carelessness.

The non-negotiable domain of the business world view is a flat surface with a thick coating of ginger­bread, puffery, fantasy, vague­ness, deception, magic and witchcraft.  The surface and the topping do not mix.  Most other world views are not like this.  They are romantic, pietistic, and spiritualistic.  Where the surface and the material on top commingle is the definition of the non-business world.

Practicality

"Just show me what you mean."  The business world view of practicality may sound like Jeremy Ben­tham's utilitarianism, or prag­matism, and it is indeed close.  But, again, it is stronger, more vital, simpler and a more re­silient vision than utilitarian­ism be­cause it has led people over history to ignore their church, build elaborate retail stores, and sell fancy dresses to Puritan ladies in spite of threats of damnation and shunning by clergy.

It is much closer to the empiricism of a technologist.  Earlier I compared the business world view to that of an engineer with the addition of a few flourishes.  Now I compare it to that of the inventor of the light bulb (Edison was also a business­man).

The inventor, in the Ameri­can technical tradition, is anti-theory.  He tried every kind of filament in order to find a suit­able one.  He showed his his­torical respect by carefully keeping measurements of the durability and conductivity of each filament tested.  Anti-theory with historical respect is al­most the definition of technical development.  Yet the inventor's world view is not pre­cisely the business world view.  The business world view in­cludes more.  Because it applies to the world of humans, it in­cludes the reactions of other people who are themselves complex and unknow­able domains.

To visualize this proto-practical component of the business world view, again imagine a business person offered a free month on a lease if a neighboring tenant with a loud musical instrument (sounding most unpleasant to the business person) is permitted to continue occupying the adjacent rental space. In most cases, the business person would contact the musical tenant and attempt to negotiate a separate noise reduction agreement that would make the free month worthwhile.  Practical business people twist and turn to find ways to make their world work even in less than perfect conditions.

The business world view is the plane that includes humans as a rubbery surface.  In some places, the na­ture of the surface is unknown but safe to walk on.  Sometimes it is sticky, sometimes uneven and sometimes thin, but still a workable and stable walking surface.

Edison was both an in­ventor and a businessman.  He developed his light for a consumer market in which he knew that humans wanted only thin wires on util­ity poles, and electric lighting cheaper than gas.

Sacred Numbers

The business world view holds numbers to be sacred and financial state­ments to be divine.  No good business person, and only a few mediocre ones, will do business without a full appreciation of and exposure to the world of mea­surement, balance sheets, in­come-expense statements and cost data, which in business are presented in dollars and units (products, clients, etc.).

A great deal more needs to be said about this, be­cause business decisions are not based solely on measure­ment.  It is sine qua non that numbers are the first thing to look at.  Yes, there can be too many numbers, so the first rule of “Occam's Sledgehammer” applies.  However, too many numbers is like too much food in the business world view:  a nuisance, not a serious problem.  Too few numbers is like too little food:  possible starvation and great discomfort.

This third item may appear to be a subset of the first two, because an engineer and an in­ventor will rely intensely on numbers.  It is not a subset because numbers have a tangi­bility in the business world view that can be missing in engineering and in­venting.  The business person can drive a business with fi­nancial data the way an auto­mobile is driven with the steering wheel, the throttle, the dashboard instruments and brake.

To visualize the importance of numerical data to the business world view, again imagine a business person offered a free month on a lease with an offset of a four-percent increase in the monthly rental.  On the face, this might look okay.  Most business people would re-do their calculations in detail before accepting the offer.  Rather than accept an overall numeric advantage, most business people would make sure that other incidental costs would not be diminished because of the free month on the lease; the real net cost calculation might not be as favorable as the obvious date indicates.

Numbers have an instrumentality for business people similar to the power of a telescope or micro­scope to a scientist.

Rewardism

The business world view has a slight ele­ment of theology. Business is found in all parts of the world where there is es­tablished religion.  Where it isn’t found is in much of the commu­nist world where rewardism is opposed by the prevailing ideology.  This is also why commerce didn't flourish in periods of total Catholic Church domination, when the church had its own theology of rewards.

Rewardism is merely the view that rewards work.  Not that rewards should work, not that rewards are just, and not even the converse, that punishment works.  Only that rewards work.  What busi­ness knew in the time of Shakamuni, more than 2,500 years ago, is what B.F. Skinner finally put in writing.  Human beings can set up a system of rewards that can and will, if well designed, direct human behavior.  As an example, the monetary system:  it exists as an au­tonomous reward system because it allows for accumulation of rewards (part of any good reward system) and for multiple out­comes.  You can buy many things with money.  Multiple benefits are a part of better reward systems.

To visualize the importance of rewardism to the business world view, again imagine a business person offered a free month on a lease with some conditions attached.  Most business people would respond positively to such an offer because they recognize the businesslike atmosphere of using rewards.  However, they would also examine the offer carefully because most would project onto the lessor a motive in offering a reward.

Bourgeois

One of the most accursed and confusing facets of the business world view is embodied by the French shopkeeper, the person who washes the steps in front of the store every morning.  Accursed, because when these people form groups, they are opposed to any change whatsoever unless it reduces their taxes.  The local Chamber of Commerce is generally reactionary.  They hate change, only because it is change in and of itself.  This hatred is often per­ceived as selfishness and greed.  It occasionally is, but that is not part of the business world view.  The business world view hates change out of the desire for a stable planning horizon.

The stable planning horizon is what permits business to thrive.  To the business person, money is like sunlight to the desert farmer:  ubiq­uitous.  But, as fresh water is scarce for the farmer, so as­set security is to the business person.  Fresh water will pro­duce plants in nearly every dry soil, turning a desert into a luxuriant oasis.  Asset stability creates a vibrant, thriving financial community.

An irrigation system is more than a metaphor.  In this case, it is synecdoche.  A maintained irrigation system is a social system that reflects social stability.

Traders can operate every­where.  Their price mark-ups rise as social instability in­creases, but trade is more likely to flourish in a stable environment.

Business operates without theories, often without good ideas.  It is inherently conser­vative because it only knows what works, what customers are buying now.  Any change is more likely to lead to a loss of customers and revenue than to an increase.  So conservatism is mandatory.  Changes in the operation and marketing of a business need to be glacially slow for empirical reasons, and they need careful measurement to determine the impact on customer be­havior.

The confusing thing about the bourgeois business world view is that business people are frequently the cause of much of the change they abhor.  The lo­cal Chamber of Commerce is up in arms because a large su­permarket is moving into town, and morals are declining as more women take full-time jobs.  Yet their own members are the business people opening the larger supermarkets and hiring women into the labor force.

It is not hard to visualize the confusion created by bourgeoisness in the business world view when it operates openly in the business world.  Picture a national Chamber of Commerce lobbying against the expansion of national health care because it will drive up taxes for its members.  At the same time, a small group of the Chamber's members come to see their national leaders and oppose the organizational lobbying because this small group has been profiting greatly from their rapid introduction of new technologies.  The very technologies that are pushing medical costs higher create the political pressure for a national health program.

 

The Language of Commerce

 

Money is language, with all the same common attributes. Commerce is the domain of money.

 

In the same way I speak English, Urbanus speaks money.  Commerce came before money, but with just barter, the world would still be made up of small farmers and nomads.

Money allowed commerce to flourish.  In our lifetime, money has become the dominant force in most human lives.  But what is money?  Nothing but the language of commerce.  As indicated in the previous chapter, under the business world view of Sacred Numbers, money is a central part of the trader perspective.

There is an American adage that “money talks.”  This phrase can be described as the opposite of an oxymoron, which is a  phrase that is stupidly contradictory.  “Money talks” might well be called an oxysavant, a statement that is brilliantly contradictory.

An example of an oxysavant would be high school philosopher.  At cocktail parties, professional philosophers dread the response they get when describing their occupation.  The Ann or Arnie Landerses of high school graduating classes in perpetuity will say, “Oh, professor, when I was in high school, so many of my friends told me I should be a philosopher.”

In this case, the party guest is showing respect for the social importance of philosophy, the savant part of high school philosopher.  Recognition in money talks that money is language is also savant; confusing the dispensing of personal advice with philosophy is oxy.  So is the implication that a direct connection exists between money and power.

What money doesn’t always say is power, although that is a common interpretation of the “speaking money” cliché.  Many rich people are pathetically powerless and some very powerful people have little money.

Money Equals Language

Some writers have observed that money has qualities like language; it is pervasive among humans, has many forms and seems integral to life.  Wherever there is commerce, there is money.  The one exception, silent trade, proves the rule. Silent trade occurs in rare instances where two neighboring tribes are mutually hostile.  In a trade, they display their offerings on opposite sides of a riverbank.  When the two sides are considered matched, the exchange occurs.

This chapter makes one simple point:  Money is not like language, it is language.  Money is the language of commerce.

It is important to make this distinction.  Money cannot be compared to language as a metaphor.  Money can be examined, discussed and talked about as a language.  A specific money language would be American money, just as we have a specific oral/written language in English.

Real and Metaphoric Digression

This point needs clarification.  Let us substitute two games for money in this discourse.  People often talk about games as metaphors for daily life.  This comes from an inaccurate reading of games.  It results from seeing the parallels between games and daily life, not realizing that it’s the context of daily life that selects particular games.

Chess dominates the intellectual game arena in the West.  In Japan, Go is the classic thinker's game.  Neither game should be read only as a  metaphor for the larger society.  They are actually metanymical, a small fragment that represents the whole.

This is best illustrated by asking one question:  what were the longest wars in Japanese and Western history?

In Japan, it was Hideoshi's two-day battle at Osaka.  In the West, it was the Hundred Years’ War between France and the Flemish countries.

Throughout Japanese history, armies were amassed, confronted each other, and then their leaders negotiated.  If the power or might of either army was in doubt, a single fierce battle was fought to evaluate the army’s relative strength before resuming negotiation.

In Europe, armies for millennia would amass every spring, fight during the long summer