Recently I read an excerpt by a management consultant named Lawrence Miller regarding the life cycles of a corporation and I thought about sharing it with you and how this relates to a life cycle of a civilization as well. So here's what he explains. He explains how a corporation. starts with a prophet, right? Now, I want you to understand that this also has a lot to do with civilization.
The prophet of a civilization could be the founding fathers. This is the visionary. This is the person with the idea. The Steve Wozniak, right? Then the next phase comes when the barbarians arrive.
Now, the barbarian is the pilgrims, the Steve Jobs. Impatient, very urgent, right? One of the quotes he uses in his excerpt is, How by Peter MacArthur in 1904, every successful enterprise needs three people, a dreamer, a businessman, and an SOB. And you know what an SOB is, right?
You need somebody that's going to go out there and kind of ruffle the feathers a little bit, the barbarian, right? And he explains the next phase is the builder and the explorer, right? The builder and explorer could be... the salesman, the people that are willing to go and take the product to international, sell it in China, sell it somewhere else. But the builder explorer in a civilization is a Rockefeller, a Ford, a Franklin, a Walton that's creating jobs, that's going out there developing things, right?
Builder and the explorer. Then the next comes the administrator. The administrator phase is when a company starts putting Regulations, rules, systems, laws, sometimes they annoy the builders, right?
Because they're always getting in their way and they slow them down. They can annoy these two guys, right? Because they're slowing things down.
For a nation, the administrator could be somebody that creates the laws, the lawmaker. IRS agents, let's hire more government employees, right? More rules, kind of like in 1903, how in America we only had, our taxes was only 20 pages, 10 to 20 pages our tax code, and now it's over 80,000 pages.
We are creating more rules, more regulations. Then the next phase. Is the bureaucrat, the bureaucrat is about control, is about I know what I, I know what you need to do, right?
So they're the lawmakers now who tell the administrators to administrate the laws that they have in place. don't connect with people all the time. They're the rule makers.
Bureaucrats don't do well with profits. Then the next phase is the aristocrats. Aristocrat is the one person who is the almighty.
I know better than you. I am smarter than everybody. I know what's best for all the people out there, right?
So, this is inevitable. This is not something we can prevent. This happens to great empires, right? And typically the person that keeps them together is the synergist.
Every nation, every civilization, corporation has many synergists. The key I want you to think about... When you look at this, a lot of empires have fallen before. The Assyrian Empire, the Roman Empire.
Many of these empires have fallen before. But when you look at this, this is the key here. The key is what can we do to keep the company, the civilization, the corporation in this phase as much as possible where creativity... And creation is constantly happening. And keep it out of their ways, right?
Where they can go out there and do their part to constantly expand, grow, you know, innovate, create new things that's exciting. There's energy. There's enthusiasm to keep it going. Just to stay at this phase.
My message of the week to you.