Everyone's A Winner

Do the right things, and the right things happen.

I was in London on Monday with the nice people from the Made Simple group. They're setting up a groovy new portal (that's an information-rich base for folks on the web, not the game) for folks in Small-to-Medium-sized-Enterprises ("SME's" in the jargon) and (I've had a sneak preview) it's looking very good: attractive, informative, useful and easy to use.

I was up there because Howard Graham, the guy behind the Made Simple shebang, had put out a call asking for volunteers to make podcasts for the new site and I was one of those who responded. (It will be appearing there in few weeks - I'll let you know when it's up).

I like these win-win things. Howard got some content for his portal, I got a chance to introduce Bloomstorm to some more people, and (hopefully) the portal users will get something useful and interesting. It's a good way to do business.

We got to talking afterwards about networking (Howard's a big noise in BNI, the networking organisation) and I was struck again about the only principle of economics that to me has any real force.

It goes back to Adam Smith and David Ricardo (and is a corollary of the Law of Comparative Advantage, for those of you interested in that kind of thing) but as I understand it, the upshot of is that after any reasonable economic transaction in a fair market, both parties - the buyer and the seller - are better off. The buyer gets what they want, and the seller gets what they want. Value - to both parties - has increased.

To make a transaction work, therefore, each party needs to reduce the cost and maximise the payoff to the other party of doing business (while not giving away the farm in the process).

I love this idea, for all sorts of reasons.

It's self-correcting - if a buyer loses out once, they won't repeat the transaction.

It requires you to know the thing you do that offers most value to your customers

It shows how there is no limit to economic growth (because the economy grows with every fair transaction, and will continue to grow as transactions continue).

It is the only proven way to make war zones sustainably peaceful (give people the chance to trade and the personal value from peaceful transactions quickly outweighs the value they get from war. Northern Ireland is a great example. It's much harder to get people to riot when they might lose their digital video recorders in the mayhem - so the whole 'riot transaction' is not worth their while...)

I think it'll be only way way we'll beat global warming (A whole other post, maybe - but I will add one comment: yes, I get it about how it might also be the cause of global warming).

And it shows that the best way to get rich is to work with your customers and your suppliers and your partners to maximise the value they get from dealing with you.

How do we do this?

Be nice (or at the very least, courteous) to people, and so decrease the cost of doing business with you.

Be honest - if you lie about what you are selling (or, interestingly, about what you are buying) then the chance of getting the value you want drops down hard.

Help people - value does not have to measured immediately in pounds and pence.

Know the value of what you offer - in the other person's terms

Make it easy to do business with you.

Demonstrate that you can be trusted.

Interestingly, if these conditions apply, you don't have to sell what you are offering - you simply need to let people know what you've got to sell, and they'll buy.

And this is why I think the whole idea of networking is such a good one for your business. It's not about exchanging business cards and crocodile smiles and getting 'contacts'. It's about widening the pool of people who know you, trust you and want to work with you - or tell others that they should work with you - because the chance of a win/win outcome is very high.

And it makes doing business a pleasure.

- Mike