I'm Not a Communist

One of the first things Shelly Blake-Plock told his audience is that an entrepreneur will fail many times before ever founding a successful, profitable business. When he/she fails, he can either quit entrepreneurship or re-invent himself and pursue another business plan. The audience brainstormed business ideas by first deciding what needs to be changed in the world in the next ten years. Most of the answers involved environmental issues like climate change. Then he asked us to think of something that could be sold to individual people that could help resolve these issues, emphasizing that it did not have to actually save the world; it just needed to entice people to buy the product. He told us about Kodak filing bankruptcy because they were hesitant to re-invent themselves or change what their company sold. Kodak invented the digital camera in 1975, but hesitated to sell it to the public since they would sell less film if digital cameras became popular and eventually fell behind after selling its patents to its competitors for a short-term profit.

Shelly Blake-Plock was mostly interested in business ideas that would make the most money. This kind of thinking is expected in a monetary-based capitalist society. I think people latch on to the idea that capitalism is the best possible system because it brings people freedom and motivation to have strong work ethics more so than any other system in the past. People ignore the flaws of capitalism rather than re-invent the system entirely because most think its the only system. Some of the business ideas the audience thought of were profitable, but none of them would effectively change what the audience originally set out to change before Blake-Plock explained that saving the planet was not the ultimate goal. If humanity is to achieve the most important goals like the one's the audience addressed originally, we must re-invent the system entirely instead of adapting to an environmentally harmful system.

Stossel