(11-11-2019, 04:09 PM)sushi521 Wrote: [ -> ]Hey Shannon, I was reading the product description for UMS. It has emphasis on achieving the goal without harming anyone in the process. Wouldn't this limit the sub's effectiveness if you want to start your own business and have to compete with others? If you succeed, then your competitors might be harmed financially and emotionally, even if you don't mean to.
There is always a way to accomplish your goal without harming others in the process. Most people just don't take the time to look for it.
In business, most people think it's cutthroat, kill or be killed, win at any cost. That isn't how it always was. In the days of our grandfathers and great grandfathers, business was much more cooperative and honorable. There are ways. And those ways don't get much use anymore because they require that you stop thinking just of yourself, and stop thinking just about this quarter's profits.
But even if you are head to head with another company, and directly competing, there is no harm in producing a product that destroys your competition. In some ways, business really is cutthroat, and it always will be: if you offer a product that I also offer, in a free market, the customer will vote with their wallet, and that means you did not harm your competitor. You simply produced a significantly better product. There's nothing wrong with that, and whatever harm comes to your competition in that case was the customers' choice, not yours.
The goal is to create positive competition where more than one person or company offers a similar product. This creates a drive to improve the product, which forces everyone to raise the bar, which benefits the customer, which makes things better for everybody.
Harm comes when a company is negligent in designing, building and offering a product that is defective because they're too cheap and greedy to care. Harm comes when one company steals the secrets from another to gain an unfair advantage, or sabotages their competition or passes laws that favor themselves as a hedge against competition.
Healthy competition is not harmful. If you want to play ball, you have to be able to play with the rest of the players and make a profit. To claim that healthy competition, fair competition, is harmful is about as crazy as passing laws that protect criminals from being stabbed after they broke into your house and attacked you. (We actually have laws like that in some parts of the United States, by the way.)