I am sure that you have heard the phrase "safety in numbers" before. In the animal world, creatures travel in groups because they instinctively know that, when there are many of them, predators have less of a chance of being successful during an attack. In most cases, if a predator is successful, its victim is usually a sick or weaker member of the herd. This is an important part of the process of natural selection and maintains the process of survival of many species.

On the other hand, there are predators that travel in packs because they instinctively know that in the search for prey, some potential meals have the ability to defend themselves, and a group attack is usually more effective. This too ensures the survival of the species because, without the pack, some predators would literally starve to death.

In the large corporate world, herds and packs are replaced by boards of directors, employee teams, shareholders, and subsidiaries. These are groups of people who come together to pool their abilities in support of the agenda or goals of the corporation. In essence this ensures the future success of the business. In the large corporate world, failing companies are often absorbed by successful ones in mergers and through acquisitions. Rarely does a large company just "go out of business" or become extinct. They are usually simply bought by another large company.

In the small business world, the entrepreneur is the animal who has wandered away from the herd. Sometimes it happens because of unemployment, but often it is because they have a desire to be independent from the politics of the corporation, or simply to be self-sufficient. Fortunately for the small business owner, a community exists where they can count on others to help them to be successful. It is the community of business-to-business networking.

Not all small business owners are aware of the opportunities of success involved in business networking. In fact, if I were to make a guess at how many businesses are involved in networking, I would guess the number to be around less than 10 percent of all businesses. This is unfortunate because not only is there a great deal of opportunity for acquiring more new business in the networking environment, there are also methods of learning to be more successful and to be a bit safer in the business community.

Why would I link safety in numbers, animals and small business? Because in the business world at large, predators exist. Corporations have learned that a part of doing business is putting measures of security in place through patents, copyrights, server firewalls, policies, and a myriad of other functions that occur on a daily basis often with employees dedicated to these. In the environment of small business, we often are not even aware of the threats and if we are, rarely do we have the means within our budget to protect ourselves against them.

Let me ask you a question. Have you ever done work for someone who refused to or simply never paid you? If you have never had this experience, I applaud your extreme streak of good luck. On the other hand, maybe you have not been in business for very long so this painful experience may be looming on the horizon.

In any case, when this does happen to you, what will you do? Contact the lawyer? File suit? Complain to a friend? Accept it and move on? Most people tend to simply accept it and move on. Some cases may involve inventory that you can write it off as a loss on your taxes, but some cases involve intellectual property where there is no monetary resolution. The sad reality is that often there is no justice for you, no satisfaction, and ultimately no payment.

When one opens the figurative doors of their small business, they do so with a lot of enthusiasm. To maintain the daily pressures of meeting expenses requires a great deal of positive mental attitude. It means that even when things are tough, you have to be upbeat, and forge ahead in order to survive. This world of positive attitude dictates that we eliminate negative thoughts so that we can remain focused on our goals. In fact as communities of small business owners develop, it is almost an unspoken rule that negativity be eliminated from conversation on every level. After all you would not want to admit to a prospective client that things are not going well and you are going to have to file bankruptcy if you don't close this deal.

In the same vein, as the predator attacks the small business owner and feeds upon them, the entrepreneur is reluctant to talk about this negative experience. In some cases, the predator is working within the peer group of the victim. As the predator continues to feed, several members of the group may have fallen victim, but because of the fear of reprisal among the group for saying negative things about another "nice" member of the group, they remain silent. They are afraid that if they say anything negative about the predator, that they themselves will be viewed in a negative way.

People are afraid of being accused of slandering another. They are afraid that no one will believe that this person has really done what they are accused of and that it will further damage their own reputation if they become vocal. Have you ever felt this way? Has this happened to you? I am willing to bet that there are those reading this who feel the same way.

The truth is in my opinion, and this is simply my opinion, that as long as the predator is allowed to continue to function in a group, they will continue to do harm to individuals within the group. After they have victimized a good portion of the group, they simply move on. So how can we change this, how can we stop it? Is it just a question of taking responsibility to protect the others? Does it have to be a matter of risking our own reputation to try to protect others?

Until we change the paradigm of responsibility and belief, the predator will continue on, business as usual. Until we can find it acceptable to hear the honest truth about someone who appears to be a "nice" person, the predator will continue to thrive in our midst. There is safety in numbers unless we have blinders on. Without the ability to voice the experiences we have without tainting our own reputation, we will continue to suffer our losses.

Community Vs. The Loner

There is a growing interest in suicide. When people start looking for more information about suicide, you'll be in a position to meet their needs. This article is a brief description of much information on this subject. Let's start with 3 levels to discern in the act of euthanasia.

There are three levels to discern in the act of euthanasia:

1. One is a patient who is comatose or brain dead. In these cases the doctor is asked to "pull the plug," or remove the patient from mechanical life support. These cases are generally not challenged by the general public. It is an act of withdrawing or withholding necessary mechanisms used to sustain a life that cannot sustain itself. It is here that the recognition of one's personality is gone and the shell of a body is all that remains.

2. Another act of euthanasia involves the use of morphine to hospitalized patients in the painful final stages of her or his life with diseases such as cancer and AIDS.

3. The last category of euthanasia is patients in relatively good health and at the beginning of a terminal illness wishing to end their lives. Such cases as Alzheimer's and Cancer preclude patients to want information on PAS. This is the most controversial of the three issues involved in euthanasia.

Euthanasia originated from the Greek language meaning "good death." It is the intentional termination of a life by another person capable of doing so by the request of the person wanting to die. Here are a few terms that one needs to know in PAS that define actions taking place.

Passive Euthanasia is the hastening of a death by means of altering some form of support and letting nature take its course. This can include; removing life support equipment, stopping medical treatment or procedures, stopping food and water consumption which leads to dehydration or starving to death, and withholding CPR (Cardio-Pulmonary Resuscitation). The most common use of PAS is to give patients large doses of morphine to control pain. It is most likely that the pain relief will suppress respiration and cause death earlier than it would have otherwise happened. This is also done on patients who are in a persistive vegetative state or patients not able to regain consciousness due to brain damage

Active Euthanasia is the use of intentional means to cause the death of a person through a direct action. Dr. Jack Kevorkian, a Michigan physician made this well known in 1998 with a patient who had ALS (Lou Gehrig's Disease). His patient was afraid of the long suffering involved in ALS and wanted to die a quick and painless death. Dr. Kevorkian injected controlled substances into this patient and caused death. Kevorkian was charged with 1st degree murder, but the jury found him guilty of 2nd degree murder in March of 1999.

Physician Assisted Suicide is the provision of information or means to a dying patient with the intent to commit suicide.

Involuntary Euthanasia is the ending of a life without a patient clearly requesting it.

"There are many reasons why patients want to utilize PAS. Some are simply clinically depressed, of which, one's illness has brought on or one's emotional and mental processing of their illness has led to suffering in ways beyond the body. Others live in chronic pain-due to lack of healthcare coverage or means to obtain medication. This later group would rather die early and not incur medical expenses on those they leave behind. A serious disorder or disease such as: ASL, Huntington's Disease, Multiple Sclerosis, AIDS, Alzheimer's, etc. are just some of the illnesses people would rather avoid losing their independence and finances over. In some ways, this gives people a feeling of control over the process of their lives."

Samuel Oliver, author of, "What the Dying Teach Us: Lessons on Living"
For more on this author; http://www.soulandspirit.org

Approaches to Care in Physician Assisted Suicide

In the 25 + years of working with some of the best people in Business Development within the power generation industry, we have found some unique characteristics that separate these individuals from the rest. It doesn't seem to matter what organization they work for, or the services, the client base or the economic climate. We find that these individuals are in fact the top 3% of the professionals in their field. In addition to learning to think as CEO's, Presidents, entrepreneurial leaders of Business Development units, we've discovered they have acquired the behavioral characteristics of a leader. They have learned how to set strategic and operational objectives in putting together plans, how to be visionaries and see opportunities for their organizations that other individuals may miss, and in the role of Business Development, they have mastered the 12 Core Competencies, a benchmark to measure leaders.
One of the most compelling definitions of a leader is an individual whose mere presence inspires the desire to follow. When asked if leaders are born or bred, the general consensus is that leadership can be taught. While few of us have had the opportunity to be formally trained or mentored in leadership, all of us are called to be a leader at different times and circumstances in our lives. Leadership is first about who you are as an individual, not what you do, and the term character best describes the core characteristic of a leader. It is this part of an individual that inspires other to follow, so we see character as the summation of an individual's principles and values, core beliefs by which one anchors and measures their behavior in all roles in life. Principles and values of a positive leader include loyalty, respect, integrity, courage, fairness, honesty, duty, honor and commitment.

If character is the summation of our principles and values, then ethics is the application of them. To understand more about character development, we can reach back nearly 2500 years to the writings of Aristotle in Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle taught that moral virtue is acquired by practice. Ethics, according to Aristotle, is moral virtue that comes about as a result of habit. Ethics has as its root ethike, formed by the slight variation of the word ethos (habit). Aristotle explained that moral virtues do not arise in us by nature; we must accept them, embrace them and perfect them by habit. Leadership training emphasizes that understanding leader values and attributes is only the first step in development. A leader must also embrace values and practice attributes, living them until they become a habit.

In the Business Development role, success requires a fusion of who we are as an individual, along with our principles, values, ethics and their application. It's a unique combination of what we know, how we apply it and what we do.

Bill Scheessele is CEO/Founder of MBDi, a Business Development consultancy based in Charlotte, North Carolina. For the past 27 years, MBDi has assisted client firms in leveraging their high level expertise into bottom line business. Information on the company and the MBDi Business Development Process™ access: www.mbdi.com.

Ethics & Leadership in Business Development

The recent spate of accounting fraud scandals signals the end of an era. Disillusionment and disenchantment with American capitalism may yet lead to a tectonic ideological shift from laissez faire and self regulation to state intervention and regulation. This would be the reversal of a trend dating back to Thatcher in Britain and Reagan in the USA. It would also cast some fundamental - and way more ancient - tenets of free-marketry in grave doubt.

Markets are perceived as self-organizing, self-assembling, exchanges of information, goods, and services. Adam Smith's "invisible hand" is the sum of all the mechanisms whose interaction gives rise to the optimal allocation of economic resources. The market's great advantages over central planning are precisely its randomness and its lack of self-awareness.

Market participants go about their egoistic business, trying to maximize their utility, oblivious of the interests and action of all, bar those they interact with directly. Somehow, out of the chaos and clamor, a structure emerges of order and efficiency unmatched. Man is incapable of intentionally producing better outcomes. Thus, any intervention and interference are deemed to be detrimental to the proper functioning of the economy.

It is a minor step from this idealized worldview back to the Physiocrats, who preceded Adam Smith, and who propounded the doctrine of "laissez faire, laissez passer" - the hands-off battle cry. Theirs was a natural religion. The market, as an agglomeration of individuals, they thundered, was surely entitled to enjoy the rights and freedoms accorded to each and every person. John Stuart Mill weighed against the state's involvement in the economy in his influential and exquisitely-timed "Principles of Political Economy", published in 1848.

Undaunted by mounting evidence of market failures - for instance to provide affordable and plentiful public goods - this flawed theory returned with a vengeance in the last two decades of the past century. Privatization, deregulation, and self-regulation became faddish buzzwords and part of a global consensus propagated by both commercial banks and multilateral lenders.

As applied to the professions - to accountants, stock brokers, lawyers, bankers, insurers, and so on - self-regulation was premised on the belief in long-term self-preservation. Rational economic players and moral agents are supposed to maximize their utility in the long-run by observing the rules and regulations of a level playing field.<

This noble propensity seemed, alas, to have been tampered by avarice and narcissism and by the immature inability to postpone gratification. Self-regulation failed so spectacularly to conquer human nature that its demise gave rise to the most intrusive statal stratagems ever devised. In both the UK and the USA, the government is much more heavily and pervasively involved in the minutia of accountancy, stock dealing, and banking than it was only two years ago.

But the ethos and myth of "order out of chaos" - with its proponents in the exact sciences as well - ran deeper than that. The very culture of commerce was thoroughly permeated and transformed. It is not surprising that the Internet - a chaotic network with an anarchic modus operandi - flourished at these times.

The dotcom revolution was less about technology than about new ways of doing business - mixing umpteen irreconcilable ingredients, stirring well, and hoping for the best. No one, for instance, offered a linear revenue model of how to translate "eyeballs" - i.e., the number of visitors to a Web site - to money ("monetizing"). It was dogmatically held to be true that, miraculously, traffic - a chaotic phenomenon - will translate to profit - hitherto the outcome of painstaking labour.

Privatization itself was such a leap of faith. State owned assets - including utilities and suppliers of public goods such as health and education - were transferred wholesale to the hands of profit maximizers. The implicit belief was that the price mechanism will provide the missing planning and regulation. In other words, higher prices were supposed to guarantee an uninterrupted service. Predictably, failure ensued - from electricity utilities in California to railway operators in Britain.

The simultaneous crumbling of these urban legends - the liberating power of the Net, the self-regulating markets, the unbridled merits of privatization - inevitably gave rise to a backlash.

The state has acquired monstrous proportions in the decades since the Second world War. It is about to grow further and to digest the few sectors hitherto left untouched. To say the least, these are not good news. But we libertarians - proponents of both individual freedom and individual responsibility - have brought it on ourselves by thwarting the work of that invisible regulator - the market.

Anarchy as an Organizing Principle