"Consumers"

I love that word, consumer. It's used so often now that people forget that its antonym is producer. Few produce, but most consume. And consume. And consume. Why? Because that's what they do. So it's up to the enlightened producers to feed that appetite, and make a buck r three million in the process.

When you sit down and think about it, there are very few true producers any more. In most businesses, ultimately it is the engineers which produce value -- and the rest of the organization is a bureaucracy to enable this. If you look at the business lifecycle, the headcounts reflect this -- it starts out heavily weighted in the R&D areas, then slowly the sales, marketing and their support staff grows and grows and ultimately the actual producers, the ones without there would be nothing to sell, get marginalized.

This bureaucracy consists of consumers. Except these consumers eventually thinks it is more important than the producers that brought them to power to begin with. That gave them something to sell and market. The consumers that grew rich off the efforts of the producers.

But that is what a corporation is -- a wealth transfer mechanism; it transfers wealth from "consumers" to the owners. Which usually aren't the producers; the ones who created the wealth to begin with.

It is food for thought. Who actually produces wealth? Who truly creates value? It has to start somewhere. But now my brain hurts, my belly is full, and my bed calls.