Damage From The Wastefulness Syndrome in Life and Business

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Damage From The Wastefulness Syndrome in Life and Business

I can live with the fact that my children have to throw almost half of the entrées they order. But this is a sacrifice we have to make to the gods of economics. That quantity of food is perhaps the most scalable. What I fail to fathom, however, is the gargantuan, gratuitous, and obscene appetite for the big and the wasteful. Just because you can, does not mean you should. My whole house has to be cooled even when I am confined to a single room for the last 2 months as my family is vacationing. Why could this house not have been constructed with split A/C's? After all, you would not go to a restaurant and order a whole roasted bovine instead of a sirloin steak... or a 5 pound cheese cake for desert after the steak... (although I am simply presuming that about you).

Okay, so for those who know me, the reason my wife drives an Excursion and we live in a 4600 Sq Ft home is that she has to tend to 3 screaming urchins and often our parents are with us. So we are really barely managing ourselves in confined spaces. But right now the electricity bill is really hurting me and it aggravates my sense of loneliness, given that I am by myself.

Getting back to the topic at hand...the habit of wastefulness, which also reflects a complete disregard for the resources we have been blessed with, is what leads individuals and companies to financial ruin. The desire for big homes is what got us in the current financial crises in the first place. It leads to a way of thinking which is devastating in the long run, many financial failures that we have seen in the past few years have come about due to such habits. I have seen the same with startups and firms that have gone belly-up. Leaders of such firms always try to TARGET BIG... they have no sense of segmentation... no sense of a beach head market to capture. They think that the entire population can be marketed to and have no sense of limits. They simply can't say that my target is the CIO of a 100 to 250 Million dollar firm in the educational psychology sector which mostly outsources clinical trials to Timbuktu and wants to buy CRM software. No, No, No!.. They want to sell CRM and they believe everybody needs one. Their sales staff has no knowledge of market segments, and why they fit best in a given segment. This nefarious desire for BIG drives them out of business sooner or later.

So you might say, I am still not convinced. I can make "abc" software that is good for all, and better than others. Yes you can!! But don't forget about marketing it please. The best does not always win. There is a method to the madness. Microsoft was not the best, or is the best. Neither are you in a position to know the needs of everybody, let alone convince them that you do know their needs more than the next guy in the line wanting to take his/her money from their wallets. You may be able to eat a whole cheese cake but it has to be one piece at a time because your mouth is only "this big" (i.e. if we can ignore your stomach for now). So take it easy...don't run after the whole herd... go after one particular target, else all of them will run away. Hold your horses, aim small... think reasonable.

Meanwhile, let me find out if my HOA will allow me to put a up a split AC from Mitsubishi in my home office.