The Ultimate And Number One Success Factor In Business

Bill Gates would have probably been a one-digit billionaire without his mom arranging him a preferential meeting with the IBM CEO at the time. ​Without Paul Allen pulling strings behind the curtain, Microsoft wouldn’t have become the Pentagon’s favorite to win the most governmental contracts. ​

Jeff Bezos probably wouldn’t have been a billionaire without his ties to the Wall Street giants that financed him and waited 20 years for Amazon to become profitable. Most of the powerful figures in Silicon Valley are inter-connected families from the first, second, third…and so forth…marriage. Corporations act like tribes optimising the wellbeing of their tribal members. Most intellectual businesses win by using referral networks….and  50%+ of marketing is done the same way. Referrals and private networks make all the difference. 

It’s needless to say that without knowing the right people your business will flop. You won’t grow, and you won’t acquire funding to expand more tactfully than the competition that would eat you alive faster than Facebook ate MySpace. Who are the right people and how does this ‘success thingy’ work?

Well, to reach a certain level of success the rule of thumb is that values come first when attempting to build relationships that last. You have to relate to your tribe and support one another. The more intelligent people are, the less they need tribes, and hence their disadvantage in the contemporary tribalistic society. They expect systems to work, institutions to do their jobs, and nepotism to be a non-issue. Such fairytale-like thinking empowers the most obscure and most devilish clans to gain prominence in society to the disadvantage of the intelligent people who may have the bias of thinking others are like them. They’re not.

That’s why a conscious effort is needed to find and join 'the tribe' that matches your values and does business in the most ethical and balanced way. The tribes that only take and don’t create value (some corporations and political parties), the tribes that are balanced (give as much as they take), and the tribes that give a lot more value than they take (Mautic, Wordpress, etc). Where do you belong?

If you are in the middle, then you are like iSEE MarkComm’s founder who slightly over-delivers and wants to build a lasting balance in the universe through his actions. He wants to make more money and grow his ventures but in a responsible way by creating even more value through innovation and scaling. However, unlike Linux, he wants to charge his value fairly.

Many would prefer everything to work at the click of a button. But many have also come to realize that the world is still tribal. Tribes are everywhere. Even at the UN. Politics over merit is 97% mainstream for most major money flows. States still make more than 30% of GDP internationally. Like it or not you have to find your tribe. Business is still mainly local and deeply embedded in unique cultures, while only a small but powerful niche promotes the opposite. However, all globalists have their tribes that are nothing like the ideology they promote.

Our iSEE (TOP) tribe is made of anti-tribalists who believe in the benefit of the markets to ensure the survival of the fittest. They don’t take shortcuts only because they see the benefits of market orientation in the long-run and have understood that regardless of how excellent and capable they are individually, they need a tribe to survive & thrive.

Join our honest anti-tribalist tribe or record a TOP interview