Hans Lysglimt - Personal Blog

In business school you are taught to work for win-win relationships. You are taught business ethics. You are taught business law. You are fostered to behave in an idealized nice way - and many if not most buy into this. You are bottled up to be a nice guy and behave nice.

But the business world is full of people that are anything but nice, there are bad guys all over the place. When you look around in the real business world you see people behave unethically, greedy even criminally and getting away with it. The famous cases like Enron, options scandals, savings and loans etc are just the top of the iceberg of cases. The fact is that businesspeople are behaving unethically and doing so because it pays, most get away with it.

It is much like the priest who preaches faithfulness on Sunday and then screws around all week. He is preaching an idealized nice way that does not correspond with the actions of the real world.

The thing is that the nice guys end up being the suckers. The nice guys who do behave ethically in a Boy Scout kind of way get screwed over by the bad guys. But business school never tell you this, business school made you expect people to be nice like the textbooks describe. In this way business school is failing miserably to prepare young people for the real world.

The kind of knowledge needed is street smarts; this is also why many spectacularly successful businesspeople never went to business school.

I once met with an American businessman. We came to talk about win-win relationships.
"Yeah he said - win - win relationships, sure. Slapping his hands twice he said, win-win means you win twice you fuck your customer twice."

The problem is that when nice guy "you" are dealing with this bad guy businessman he might talk about win-win, and you might buy what you believe are his true genuine good intentions. You might even trust him. When he then goes for seconds, and proceeds to f*** you for the second time - you are will be totally unprepared and vulnerable.

Business schools would prepare students better by offering courses like "Street Smarts 101", "Advanced Suing", “Applied Game Theory”, "Contract Strategy" and "Social Control Mechanisms".

Explorer Thor Heyerdahl once told me in a private conversation that "we are still living in the middle ages", and he was so right.

I am just looking at the internet and how unsophisticated it is, it has just only started. This will happen in the next 5-10-20 years, who knows what will happen after that.

- All human formal knowledge will be entered into the semantic web.
- Machines will then be able to read human knowledge and to a limited extent interpret it. This will not be real artificial intelligence, but something fairly close in some instances. Like when the computer Big Blue beat Casparov in chess, machines will be able to amazing tasks.
- We will all have small handheld computers in our hands that we will communicate with constantly.
- Computers WILL be able to interpret human speech at an acceptable level, this is not a very sophisticated task.
- The economy will then become MUCH MUCH more efficient. Supply and demand will be instantly available. Whenever you need something the suppliers will be instantly there. Machines will order what you need for you and deliver forward in the value chain.
- You time will be MUCH MUCH more efficient. Machines will tell you what to do. How to do it most efficient. When you need to do a task machines will instantly suggest you the best procedure.
- Machines will suggest good fits for you. Your old trusted best friend from college is going to the movies tonight, why not show up and have the machine automatically book the seat next to him? The combinations are endless.

- Search engines today are incredibly primitive. It is almost ridiculous. Do a search for "hotel london", the search gives you nothing of value. Do a search for "hotel london" on Expedia and it might remember the hotel you stayed at last time - that is unsophisticated but shows us the direction we are heading in. Our search results will be MUCH MUCH more sophisticated and tailored to our history and fit to our needs.
- Right now click advertising is the big thing. But the text click advertising like we see it today will not survive for long. In fact text based click advertising is a great example of how short we have come in the evolution of the internet. Of course the amazing effects of supermodels posing with the products we desire will grow into the net. 20 years from now you will not click on a text ad for a flight to Bali, you will see the current supermodel on the beach in a photo.

- Email will evolve tremendously. We will get rid of the spam problem, we will have a controlled environment where messages and task/project management and teamwork will be fully integrated.

If you consider all these things combined, and many other things we can not even imagine right now you see that the future ahead is very bright indeed. We are still in the middle ages, the internet, the information revolution and the lightening up of the global fiber network was just the last spark of the enlightenment that was needed to propel us out of the dark ages.