What if you could “go back 30 years in the business world, knowing what you know now?” Rich Karlgaard asked in Forbes.

30 years ago is when Gates + Allen got Micro-Soft off the ground, when Jobs + Wozniak fired up Apple Computer, when Boyer + Swanson launched Genentech and real estate was cheaper than dirt in a near-bankrupt New York City.

If you could step into the mid-1970s knowing what you know now, would you choose the business you’re in? Would you choose the company you keep? Would you invest the same way?

If only I’d been in a better cash position 30 years ago…

If only I hadn’t been two-years old in 1976!

Timing is Everything!

Well…not quite. Timing is important but Mr. Karlgaard won’t let it rest there. Timing isn’t everything, he says, “You must also marry opportunity to action. The capacity for action starts with the right belief system.

Two questions from Rich Karlgaard:

• Was it smarter in 1976 to follow the economic path of Galbraith and Samuelson, who advocated the efficiencies of big corporations, or Schumpeter and Hayek, who championed entrepreneurism and free markets? Which business worldview would have created more sustainable capital?
• Was it smarter 30 years ago to listen to Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich’s warnings about depleted natural resources or the assurances from University of Illinois professor Julian Simon that the price of oil and other commodities would drop?

These are worldview questions. “Yep—our financial position in 5, 10 and 30 years rides on what we believe today,” Mr. Karlgaard writes, “and the actions we’ll take because of those beliefs . . . we’ll have to use our brains and instincts to discover the answers. But first we must arrive at the right belief system.”

For Rich Karlgaard, there are three “eternal truths” at the core of the right belief system for business.

1. “Natural resources will never run out” because humankind discovers or creates resources faster than they are consumed. “Whale blubber started to run out in the early 1800s. The Paul Ehrlichs of the time were in a panic. Then in 1859 Edwin Drake drilled the world’s first oil well in Titusville, Pa.”
2. “Success is not a zero-sum game” because there’s room for more than one winner.
3. “The Golden Rule is more than a spiritual truth, it is a business truth” because “the odds overwhelmingly favor the company that serves its customers with great products and services at a fair price.”

He adds two “modern truths

Moore’s Law

We know that digital technology progression occurs at a predictable rate: Chips double in performance every 18 months; storage every 12 months; bandwidth every 9 months–or close enough, anyway. I know a billionaire venture capitalist who says his secret of success has been simply “to project Moore’s Law into the future and to imagine what new products and services it would bring.” Moore’s Law has been a billion-dollar idea to this investor.

Wriston’s Law of Capital

In the age of electronic money transfers, said Wriston, “Capital will always go where it’s welcome and stay where it’s well treated.” Capital is mobile, capital is in play, and if you want some of it, you’d better treat it well…Wriston once told me that capital is not just money, “It’s also talent and ideas. They, too, will go where they’re welcome and stay where they’re well treated.”

Karlgaard wraps it up this way:

Moore’s Law, Wriston’s Law and a few other older truths help us see the world in which we live. And where that world is going. With the right belief system we can predict the future.

At InsideWork® we stop short of predicting the business future—not because we’re timid but because we’re convinced that what we don’t know may be as telling as what we know. The right economic beliefs are not fully apparent until the postmortem.

Case in point*: Whale oil was well over $1 a gallon and rising when, against great odds, Edwin Drake sank that first oil well in western Pennsylvania. A dozen years earlier in Canada, Abraham Gesner developed the means to extract oil from coal (he named it kerosene), and half a dozen years earlier Ignacy Lukasiewicz distilled clear kerosene from seep oil in Poland. Drake opened an apparently endless supply of cheap crude for Lukasiewicz’s distillation process which in turn saved Gesner’s company, which was by then struggling to meet demands for coal oil. Gesner expanded rapidly and when his North American Kerosene Gas Light Company was acquired by Standard Oil of Ohio, he returned to Halifax to teach and write until his death in 1864. Lukasiewicz launched one entrepreneurial enterprise after another until his life was cut short by pneumonia in 1882. Edwin Drake failed at business and died in poverty in 1880.

By the end of the 19th century, six cent-a-gallon kerosene drove the price of whale oil to 40 cents. Standard Oil turned out to be the big winner by cornering the refining market.

Geography, timing, skill, diligence, ingenuity, relationships, technology, cash, luck (providence if you prefer), resilience, and war all played a role. It’s not at all clear that anyone prevailed or failed on the strength or weakness of his belief system.

All that said, we tend to agree with Mr. Karlgaard’s truths as far as they go.

If you spend much time with InsideWork, you know that a big part of our business is helping people build what we understand to be a biblical worldview.

Our colleague Dan Wooldridge likes to quip that no one but God has a completely biblical worldview. Point taken. God is the one whom a biblical worldview is meant to reveal. If we’re even in the ballpark on this, then finding out what sort of person God is and learning what God values and doing what matters to God is The Point.

Everything we’ve learned so far—by discovery, trial and error and the process of elimination—points in that direction. So for us, that means living with the biblical text, letting it infuse our thinking and practice with as much depth and breadth and sophistication as we can muster every day. On our best days we drink it like morning coffee, chew on it all day, sip it like wine through the evening, then sleep on it all night.

We do not worship the Bible, nor do we treat it as God’s Answer Book for a happy life. The biblical narrative interprets our lives by unfolding the interaction of the Creator with his creatures. The better we understand that interaction, the better we become as people—slowly but surely, one step a time.

Near the heart of all this is our understanding of ourselves— all humankind, in fact—as workers made in the image of The Worker. We don’t accept the view that work is distinct from worship. We think work well done is worship.

So, when Rich Karlgaard says, “Natural resources will never run out,” we say, “There is enough of everything we need if we treat the world as a gift from God.”

When Mr. Karlgaard says “Success is not a zero-sum game,” and “The Golden Rule is more than a spiritual truth, it is a business truth,” we say “Absolutely! Success is not a game at all; success is contributing to wholeness for everyone; treating each person in the relational web as we wish to be treated.”

We don’t understand the biblical worldview as a belief system or a list of truths or a perch from which to view things. We understand the biblical worldview as a place to inhabit. We are on a journey “higher up and further in” (borrowing from C.S. Lewis). The kingdom of God is not our destination; the kingdom of God is our permanent address.

To say this changes the way we understand the business life—work and reward, success and satisfaction today and into the future—barely scratches the surface.

*The Petroleum Industry: A Historical Study in Power, D.T. Armentano, Cato Journal, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Spring 1981).

Winning The Oil Endgame, Armory B. Lovins, et.al., 2005, Rocky Mountain Institute, www.oilendgame.com
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