Ronnie Rendel's Blog on Kabbalah, Business, and Life

The Rambam writes something very peculiar regarding the days of Moshiach.  Among the descriptions of the Messianic times, the Rambam writes that “there will be no more competition.”  The he adds that there will be no more envy, wars and everything else, but he specifically mentions competition.

Rashbi face in Tzfas with Kabbalah

We have al wrong up to believe that competition is the staple of free markets, and that there is nothing better than a little bit of ‘healthy competition’, to both motivate the highest level of excellence possible, and to ensure the best value for the customer.

Obviously, competition has a negative side to it, which is that, a lot of promising ventures that for one reason or not, lost in competition, because competition implies winners and losers, never got to offer their values to society.

When you are starting a business, in many ways, it feels like going to battle.  Competition is a very fierce aspect of launching a new product or a service and one that is probably the strongest driving force behind a business.  We’ve certainly seen negative effects of companies that have no competition.  Again, as is proven by the free markets theory, the companies have no competition usually offer a worse product to the consumer, because the consumer has no choice but to take their product.

So how is it that Maimonides writes that in the days of Moshiach, as we know, things don’t necessarily change as far as the existence of banks, railroads, homes, cars, food, and everything else. There will be no difference between these days and the days of Moshiach, except for the change in politics, a change in attitude.  Later on, in the advanced days of Moshiach following the ingathering of the exiles and rebuilding of the temple, you start to see more miraculous behavior in nature, but this could happen as far out as a thousand years after the initial onset of Moshiach.

So what is the Rambam saying about no competition?  Well, we’ve seen already a glimpse into this new theory with the rise of the internet and social media.  All of a sudden, we are now seeing a new business model develop, a business model that is now in its infancy and is very worthwhile to track with the following perspective, which is in this new age of internet publishing and social media, competition gives way to cooperation.

In the old day, if you had a customer list, people either bought your services or there were leads that they were interested in your services, the last thing you would ever do is share that list with someone else, especially if they were offering a complementary product to yours.  That is changing with the internet.  If I have ten thousand subscribers of an email newsletter, usually the value I provide to them is not fresh content. If I have someone who is offering a similar yet complementary product to mine, which again, we talked about content, internet and services, it’s much easier to find complementary content as opposed to copying each other, then if I share this offering with my current subscriber list.

First of all, I add value to my customers, because with the nature of how niche markets work in the internet, they’re becoming more specific.  Let’s me give you an example.  Let’s say you have a blog on kosher cooking.  In the old days, it wouldn’t be worthwhile to put the publishing effort into a niche market such as kosher cooking.  There were very few who actually did that.

Today, if my product is a weekly newsletter with recipes and information on kosher cooking, I have a value to give to my subscribers on a weekly basis.  Now, the people who are following my list are interested specifically in this niche.  Now, kosher cooking happens to be complementary to the laws of cooking on Shabbos.

So let’s say I have a friend who has a blog about the laws of cooking on Shabbos.  For me to advertise his blog on my list, and to share his services— let’s say he put out a book, “A Convenient and Absolute Idiot’s Guide to Cooking on Shabbos” (great idea for a book, btw). Offering it to my channel is not just a cross sale as it was in the old world.  It’s actually a cooperation of two different products with the ultimate purpose of providing value for the end user.

If you look at the way a network is designed, a network is taking a bunch of individual elements (for computers it would be a whole bunch of individual computers) and you are creating something bigger through combining and connecting them all together.  A network of people works in a similar fashion.  You take a whole bunch of different people of different educations, different experiences, different intellectual and emotional structure and bring them all together, you have a group that’s more than the sum of its parts.

This is a new way of looking at life that goes hand in hand with the new approach to life, which is heralded together with the Messianic redemption.  The new approach is that no longer is the person standing next to me competing with me for a finite amount of resources.  This has been the main theory behind capitalism and modern economic theory. That theory is that there is a finite amount of resources and people are competing for this finite amount of resources.

That premise is no longer true, and was never true.  Part of the Messianic redemption is realizing that first of all, there is an infinite amount of resources, so they seem finite for less since G-d is providing for every single creature.  The only time there is lack and you see there is not enough resources to go around is when we actually lose this perspective.  This is the esoteric meaning of the concept of idolatry.  Idolatry is when you make the world and the limitations of it seem as they stand on their own and that what you see is what you get.  At that point, you are actually concealing G-dliness and that is actually the inner aspect of the prohibition on idolatry.

In Messianic times, G-dliness is more revealed and we see there are more resources.  However, I don’t have the vessels to take advantage of all of the resources that ar available to me unless I connect to other people.

It’s explained in Kabbalah and in other esoteric writings of the concept of ‘lights and vessels’.  If you have a vessel, that can contain one hundred pounds of blessings, influx, sustenance.  Once you connect with someone else, now each one of you, who has a one hundred pound capacity, so to speak, now each of you has a two hundred pound capacity.

If you can hold a hundred pounds and your friend can hold a hundred pounds, once you’ve combined for form a network, now each of you has the ability to receive two hundred pounds.  This is spiritually speaking. What this means is, that the more we connect to the network and the more we give to the network, the more we express our altruism in the network, the bigger and bigger vessels that we have to receive G-dly light.  This translates to health, wealth and all the other blessings we have in life.

This is something that we are going to see more and more of in business.  If you’re smart you’ll look and see how this applies to your business.  Find people you can cooperate with, to share with.  If there is someone who is offering the exact same product as you to the exact same market as you, obviously there is not so much cooperation you can do.

It also means that one of you is wrong, because there really should be a synergistic relationship between value offerings in the market.  It shouldn’t be five different people offering the exact same product. That is actually inefficient and it comes from a lack of creativity.

We’ve seen this a of of times in our sales and marketing consulting gigs where we saw someone do a very successful product—a unique offering, whether in financial services or something similar to that, and within a couple of years, there’s four, five, six former employees and started offshoots of those.  That is economically inefficient and is usually means the end of that specific niche.  The better way to approaching is to always think of complementary services of how things can work together.

Again, keeping that together with faith, and with the strive to see G-dliness openly in this world, is really the key to living messianic times, even today, in all aspects of our lives, including economics.

This entry was posted on December 30, 2009 at 5:00 pm and is filed under Business, Kabbalah Applications for Business, Moshiach Coming in 5770. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: Business relationships, consulting, moshiach, networking, Project Management, redemption