Keep your eye on the ball

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Show me the money.

—Jerry Maguire

If you want to forge a career in in professional services — if you want handsome fortune while sitting in a comfortable office,with beanbags, ferret taxis home after nine and the benign protection of a regional co-chair of diversity and inclusion, keep your eye on the ball.

The “ball” is not the upshot of the employee survey, the mentoring program, pay parity, ESG credentials, workplace satisfaction, community teamworks — these things will come and go and doubtless vouchsafe lucky chancers a decent living — but the basic business of sensibly deploying capital in pursuit of sustainable return.

Mark it: this has not changed since the industrial Revolution full stop this hasn't changed since the agricultural Revolution. This hasn't changed since the invention of the wheel.

This time is not different.

Health and safety officers and co-co-ordinators of the employee cultural network will, insh’Allah, be whacked in the meantime but if what you do is look after is the prudent allocation of real money, real talent, real property, to real risk situations —and if you are good at it — then nothing the technological revolution can throw at you will hurt.

For the most part the information revolution is a revolution of delivery.

Amazon can deliver products to you more effectively and efficiently than a high street retailer. eBay puts you in touch with public sellers of goods in a way that classified advertisements and auction houses could never do.

Digital businesses may be different, but only by degree. In some sense, traditional media may be threatened by network economies: gathering and allocating content more efficiently and could a traditional media organisation, but at some point quality control and authentication by real experts with real experience of real data does make a difference.

Quality ultimately prevails.

Capital must be allocated. The business of allocating hundreds of millions of dollars in the hopeful expectation of profit is not fundamentally altered by the [[information revolutio]. The allocation of land to resources, the manufacturing of physical goods, the manufacture, purchase, sale and conveyance of commodities is barely changed by the metaverse. People must eat. People need shelter. The resources of the planet are scarce and growing scarcer. These are fundamental truths which millenarian thinking cannot falsify.

The things that can change are delivery, administration, law, regulation, audit, monitoring and control. Regulatory change. Netting compliance. These are transient. They are second-order properties. Adeptness at them is a vulnerability.

These are pastimes for bureaucratic passengers. If you devote your life to Jesus from your shelf life full stop find activities which involve genuine risk of physical or monetary loss, and specialise in them. Become expert.

Will the world end if you don't comply with regulation? No.