My dear fellow travelers,
Greetings to you on this
momentous occasion. Each one of us is the CEO of his own company. Size of our
companies may be small or big, it does not really matter. All of us do
ultimately share a similar dream.
Each one of us offers our
individual markets a bouquet of services which the market has accepted in
varying degrees but the fact remains that although our market is more or less
captive, there are certain undercurrents which undermine the brand loyalty from
our customers which all of us desire.
In the past, many or maybe
even all of us have harbored ambitions of going global and have made enormous
efforts in that direction; efforts which I must say have required expenditure
of huge amount of resources and especially managerial talent. Needless to say
that much of these efforts have often been directed against other corporations
and even your own brethren in corresponding top management holding crucial
positions in these entities. I am sure you will agree that all of us could
benefit substantially if these resources and talents were to be channelized for
serving our markets constructively.
We have seen a lot of
technological developments in past few years that have enhanced our ability to
serve our markets through vastly improved data collection and data analytics
which have together enabled us to reach remotest corners of our markets. I feel
time has now come to consolidate our position more and ensure that we can
continue to serve our markets with more and more efficiency.
With that single agenda on my
mind I have been holding one-on-one discussions with each of you and have
received favourable responses. I now propose that all of us gathered here agree
to restrict ourselves to the geographical markets each of us is dominant in and
leave the other geographies to our fellow CEOs who may be better equipped to
serve those.
I am aware that this may
appear to be a radical departure from the norms that we have been used to
operating, but a little reflection may convince each of us that it would be an
ideal solution to avoid the bitter marketing wars that we have been used to all
these years. Let me not claim that this idea is my own. The conceptual
framework for this was drawn up around seventy years ago by a little known political philosopher by the name of Eric Blair who had developed this theme in his
concept paper painting an almost utopian scenario based on such an arrangement.
You may ask me why this
radical departure from the time-tested routine of involving Chambers of
Commerce which is a formal setting for such discussions. I cite the precedent
that comes readily to my mind. In 1945, 3 CEOs of the then largest corporates
met to discuss the future course of market at Potsdam. In the scenario drawn up
by Eric Blair, he had predicted that such market segmentation would come to be
a reality by 1984 but I think 2018 would not be a bad place to start towards it
in real earnest. Better late than never. Vladimir, Li, Kim, Recep, I welcome
you all to this momentous conference. Our critics in fake media have termed
this as Despotsdam Conference. But let us not get distracted from our agenda.
This is the greatest thing that has happened to Earth in millions of years. Let
our journey to Utopia begin.
Donald
July
2018
Note to the reader: If you
have read Eric Blair aka George Orwell’s “1984” you would have wondered how the
situation depicted therein could possibly have arisen. Now you know.
