Editor’s note: This article was first published in September 2011, during Spain’s economic crisis. Its picture of Facebook as a closed platform versus a sharing Google reflects 2011.
Being ambitious could be considered a virtue, because the opposite of ambitious is complacent. There’s nothing wrong with being complacent, except that when complacency is applied to business, the complacent entrepreneur usually gets overtaken by a more ambitious one. At the pace companies move today, we can’t afford to stand still. Look at the Facebook vs. Tuenti case (Tuenti was a Spanish social network).
Ambition means wanting to take on more. It means having a drive to improve, growing as a person and as a company, and of course wanting to earn more. At some point we can cross the line of ambition, and once we step over that line we’re in the territory of greed.
Greed is trying to chew more than you can swallow. It clouds what is possible and realistic. Greed is wanting to get even more than you’ve earned. It’s wanting the maximum profit for the minimum effort, or, as the well-known Spanish proverb puts it, “La avaricia rompe el saco”: greed bursts the sack.
Some people are by nature neither ambitious nor greedy, but complacent. They tend to settle into a salary and do their household sums to work out what they can spend that month and what they can save. Faced with a situation like the current one, where unexpected expenses can come up or the family’s income can dry up, people like this end up regretting that they weren’t a little more ambitious.
Others have been left in debt for life after society gave them the chance to live beyond their means. They were complacent until they saw their neighbors enjoying a higher standard of living; comparing ourselves with the rest of society is only human. These people went from complacency to greed without passing through ambition.
Another example, this time of companies that were ambitious until greed got the better of them, are those tied to the financial system: banks and savings banks, which used money that wasn’t theirs to earn money that didn’t belong to them. Once they realized the mistake they had made, there was no turning back, so they slid into criminal greed: when you know you’re putting third parties at risk, but you take advantage to bring in the rest of the harvest and protect yourself before the storm you yourself caused arrives.
Finally, we have the ambitious companies, the tech companies, such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple and so on.
Although these companies might seem to fall on the side of greed, the truth is that they’re growing quickly but steadily. Once they dominate a sector they move into others, buying companies with the profits they already have, so their earnings grow year after year. Before taking on more, they build a solid base at the previous step.
Among these tech companies, we could already say that Facebook is starting to become greedy compared with its rival Google: while Google tends to share, even part of the revenue it gets from advertising, Facebook has built a closed platform.
The internet means sharing, until content enters that great city called Facebook. Once inside its walls, it can’t get out. While Facebook uses the databases of other online platforms, it doesn’t let anyone get anything useful out of its network.
Zuckerberg could become the exception that proves the rule about greed, because in the real world, if you behave like Facebook, you won’t last 20 days.
Further reading
- Life is a table: which side of the table do you want to be on?
- 5 ways to grow your business
- Mistakes to avoid when starting a business
Featured image: Richard Heighway, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
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