Carrying the bucket or building the pipeline..!!!

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I also write technical articles here

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“Building the pipeline”, “Carrying the bucket”, have you heard these words before? I happen to hear these words quite often these days. And I almost ended up laughing when I first came to know the meaning of these words. Carrying the bucket means working as an employee somewhere and building the pipeline means setting up one’s own business. What I don’t understand is one uses a pipeline or a bucket, either ways the water will be delivered to the same pot. Then shouldn’t we be concentrating on the more important question of “whose pot is this in reality?” rather than basing our theories on the methods employed to fill this pot. 

What I’m talking about are the so called MLM (Multi Level Marketing) companies, not all the MLM companies but the ones that make people fall prey to their faulty pyramid building methodologies. Let’s not get into the technicalities of how these companies deceive more than half the people who join them and why some countries have banned such companies. The links towards the end of this article throw more light on that. Purpose behind the article is to talk about a few arguments that the believers of such schemes make against non-believers, and which I found to be equally applicable to them in some cases or totally immature in others.

One of the very common arguments that these people make is “People in the job (call them employees in some organizations) don’t work for themselves but for their employers”. How true!! What about the people who promote MLM schemes promising huge returns in a short span of time? They too make the people above them in the pyramid make money. Every time the person above you (This is the same person who made you join such scheme) earns lot more than what you earn. Ultimately, here too, people are working for others. At least someone like me (who is an employee) knows whom he is working for. Such is the fate of the people joining this fraudulent MLM scheme that they don’t even know who is taking the major share of their money.

Another argument that these guys make is – “People like Birlas and Ambanis are making money through our hard-work”. This argument seems very immature to me and this again boils down to the same thing. Someone who started this MLM thing is building his castles on all the hard work that these quick-buck dreamers are doing. Birlas and Ambanis (or any other business houses for that matter) are all visionary people, they are building something that will last forever and won’t end up in people loosing their hard earned money. They are contributing to the GDP of the country, where as these fraudulent MLM companies are taking the savings of common man out of the country.

Here is another one – “We are not making people join the scheme, we are creating leaders”. That’s really very immature and childish to me. These people are doing something by delivering a few seminars; even IIMs think that they can’t do that in two rigorous years on their campus. One very fundamental thing that these people forget is that leaders are born and are not created.

I have many other arguments made by these MLM guys, but these more of personal sort. And putting them in here would make this article very lengthy. My purpose of writing this article is to start a patient and mature debate over the advantages and disadvantage of not so genuine MLM schemes (I reiterate again, not all MLM things are fraud, Tupperware in US for example is pretty genuine thing).

I would urge you all to go through this link (and all the links on that page) before making uninformed statements/decisions.

http://users.openface.ca/~cobe/eth/quest.html