After this enlightening TEDTalk, you’ll never look at drug cartels the same way again.
Billions of dollars in sales. Quick shipments. Ultra-efficient distribution chains. Carefully orchestrated PR. Drone delivery.
It sounds a bit like Amazon!
But in reality, this is any one of the three major Mexican drug
cartels--what Yale professor Rodrigo Canales paints more as innovative
multinational businesses pushing high-margin products than gangs of
“faceless goons” peddling drugs. And in the TEDTalk above, he urges us
all to make the mental leap that, these aren't just multinational
corporations in size, but also in practice.
Canales points out that illegal drugs are a $60 billion market
(wholesale) in the U.S., which is just about the yearly revenue of
Microsoft. And everything the cartels do is part of “integrated
strategy” to pursue this market--including a strong organizational
structure, tempting incentives, and good brand management. Maybe this
seems like your typical TEDTalk, oversimplifying massive world problems
into a bite-sized business language that seems as simple to fix as a
miscalculated spreadsheet. But I was taken by the presentation--by how
well it explained methodology and motivation, with all the
understandable progression into the immoral you might see in Breaking Bad.
Perhaps his most stunning example is of the cartel Los Zetas,
which is known as the most gruesome of them all--having brutally
dismembered and decapitated women on several occasions this year
(filming and uploading it for all to see).
Los Zetas started out as the Gulf Cartel. The cartel eventually found
its distribution channel infested by authorities, and so they recruited
a team of elite paratroopers for the Mexican army to clear and protect
their pipeline to drug sales. It’s why you should never own a tiger,
Canales jokes, as eventually, those paratroopers usurped the whole
organization.
After the very hostile takeover, the Gulf Cartel rebranded as Los
Zetas, and members used their military training--namely that of
incredible, scalable organization through a multi-tiered chain of
command--to franchise a complete business of crime, including drugs,
kidnapping, prostitution, and human trafficking. When the Los Zetas
enter a new town, they make major violent demonstrations (branding), but
they also openly recruit the Mexican Army, promising incentives like
better salaries and food (sounds a lot like Google, doesn’t it?), and
then train the most powerful gang in the area to become the regional
franchise manager.
At the end of the day, Los Zetas is known as the most ruthless
cartel, but its casualty count is roughly the same as the two other
major players in the space. And that’s a casualty count Canales stresses
will constantly be on the rise so long as the cartels need to protect
the distribution paths to their target, drug-hungry market: us. So if
we'd really like to beat the drug cartels--highly adaptive, absurdly
funded, incredibly organized multinational corporations that ruthlessly
protect their supply chains--we need to stop buying so much of that
supply.
[Hat tip: Reddit]
No hay comentarios.:
Publicar un comentario