Epilogue: The Zenification of Network Marketing

By now, you’re probably wondering what any of this has to do with Zen. Nothing, really—and everything.

Of course, network marketing has nothing whatsoever to do directly with Zen Buddhism or Japanese culture. (Although it’s interesting to note that Japan is one of the strongest markets in the world for our profession—some years, the strongest.) But there’s been a distinct shift in the way we practice this business over these past two decades that I’ve been participating in it. It’s a shift I regard with keen interest, and the best way I’ve found to describe it is to call it “the Zenification of network marketing.”

Picture this: you’re standing at a long, polished walnut boardroom conference table, upon which sit two objects. On your left: a big 1980s boom box, two and a half feet wide and over a foot tall, complete with chrome trimmings and major amplification that dials all the way up to eleven. On your right: a sleek black iPod.

The boom box weighs thirty pounds and holds an audiocassette that plays about ninety minutes of music. The iPod weighs a few ounces and holds nearly a hundred hours of music. The iPod is what the boom box looks like after Zenification.

What does the Zenified, iPodilated version of network marketing look like? That’s what we’ve been finding out over the last twenty years, and we are in the process still.

Central to the Zen aesthetic is the practice of kanso, or simplicity. Here’s how Garr Reynolds, an American designer living in Japan, explains this concept:

In the kanso concept, beauty, grace and visual elegance are achieved by elimination and omission. . . Simplicity means the achievement of maximum effect with minimum means. You do not always need to visually spell everything out. You do not need to (nor can you) pound every detail into the head of each member of your audience, either visually or verbally.

Amen. In other words, if you want to keep people’s interest, don’t spill every bean you’ve got. If you walk around wielding the “Three-Foot Rule” like a two-by-four and dumping breathy, effusive thirty-minute presentations on everyone you see, you’re going to lose friends and influence nobody. (Sort of like being Dale Carnegie, only in reverse.)

Garr goes on to give this brief list of Zen aesthetic values:

simplicity; subtlety; elegance; suggestion (rather than complete or obvious description); naturalness (nothing artificial or forced); empty space (or silence); stillness and tranquility; elimination of the non-essential.

Simplicity, subtlety, elegance. Elimination of the non-essential. Silence. I like the sound of that! Seems to me we could use a bit more kanso in network marketing.

And we’re starting to get it. In fact, Zenification has emerged as the hallmark not simply of twenty-first century MLM, but of twenty-first century everything. Corporations are deconstructing, decentralizing and outsourcing. Why? Because as a way of doing business, the twentieth-century corporation is a boom box. Today’s home-based business is an iPod.

The world around us is evaporating into an ever sleeker transformation of itself. Wired is going wireless, stationary going mobile, heavy going light. Everywhere, our technologies are following the trend that architect and futurist Buckminster Fuller long ago dubbed “doing more with less,” and nowhere is this shift more in evidence than in network marketing . . .