I remember a lecture I attended more than a decade ago about Conflict of Interest. In its simplest form, conflict is summarized into the following three items:
1. Investment/interest in a supplier company
2. Investment/interest in a customer company
3. Investment/interest in a competitor company
For those incurable googlists out there, Wikipedia has a very long article about Conflict of Interest, but for corporate conflicts (as opposed to government and other types of conflict, all of which are very interesting by the way), I guess those three phrases just about sum it up.
Now I am having my own conflict of interest here. A part of me wants to wrap up this article right now while another wants to connect what I had just written to another seemingly unrelated topic. Hmmm…let’s see who will win.
(I always try to add a second or even a third dimension to anything I write in order to put some depth. Because a mono-dimensional piece is simply boring. Of course, the more unrelated the other subject is, the more challenging it is to link to the original issue.)
So what can we relate to Conflict of Interest? How about…Life?
Gotcha! I’m not going into that stuff right now. Not because it is cheezy but because it is far too general. For me, general is boring. I’d rather deal with the countless details that underlie the whole complexity of complexities of this thing called Life. See! Now I’m starting to get cheezy.
Another topic then. Ah, how about Sex. I’ve read somewhere that the female orgasm has no role in the procreation of the species. I think this makes some sense because it is only the male ejaculation that is needed in order to fertilize the egg. And there seems to be a conflict of interests here, because while some lazy selfish males just want to pass on their genes and get it over with, their female partners, unsatisfied, are left with the task of rearing their offspring.
Fortunately for the modern woman (and unfortunately for the lazy man), we are no longer living in the caveman days when “wives” were treated almost like property and forced into a life of submission to the every whim of their “husbands”. Today, if the female is left unsatisfied, the male will not have much of a second chance to do the act of passing on his genes.
Unless he pays for it of course.
Inner Minds 