"The Next Trillion: An Interview with Paul Zane Pilzer," by John Milton Fogg, Network Marketing Lifestyles Magazine, September 2001.

  Page    1    2    3    4    5

More on
The Next Trillion:

Why the wellness industry will exceed the $1 trillion health care (sickness) industry in the next ten years.

View Actual Article (pdf)      

WHY NETWORK MARKETING IS POISED TO DRIVE THE NEXT MAJOR ECONOMIC POWERHOUSE
By JOHN MILTON FOGG

An earthquake is coming. In fact, its preliminary tremors have already begun. The economic foundations are perceptibly trembling; hairline cracks are spidering out along the plaster walls of our domestic spending habits; neatly framed pictures of current fiscal reality are starting to tumble off those walls. Looks like it’s gonna be a good 8.0 on the
economic Richterscale— or higher—and only one man seems to have
ears keen enough to hear it coming.
 

Pilzer is quick to assert that he has no crystal ball: it's all in the data. But the three-time New York Times best-selling author and economic advisor to two presidential administrations has an uncanny knack for assembling masses of facts and figures and seeing the forests those reams of trees represent. His penetrating insights have attracted the attention of network marketers for over a decade.

Now he's back, with a new message: We are witnessing the explosive birth of a new trillion-dollar industry, and network marketers everywhere are poised to be the vanguard of that explosion.

After two centuries of economic opportunity for the pioneers of manufacturing, we have entered the age of distribution. Today, the greatest opportunity for wealth awaits those who can deliver what Pilzer calls "intellectual distribution."

He is describing network marketing. He is, as the saying goes, singing our song.

NML: Paul, you were the first well-known economist to have anything kind to say about network marketing. What got your attention about the business in the first place?

I think it would be more accurate to say that the business found me. It started with my 1990 book, Unlimited Wealth, which analyzed different sectors of our economy and projected some interesting changes by the year 2000.

By the 90s, the same item still sold for $300, but it was a far superior product with a great many more features--yet its manufacturing cost had fallen from $150 to $15 or $20! Now 80 to 85 percent of the product's costs was in distribution; only 15 to 20 percent was in manufacturing.

By 1990, I explained in Unlimited Wealth, the greatest opportunities for wealth were no longer in manufacturing but in distribution. The book projected that this would continue for the next decade at least. That's why the richest people in the world in 1990 were people who found better ways of distributing things, versus better ways of making things.

NML: Can you give us some examples of those "richest people" who made their fortunes in distribution?

Back in 1961, Sam Walton started a company that was committed to never make its own brand, that would sell only other name brand goods. By 1990, not only was Walmart the largest retailer in the world, Sam Walton was also the richest person in the world--a man who made his living distributing things that other people made. (Sam Walton, by the way, thought very highly of Unlimited Wealth and emphatically endorsed the book.)

In 1990, Fred Smith was the most successful airline entrepreneur of the day. Back in 1976 he had started an airline with its own fleet of planes and pilots--yet it didn't fly people! The only purpose of Federal Express was to move packages: distribution--an unheard-of thought in 1976.

Ross Perot was one of the wealthiest people in the world in 1990. Perot built a $3.5 billion computer company that made neither software nor hardware. What did EDS do? It distributed other people's hardware and software.