Leadership and Business Wisdom.

Byline: S. Kamal Hayder Kazmi

To succeed in business presently, you need to be flexible and have good planning and organizational skills, experts say. Starting a business requires analytical thinking, determined organization, and detailed record-keeping. It's significant to be aware of your competition and either appropriate or enhance upon their successful tactics. You'll almost certainly end up working harder for yourself than you would for someone else, so prepare to make sacrifices in your personal life when organizing your business. Providing good service to your customers is crucial to gaining their loyalty and retaining their business.

Limits of Social Responsibility

Whenever a business has disregarded the limitation of economic performance and has assumed social responsibilities that it could not support economically, it has soon gotten into trouble.

Union carbide was not socially responsible when it put its into Vienna, West Virginia, to alleviate unemployment there. It was, in fact, irresponsible. The plant was marginal to begin with. The process was obsolescent. At best the plant could barely keep its head above water. And this, inevitably, meant a plant unable to take on social responsibility, even for its own impacts. Because the plant was uneconomical to begin with, Union Carbide resisted so long all demands to clean it up. This particular demand could not have been foreseen in the late 1940s, when concern with jobs far outweighed any for the...