Of Broken Promises and the Cosmic Dust

Some wag once remarked that promises are like babies-Fun to make but painful to deliver!

But that's only an analogy.Promises may connnote many things to many people:

• Brand is a promise of consistent value to its customers.
• Government is a promise of soverneity,security and civil society in the country.
• Marriage is a promise(atleast institutionally) of lifetime sharing and caring on mutual basis.
• Rain is a promise of bountiful when it arrives at the right time and quantity.

Even then as we know, the presence of brands,rains,governments and marriages does not promise anything more than the consumer's own ability to extract utility(borrowed from our economist friends' vocab) from each of them.Since each consumer has a unique utility function,so is the promise different for each of them.If you consider B-G-M-R as products and services,then their points of consumption and network externalities(positive or negative effects that you have on me and others and vice versa) play a more prominent role than the products as delivered by the manufacturer(Company-Polity-Society-Nature)

So are the above and other products really a promise?Hence,even if the government is democratically elected by widely exercised franchise and even if it delivers on its election manifesto,can it promise to the nation's citizens that they would be safe,secure? Even if the police is the best in the world,can it ensure that no crime is committed?-Hence Police is not a promise of law and order in the society!-then what would that promise be?

If nobody derives utility from committing crimes(as defined by the national laws) then the society does not need police.So in that sense,the society's inhabitants are themselves a promise for their own safety and law and order.

We can generalise to say that the promise of a value offering lies more with the consumers of the value than the suppliers of the value offering.So here we are talking of co-creation of value: Creation on one side and consumption on the other side-both adding to the value offering.In that sense the manufacturer and consumers are not on the opposite sides of the consumption game-They are actually on the same side seen conceptually from the perspective of value creation.

Now,we know from physics that matter/energy can neither be created nor destroyed,it can only change forms.Then how can value be ever created? Thats true,when we talk of value creation are we serious?

Hence,Value generation is a more appropiate to use than value creation ! Value is generated from some existing forms of resources which inherently have some value in themselves.Since the time of the big bang,value is constantly being transformed from one form to another.The cosmic dust has certainly come a long way since !