Art-Tec Design

on kindness. This concept already exists – as Colin Mayer points out in ‘Prosperity’ – in Delaware, USA. So for 2021, please consider if you can reform and rebuild kindness – not just into your personal life and interactions, but firmly and squarely into your business objectives, purpose and operations. • It isn’t kind to sell COVID19 masks or vaccines at the highest possible price based on principles of supply and demand and exploiting as much as possible any lack of regulation by states. • It isn’t kind to conduct a team-building session for your employees, then – when you leave the car park – cut into the other cars trying to leave, drive in the outside line flashing your lights to try and intimidate cars and humans in front of you, so you can get to your next appointment, or slow walk around a shopping mall, more quickly. • It isn’t kind to employ migrants, keep them in disgusting confined quarters, use their labour and resource due to its cheapness – and scarcity of comparably cheap alternatives – and then when they fall sick dump them in a forest and abdicate responsibility for their lives. • It isn’t kind to design a societal reaction to a pandemic that allows travel in and out of a country’s airport and then repeatedly ‘lockdown’ the afflicted because of the lack of authority exerted at the outset. • It isn’t kind to trade with high margins, continually acquire assets and then charge the assets by extracting rent at the highest prices from those that can least afford it but can’t obtain finance from banks who tighten credit and increase profits in times of economic distress. • It isn’t kind for a bank or lender to treat someone who borrowed 1 billion Thai baht and is in default of payment,

like a V.I.P, but then treat a small businessperson or farmer as if they are sub-human and give them no leniency or V.I.P. treatment when they walk into the bank to explain their position – whilst they grow food for our tables. Survival of the fittest is a concept to be confined to literary classics such as ‘Lord of the Flies’, to be shelved in the narrow field of pure biology and science. As a society, in our corporate lives and objectives, we can actively build in a ‘top-line’ for our wealth accumulation based on our actual needs, and Desmond Hughes do something productive and/or kind with the surplus. It doesn’t have to be communism to be kind. Companies can change, if humans have the will to make them.

I wish you a prosperous and kind Happy New Year for 2021.

read online By Desmond Hughes, Senior Partner of Hughes Krupica. Hughes krupica is a law firm which specialises in real estate; Construction; Hospitality; Corporate; Commercial; Personal Injury; Dispute resolution; and litigation, operating in Bangkok and Phuket, servicing clients in relation to their business activities in Thailand and in other regions of Asia. www.hugheskrupica.com