Emotional attitude also has an affect on success or lack thereof in business. Aside from attracting customers and business partners after the mode of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, positive attitude also helps in plowing through the dips and allocating resources. And arguably the ascents and descents of market indexes are caused by mass emotional swings.

But can a cancer patient’s death necessarily be blamed on failure to say enough positive thinking affirmations? Is a person who lost a limb responsible (legally or otherwise) to grow it back by thinking positively? Are there boundaries to the ceilings and floors of markets which attitude alone cannot penetrate?

Of course, part of the difficulty lies in defining what is positive and what is negative and what is success. Sometimes anger or fear is a positive thing in some sense. Is being happy about cheating or harassment really positive? Sometimes success is measured by intangibles or was most fostered by a setback.

That aside, for we have some agreement on what is good and bad regardless of fuzzy edges, the broader issue is philosophical. How deterministic is the world in which we live? Are we free to choose and responsible to do so? Or is there an interplay between the two, for example, DNA determinism on the one hand and the circumstances of social interaction on the other.

My proposal is that both function in our world in some way. There are limits to what can be accomplished by positive thinking. There are boundaries that make some beliefs impossible to fulfill (e.g., that we can raise the dead or that all humans can be billionaires). At the same time, in many ways we do not make full use of what we could and have yet to witness how high the ceiling of accomplishment goes.

It is less clear that each party must benefit exactly equally in all respects, or that equal benefit is even possible most of the time, although without a pattern of relative equivalence, most such transactions would likely trail off or cease in the long run. People would haggle or vote with their feet (i.e., leave).

This introduces business ethics. Under this heading falls such unpleasant concepts as jealousy, coveting, greed, malevolence, deceit, manipulation, and coercion–all of which serve to distort both the relative equivalence of the transaction and even our perceptions of fairness.

My limited ambition for the present is to remind myself and you, the reader, to strive for the ideal. Since we must engage is business transactions to live and function, let us aim for “doing unto others what we would have them do unto us.” In its vague and cliche form, think positively.

Especially in the current economic climate.

Peter Rubel