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Greatest Invention

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Submitted By flannery42
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During Geoffrey West’s speech on Ted Talks he utters an extremely interesting quote, “Cities are the crucible of civilization.” According to Merriam-Webster Dictionary the definition of crucible is stated as, “A place or situation in which concentrated forces interact to cause or influence change or development.” (Websters Dictionary) This is an insanely accurate portrayal of what cities are, a melting pot of a wide variety of cultures, ethnicities, and businesses all working together to make one metropolitan area succeed and thrive. Each entity within a city whether it being a grocery store, restaurant, hospital, power plant, large businesses or small all provide services for one another in an attempt to help benefit their own city. These developments of different industries and firms is typically known as urbanized economies. Geoffrey West continually references how the specific number of population can help determine the wealth, crime rate, and health of a city. Often times he also refers back to linear graphs that display a wide variety of relationships from gas stations and population, to crime rates and population. In doing so he shows a three fourths upward slope within these graphs that represents progress, wealth distribution, or in other cases success for corporations. The natural progression of these linear lines is that eventually there will be a tail-off back towards the bottom, which represents eventual death, or failure. If this is to be true then Geoffrey West points out that all corporations are meant to die. This means Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and many other fortune 500 companies all have a limited shelf life. This essay will reflect on how companies and corporations can keep their momentum and avoid their eventual collapses. In order for corporations to avoid a collapse there are many important factors that they must focus on to prevent this from

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