Here’s an interesting question: of the more than 1,000 businesses in the Biddeford and Saco region, how many do you think you’ve done business with personally or professionally? For many of us, the list would run into the hundreds.
Being one person or company among so many in our modern society poses a paradox. There is no escaping the fact that every individual and every organization is responsible for their own growth and livelihood: it takes investment, effort and responsibility to achieve goals and generate success, individually as well as for a business. It’s consistent with a long strain of thought in America about self-reliance: we are all “rugged individualists” who go it alone and choose our own self-determined paths.
Some of the language and metaphors in our everyday speech emphasize these important ideals of independence and personal responsibility. For instance, think of the Horatio Alger “rags to riches” stories; the concept of the “self-made man or woman”; pulling yourself up by your bootstraps (to the extent boots still have straps); or even the classic Western imagery of a lone cowboy riding off into the sunset of the American frontier. We are individuals responsible for our own destinies.
And yet, the old John Donne line of “No man is an island” comes to mind as well. We all play our unique and specific part in a vast interconnected network of others doing the same thing. We rely on so many other people everyday: service providers, colleagues, customers, government officials, public safety officers, infrastructure providers, etc. not to mention family, friends, neighbors, teachers – the list goes on and on.
In the world of technology, an array of computer servers in a linked network is infinitely stronger than just one isolated solution; if one part of the network fails, the rest of the network can continue to run, keeping the entire system available. Likewise, in our personal and professional lives it truly takes a village to keep everything running smoothly. When the furnace goes out in the Winter, or our car doesn’t start for some reason, or we need assistance to continue to move our business forward, it’s comforting to know that an expert who can help us is only a phone call away.
From the perspective of the Chamber of Commerce, we have almost four hundred individual members, but collectively we are an association that tries to help fellow members as well as the entire area – part of a community that strives to succeed and do what’s right for ourselves and our neighbors. There is strength in numbers. Local businesses and organizations help one another by providing excellent products and services to each other. We are all separate and unique, but we are all in this together in many ways too, and so much more can be achieved by working together and supporting each other than just by working on our own.
Jim LaBelle is Executive Director of the Biddeford & Saco Chamber of Commerce & Industry.
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