In the Amway business, most active IBOs are advised to trust upline. To think of upline as a coach or a mentor. These upline mentors or coaches are supposed to have your best interest at heart and they will guide you to success if only you will be open to learning. Many uplines, including my former uplines used to coin the term "copy" or duplicate. If you can do that you will be successful. Even the simplest of people can copy. The upline may crack a joke about getting thru school by copying. Thus, many IBOs follow exactly what their upline advises them to do.
But then uplines turn the responsibility away from themselves. Many Amway defenders will also claim that downline should not simply follow the advice of upline. They may make a ridiculous claim that standing orders and functions contain advice that must be discerned. That information is like a buffet. You pick and choose what you need and discard the rest. If you are a new IBO or prospect, let me tell you that is a load of guano (bird crap) that is being heaped on you. Your upline is touted as having experience and wisdom in the Amway business, which is why you are paying good money for voicemail, books, cds/audio files, and functions. So why would their advice be something you pick and choose? How would a new IBO know what to pick and choose?Imagine hiring a guide for a trek in the wilderness. The guide is supposed to be an experienced outdoorsman, perhaps an expert. So if he recommends that you eat certain plants or fruits, you trust that he is going to guide you right. Imagine eating something that made you sick to your stomach, only to have the guide tell you that he just points out plants and fruits and you have to discern which is good for you and which is not. You would fire the guide and tell everyone you know not to use that guide anymore.
But here we have these "systems" such as Network 21, WWDB or BWW that have been "guiding" IBOs for up to 20 years or more in some cases, and the number of diamonds are negligible. Sure there might be new platinums, but many tool consuming platinums have been found to be losing money or making very little money for their efforts. What's more, it would appear that Amway is losing ground in sales. Amway's sales dropped from 11.8 billion in 2013 down to 8.6 billion in 2017. One can reasonably guess that any new platinums that break are simply replacing the volume for a platinum that no longer exists or a platinum that no longer qualifies. My former upline diamond appears to have all new qualifying platinums from the time I was in the business and here's the kicker. My former diamond had 6 downline rubies. As far as I know, none of these rubies are qualified as platinum anymore, much even in the business.
Uplines also program their downline to take responsibility for the failure. Thus you have IBOs who did everything that was asked of them, only to fail. Yet these IBOs often blame themselves for their failure. It is my opinion that former IBOs who did everything asked of them only to fail should file a formal complaint against their LOS with the better business bureau. Amway defenders like to think that a lack of formal complaints means that the system works when clearly, there is no unbiased substantial evidence to suggest that the system works. It looks like some succeed in spite of the system, not because of.
The catch in all this is uplines skirting responsibility for the outcomes of those they "mentor" and profit from. IBOs should ask if upline really cared about their success, why do you have to pay for any help that you receive from your upline diamond?
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There are two different Amway businesses. The one that is advertised and celebrated and spoon-fed to new IBOs is the business of buying Amway products, using them yourself, selling what you can to others, and recruiting new IBOs. The other is the business of selling "tools" (a form of teaching via CDs, books, tapes, etc.) to the persons in your down-line, and making sure that they stay in the business for as long as possible.
No matter what Amway defenders try to say, these two businesses are not just distinct, but they have totally different goals. The first one is the Amway business that is sold to the schmucks, to suck them in with pipe-dreams about residual income. The second is the Amway business of your established up-line and Platinum, whose real motivation is to collect monthly fees of all kinds from you.
A low-level IBO must ask himself the following questions:
1) After I've sold as much Amway stuff as I possibly can to friends and family members who make pity purchases, how much actual money am I making each month from retail sales?
2) How much money (as overhead) am I spending each month just to be in my Amway subsystem, with its various fees and tools and meetings and functions?
3) Why must I purchase an endless flow of CDs and tapes and books (the teaching "tools") when they don't teach me anything about making my business profitable?
4) Why am I told specifically not to think about any of these questions, but to dismiss them from my mind as forbidden "negative" thoughts?
If you ask yourself these questions, your intelligence and common sense will tell you that you are being ripped off, big time. You are in Business Number 1. Your up-line and Platinum are in Business Number 2.
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