or… are we stuck in High School?
I had two brushes with higher education this week.
The first was at a speech I gave in New York. There were several Harvard Business School students there, invited because of their interest in marketing and exceptional promise (that’s what I was told… I think they came because they had heard that Maury Rubin would make a great lunch!).
Anyway, they asked for my advice in finding marketing jobs. When I shared my views (go to a small company, work for the CEO, get a job where you actually get to make mistakes and do something) one woman professed to agree with me, but then explained, “But those companies don’t interview on campus.”
Those companies don’t interview on campus. Hmmm. She has just spent $100,000 in cash and another $150,000 in opportunity cost to get an MBA, but…
The second occurred today at Yale. As I drove through the amazingly beautiful campus, I passed the center for Asian Studies. It reminded me of my days as an undergrad (at a lesser school, natch), browsing through the catalog, realizing I could learn whatever I wanted. That not only could I take classes but I could start a business, organize a protest movement, live in a garret off campus, whatever. It was a tremendous gift, this ability to choose.
Yet most of my classmates refused to choose. Instead, they treated college like an extension of high school. They took the most mainstream courses, did the minimum amount they needed to get an A, tried not to get into “trouble” with the professor or face the uncertainty of the unknowable. They were the ones who spent six hours a day in the library, reading their textbooks.
The best part of college is that you could become whatever you wanted to become, but most people just do what they think they must.
Is this a metaphor? Sure. But it’s a worthwhile one. You have more freedom at work than you think (hey, you’re reading this on company time!) but most people do nothing with that freedom but try to get an A.
Do you work with people who are still in high school? Job seekers only willing to interview with the folks who come on campus? Executives who are trying to make their boss happy above all else? It’s pretty clear that the thing that’s wrong with this system is high school, not the rest of the world.
Cut class. Take a seminar on french literature. Interview off campus. Safe is risky.
November 12, 2002
Please come to my office.
On November 5, 2002, I’m inviting 30 people to spend a day with me in my funky warehouse in Dobbs Ferry, NY, overlooking the Hudson River. (We’re 38 minutes from Grand Central Station in the heart of Manhattan.)
My goal is to help you visualize a different marketing future, to find several take-me-home marketing breakthroughs and to share practical, inexpensive-to-implement advice about taking your company to the next level. You’ll probably learn as much from your peers as you do from me.
Because it’s a small group, we’ll be working on your specific issues, evaluating your web site, talking about how you can reach the right people with the right message. We’ll step back and look at business models and on what’s working and what’s not (offline and on). And everything will be focused on things you can do tomorrow.
If you’d like more information about pricing and agenda, or want to inquire about doing something like this at your company, please drop me a line at
sethgodin@yahoo.com. Put the phrase “practical breakthrough” in your subject line. Sooner the better.
October 2, 2002
It’s hard to imagine standing at a cocktail party and answering the question, “So, what do you do for a living?” with, “Well, I trick people into giving me money.”
I just switched some domains from register.com to another domain registry service. The guys at register have raised subtle duplicity to a high art. After you notify them that you want to change companies, they send you a note to confirm the switch. This, of course, is a fine security move.
The note begins with several paragraphs about how great their services are, and then has a link. It appears that this might be the l ink to authorize the change, but it’s not… in fact, it’s the link to DENY the change! Read a few more paragraphs down, and there’s the link. Click it within a few days or it becomes invalid.
Click on the link. It appears that you’re done. But if you stop now, the change won’t get authorized. You must now check the box on the new screen. And THEN you must click CONFIRM. It’s easy to imagine that you’re done now, and you’ll close the window. But if you do, they deny the change.
You must go to yet another screen and once again confirm the change (that’s four clicks and three screens when one click would have been sufficient).
This is all very Microsoftian in my opinion.
As subscriptions, ship-till-I-tell-you-to-stop and other business models enter the online arena (where the profit margin is 100%), we’re going to see a lot more of this, I’m afraid. Almost fifteen years ago, when I first did an online project for Prodigy, I was told that their best customer was someone who paid the $10 a month fee but never used the service. If someone FORGOT that they had signed up for Prodigy with their credit card, it might take years before they noticed the billing. While that may have seemed like the right strategy at the time, it’s pretty clear that it wasn’t much of a long-run strategy.
I’m the biggest fan in the world of the milkman’s return. The idea of subscriptions that save time and money for both parties is a no-brainer way to run a business. But if you have to trick people into doing business with you, it’s not much of a strategy, is it?
October 1, 2002
Bon Jovi, known more for loud music than acute marketing sense, is profiled in a recent Wall Street Journal piece, Battling Music Pirates. At first glance, it’s straight out of Permission Marketing. The band is offering listeners who buy a copy of their new CD a chance to enter their serial number online and get concert tickets, fan info, etc.
The good news is that the music business is starting to see that the relationship with the fan is worth more than the profit on a single CD. Last year, for the first time in more than five years, no record in the US sold more than 5 million copies. That means that reliably reaching a small audience who WANTS to hear from you is a far better strategy than attempting to sell everyone in the world.
The bad news is that the band is “battling.” That it views fans as the enemy. Why should I go to the site and register my email address and a lot of personal information? What’s in it for me? Is the access to tickets just bait, or is it really a reward for my long-term attention and cash?
Here’s the challenge–we need to remember who we’re working for. We’re working for the people who pay us (with attention.) Bon Jovi is making a really brave first step. But they have to take their time. Not get greedy. Not start spamming those fans who take a step and enroll.
September 17, 2002
…the rank and file gets nothing but the short end of whatever stick is available. Whether it’s layoffs or excessive CEO pay, the hardworking folks that really do the work end up with the shaft.
I had lunch last week with my old friend Jim. I hadn’t seen him in two years, and it was a great chance to catch up. The food was great. The rest of lunch was pretty dismal.
Jim works for a big New York conglomerate. He’s 50 years old. Got another 25 years of good work left. And he hates his job. He’s stuck. He’s doing exactly what he was doing the last time we had lunch. He spends most days counting how long before he can afford to retire—a number that, thanks to the stock market meltdown, just got a lot bigger.
Five years ago, Jim had a dream job, the sort we all envied, the kind we saw profiled in one magazine after another. Now, that very same job feels like a trap.
The big lie of the new economy is that everyone could live the life of an entrepreneur without actually being one.
We bought the idea that all the good stuff that people look for from an organization—job security, benefits, vacations, the safety of being able to blame your boss when things don’t go well—could be accompanied by the rush of fast growth and the heady feeling we get when the bureaucracy gets out of the way and we get to discover what we can really accomplish.
We lionized the 28-year-olds who were pioneering new products or launching new divisions. We envied the lucky (but not particularly skilled or risk-taking) middle managers who made a fortune with stock options. We called ourselves intrepreneurs, smiling because we were getting the best of both worlds.
Wrong. Very wrong. Wrong because we missed two big ideas.
The first idea is that big companies are fundamentally broken. Big companies are big companies because they’re very good at doing yesterday’s business. They can make (and sell) their stuff faster and cheaper than the competition because they’ve gotten good at making and selling their existing products.
The problem is that when the world changes (and it is changing faster than ever) being good at yesterday’s business isn’t just useless, it’s a liability. All those big companies are sweating now, because the infrastructure they built is about as useful as the Maginot Line—it’s obsolete. Penguins like cold weather. When it gets warm, they’re stuck. The finely tuned machinery they developed for one environment won’t work so well in a new environment.
The second idea is that the stock market has been broken for just as long. The stock market is a huge mass-psychology scam, dependent on the fiction that there will always be someone stupider than you, willing to buy those shares for more than you just paid.
A key part of this scam is the generally agreed upon principles that investors seek. At the center of those principles is the idea that big companies with predictable earnings are likely to continue to grow and thrive. This used to be true, of course, but in a chaotic world, it’s proven wrong every single day.
The bottoming out that we’re living through is a direct consequence of these two ideas becoming very clear to us at precisely the same time. Big companies can’t keep growing forever at 20% a year perfecting yesterday’s business, but the stock market didn’t want to hear about that. So the big companies, with the direct encouragement of the accounting firms, lied about their results (yeah, lied is a strong word, but that’s what it’s called when you don’t tell the truth).
All along, while we were giddy at the huge expansion we all enjoyed, we were missing the real point. And now we’re paying for it.
The other day, I took my son to see Steve Jobs give his annual keynote at the MacWorld Expo in New York. He sat transfixed for hours, amazed at the energy and insight and enthusiasm Steve brought to the podium. I mean, Steve was acting like he owned the place.
Of course, he does own the place. And that’s the most important lesson I think we can take away from the nausea of the last two years.
Apple introduces great products on a regular schedule. Contrast the magic of the iPod or dot Mac or Final Cut Pro with the sheer banality of most of what passes for innovation in big business. Other technology companies introduce services they expect to become profitable monopolies. Apple introduces things they’re proud of.
Steve isn’t trying to make the stock price go up. He’s not trying to keep his current infrastructure busy or please his dealers. He’s making stuff he believes in. He’s continuing the legend. It’s the happy coincidence of his ego and our needs.
Of course, that’s only true when it’s true. The rest of the time, Apple makes products that fail, that don’t excite, that don’t make a profit. For almost thirty years, though, there have been just enough wins to pay for the losses. He’s a hero. A model for millions.
What if everyone had guts like that? What if everyone reading this article realized that the point of our careers (2,000 hours a year, 50 years in a row, that’s 100,000 hours of work) isn’t to crank out yet another widget? What if, just maybe, we quit making stuff and started making a difference?
The giant secret of the new economy was this: entrepreneurs momentarily got a free (and fast) ride to wealth via the stock market. That connection is temporarily over, but the basic idea behind entrepreneurship is stronger than ever. In a time of rapid change, the best organizations are small and fast, and the people who run them have a chance to make an impact that will last.
It’s not a coincidence that one of the byproducts of the technology revolution is the death of the factory. With all the publicly available infrastructure (from cell phones to email to Kinkos to outsourcing in Thailand) there’s really no reason at all to build a big company any more. And since big companies are no more profitable than little ones, it’s the little ones that are most likely to spring up, make a difference and then (without tears) disappear, only to reappear some other time, some other place.
This is hard to swallow for a lot of people. We grew up with parents who read Time or Forbes, not Inc. Our role models weren’t crazed entrepreneurs, on a mission from god to accomplish something or go bust trying. We don’t see ourselves wearing those shoes. Why can’t the world just settle down and let us get some rest?
Alas, the world isn’t going to settle down. The desire for safety is understandable, but it’s being overwhelmed by Moore’s Law, by globalization, by competitive desire. I’m sorry if you’ve made it two-thirds of the way to retirement, but, alas, the world got crazy on us.
The dot coms that failed in a big way all had one thing in common—they tried to use money to insulate themselves from external change. They tried to buy success, to buy bigness, to buy stability. You can’t, no matter how big you are.
As long as you work for someone, you have no job security. As long as your company is public, your future is in the hands of others—people who are likely not as smart as you are. And as long as you follow the instructions of others, you won’t be fulfilling your destiny of really and truly making a difference in the way people live and work.
How much time do you spend every day worrying about how fulfilled and happy the CEO is? How much do you invest to be sure she’s got a secure job? Big news: your CEO spends precisely the same amount of time worrying about you.
I want you to do something for you. I’m begging you. It’ll only take a few minutes, but I think you might enjoy it.
Imagine for a second that you just lost your job. Further, imagine that the industry in which you’ve been trained and are working in has just disappeared.
What are you going to do? Are you going to go out and look for another job? A job at an Enron or a Worldcom? Or at a big bureaucracy with 100 people working in accounts payable and a budget for strategy consultants of several million dollars a year?
What if there were no choice… what if you had to start something? Anything. What would it be?
You don’t need a good idea to start a business—you can steal one. Find someone in another town, another state, another industry—and do what they’re doing. Once you get started, your original idea is going to be replaced anyway. Smart entrepreneurs don’t stick to the original business plan. You’ll realize that every day is another day closer to success, and changing the plan is part of the plan.
The best part of this exercise is when you realize that you are smart enough, motivated enough and focused enough to actually do this. That once you decide that you could actually run the place, you’ll realize that no other option is as satisfying.
Quit your job. Right now*. Stop doing something that’s crazy, risky and ill-considered. (Your current job is all three). Stop working for the factory and start building something that people will remember.
Here’s the crux of the matter: organizations where the people doing the work are the very same people who are making the decisions are more likely to succeed in the long run. Just about all the sins of American business (from environmental despoliation to accounting fraud) can be pinned on the anonymous bureaucracy. Entrepreneurs can’t be anonymous—it’s your decision, your policy, your work, your business—and so you’re fast and honest, or you’re out. There’s nowhere else to pass the buck.
Is it scary? Well, just for a second, consider the alternative. You could work for Motorola or Adelphia or even AT&T, always wondering when the company was going to downsize you at the same time you were busy doing whatever the boss asked just to be sure you’d be the last to be fired…
Sounds to me like running a tiny business is totally safe in comparison.
*Actually, you don’t have to quit right now. You could just decide to quit right now. One of the best parts of the no-infrastructure economy is that you can start in your spare time. Hey, it worked for eBay.
September 5, 2002
