Category: Business

Measured

I am, if nothing else, measured.

I think linearly. Deliberately. Some might even say ploddingly. When I gather data to make decisions I plug my emotions, shut them below deck even as they heave against it; they unbalance me from time to time, but I don’t let them get to full throat. I consider as many perspectives as I can, though that seems innate rather than something for which I can take credit. And I try to be generous towards other people in my assumptions about them.

In my head I know there’s a place in the world for me, because there’s a place in the world for everyone. Yet in my heart I have doubts.

The world of arts and letters is stuffed with talent. I haven’t chosen to write as much as I feel compelled to do it. But of what interest are my thoughts, my ideas, my observations compared with both the wide and the deep perspectives shared by other authors and artists, particularly those who come from places underrepresented in our collective narrative? My prose doesn’t soar or dazzle, and my themes are simple, universal. My advantages are an unflinching gaze and pleasingly straightforward expression. That feels meager.

The world of analysts is also full, and though I have the talent and the nerve for it I don’t have the fire. Analyzing for profit is a competitive market, and I lack the motivation to win. I’m curious and creative and unafraid of ideas, but I might be collaborative to a fault. I have no agenda other than understanding. It is how I’m wired.

So I have a compulsion to create where I won’t necessarily succeed, and where I can more likely excel I have little interest. The conundrum of my life, though one I don’t own exclusively. I know there are others with similar situations, people who want to do what they aren’t best-suited for doing.

So how do I measure my value in such a place?

I haven’t a clue.

I am testing that value. I’ve committed to a year of writing to see if my voice does matter, if there are enough people interested in what I have to share to make the dedicated effort worthwhile. I will always write – compulsion, remember? – but it might be more of a hobby than a vocation. It’s a beautiful dream for my writing to support me, and once in a while dreams do come true.

But if this dream remains just that, if there isn’t space for me in the world of letters, then I’ll need to make peace with that and try to return to the world of analysis. I don’t really know how that will work, however.

I’m older and definitely wiser, but I also stepped out of that world for quite a while. My business performance since I retired from corporate jobs is abysmal, though the covid pandemic is wholly responsible for that failure. And while I’ll probably be more at peace with a role back in the business world I will likely still lack the passion that a full commitment requires. Commitment is kind of important to those who would engage my services and pay me for them.

Perhaps I’m destined to close out my working days doing a collection of part-time jobs. Credit counseling. Tutoring. Perhaps even making coffee or stocking shelves. In other words, doing things I’m neither suited for nor driven to do.

And wouldn’t that be fitting for someone who couldn’t find his place because his head and his heart just weren’t aligned?

Brilliance, Unlimited?

I surprised both my friends and myself during an argument over coffee the other day. My very good friend Tom is a fan of iconoclastic businesspeople, people who dream big and dare bigger – people like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. I had an unusually visceral response when he complimented Musk, and I was particularly inarticulate about my thoughts.

I am a free-market guy mostly, but I also believe in vigorous oversight, because far too many businesspeople will push boundaries and take advantage.

It’s a logical outcome of the widely-held view that a businessperson’s main goal is to maximize returns to shareholders. Behaviors like price fixing, price gouging, withholding new products that will cannibalize existing products, adopting rosy economic-growth forecasts when funding benefit-defined retirement programs all reward shareholders at the expense of collective utility, which is – or at least should be – the goal of any economy. In other words, businesspeople will most often choose narrow benefits over broader benefits because their goals, performance assessments, and compensation are aligned with narrow company-specific performance rather than wider economic performance.

And that’s cool. Try to reward a CEO on a broad economic performance metric on which they will have very little impact and you’ll very quickly have an unmotivated CEO. Or need to search for a new one.

But without a vigorous counterpoint (i.e., public regulation) to enforce collective utility, we end up with society as a whole bearing externalities, costs that are created by individual entities but paid for by the collective. Which leads to income disparities (shareholders get all the rewards while non-shareholders get zero rewards but have to cover part of the costs), which further frays our community.

But back to Elon Musk. I have two views of him, and there is some nuance in them.

Musk is brilliant. Tesla will change our world at least as dramatically as Amazon restructured retail shopping – and I’m all in on that change. Moving our transportation economy to sustainable fueling is seismically positive. It will reorder our world, but that huge disruption will leave us in a far better place than we are now.

He is also highly skilled at building companies. Counting PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, and The Boring Company he’s had a significant role in creating four companies that are thriving, which is a great indicator of the appeal their products and services have to people.

But.

His Twitter acquisition shows hubris. He fancies himself an expert in social media and public conversation with no evidence of his expertise. He hasn’t grown up in social media companies, learning the essential issues, understanding the wants or needs of the broader markets, differentiating among the various markets and market segments. He’s extrapolating his personal experience, assuming his experience is the same as everyone else’s, which it certainly isn’t.

People have followed him on Twitter because of his brilliance in engineering and creating companies, not because of his opinions on other topics. Like many other users, he’s using that platform to opine about stuff in which he has little to no expertise. And as long as he’s just one user spouting nonsense, then I have no issue. Free speech and all. But when he uses advantages gained elsewhere to buy influence where he hasn’t earned it, then I do have an issue with it.

The best analogy I can come up with on the fly is Microsoft buying its way into search with Internet Explorer by bundling it with Windows. Windows won its dominant position in the marketplace by its features and its marketing and its sales to personal-computer manufacturers. IE had not earned a market-leading position by its performance. So to force IE into that leadership position by power earned elsewhere undermines collective utility.

Similarly, I think, Musk views himself an expert on speech and social media. He’s transferred the appeal he has because of his engineering and company leadership into social media, but the jury is still out on the latter. He hasn’t earned a leadership position in that area.

To me this whole discussion gets into Ayn Rand territory, where she believed there exists a small number of supermen, disproportionately gifted and superior to everyone else, who need to be allowed to exercise their genius so the rest of the world can benefit from it.

But.

Those people don’t exist. There are geniuses among us, but they have no emotional or moral superiority to the rest of us. They are no less petty and no more aware about our community, its needs, and how we interact than those less blessed with brainpower or technical insights. That their genius manifests in commercial success makes them no better – and no worse – than the rest of us. I don’t begrudge these titans of industry their hard-earned rewards – and to have outsized commercial success you have to work hard – yet many of these self-same titans seem to believe that brilliance in one space equals brilliance everywhere. Musk himself seems to believe that his own brilliance knows no limits.

I respectfully disagree.

Failure

No one I know likes to fail.

If you’re raised to honor your commitments, then failing to do so feels mortifying. Humiliating even.

I am on the precipice of the two most significant failures in my life, and yet I don’t feel humiliated. Or even mortified. I’m not ecstatic, but I don’t feel bereft. I guess I feel modestly hopeful.

I regret that I haven’t been able to deliver on my promises in both cases, but I’m an analyst, and circumstances being what they are I understand why I am in the position in which I find myself. That understanding has led to acceptance of my situation. I have regrets, but they are mild. I would have liked to achieve success, but that just isn’t where I am.

The most immediate failure is of the business I share with my wife. Opening a shared workspace business was a good decision. The sector is booming, and the social and professional dynamics around work support the move to more flexibility. Opening a shared workspace business a few months before a pandemic swept the world for two years (and counting) was an ill-timed decision. The pandemic destroyed any chance to grow a shared workspace business, and while our landlord deferred some of our rent, it didn’t feel benevolent enough to forgive any of it. We’ve hung on as long as we could, putting a lot of our own money and sweat equity into the business, but as surge after surge of Covid delayed a return to the office our cash reserves steadily dwindled until we are now out of room. So we wait to see if our landlord will make some concessions that allow the business to continue.

I’m not optimistic.

The second failure has been 34 years in the making. My marriage hasn’t always been bad, but it decayed as small hurts created distance, which in turn led to greater emotional injury. And over those years, despite many successes – the greatest being our two daughters – my wife and I didn’t tend to our marriage often enough. Though my wife isn’t blameless, I bear the largest share of responsibility. I am uncomfortable engaging with emotions, so even as she would sporadically ask me to work with her, I didn’t trust her – or myself – enough to make the effort. I didn’t make conscious choices to avoid difficult discussions, but benign or not, the effect was the same. And now our differences are irreconcilable.

So my business is failing, my marriage has failed, and I am left to start again.

It’s liberating in many ways though, which is in sharp contrast to the last time I had these few commitments – when I left college about forty years ago. I don’t feel intimidated or rudderless. I can make many different choices, and I feel excited about the opportunities ahead of me. And with our assets split and the kids launched, I’ll have few encumbrances, which expands the field of possible paths.

So while I wouldn’t have chosen to be here, I am here nonetheless. And it could be worse.