Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?

In 1826 Eli Terry installed a $200 clock in the town hall of New Haven, Connecticut.   All went well until townspeople noticed that the Terry clock was falling further and further behind the nearby Yale College clock.  At first the Terry clock lagged, gradually losing some 15 minutes.  Then it began to gain, eventually racing ahead of the Yale clock by 15 minutes before, over the course of weeks, gradually falling behind again. 

Broken?   Not likely.  Terry was arguably the most distinguished clockmaker in America and among the earliest practitioners of uniform, interchangeable parts.  Meanwhile, Yale’s clock had been designed by the talented Simeon Jocelyn, another favored son of Connecticut, and had been telling seemingly reliable time for years.

The difference—and it’s one we rarely consider today—is that Terry’s clock offered mean time—solid, consistent hours that reflected an average of the sun’s daily variation—while Jocelyn’s clock followed the sun itself.  As Michael O’Malley writes in his book, Keeping Watch: A History of American Time, the question among the puzzled New Haven community was not “what time is it,” but “what is time?”

Hoodies and the Point of No Return

When I was 30 years old I was playing a fair bit of tennis.  I was not very good, so decided to take some lessons.

I met my instructor one morning and we hit for about 10 minutes before he walked up to me and asked, “How old are you?”

"30."

“Well, if you were 20,” he said, “I’d force you to learn a two-handed backhand.  And if you were 40 we wouldn't even bother-- I’d just work on improving the one-handed backhand you already have.”

“But,” he continued, “since you’re 30, I’m going to give you the choice:  Which would you like to do?”  Of course, that was his way of saying my backhand was pitiful and needed reconstructive work.   He was also asking me, in a sense, if I’d reached the point of no return.

Next month, Starling Lawrence will step down as long-time editor-in-chief of WW Norton, the largest and oldest employee-owned publisher in the United States.   He joined Norton in 1969 and became the top editor in 1993.

Lawrence, who is 68, commented, “I have certainly enjoyed this job. . .[but] I’m not particularly knowledgeable about electronic publishing. . .And frankly, if I were 20 years younger, it would be imperative that I understand and educate myself on those issues.”  Then he added, “But that has seemed less important to me because I’m frankly not a consumer of e-books myself. It’s not something that touches me personally.”

This was Mr. Lawrence essentially saying to his tennis instructor, “You know, Bjorn, I think I’ll keep my one-handed backhand.”   He’d reach the point of no return.

It's something that happens all the time, especially as you get older.  I suppose for women there's that moment when they decide to cut their hair short, or maybe to stop dyeing it.  For older folks there's the time when they stop pretending they're just "resting their eyes" and just 'fess up that they like to nap.

It seems everyone in techland is wearing a hoodie these days, thanks to Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg.  Investors in Silicon Valley even have cashmere hoodies.

I was in a Bob’s Store the other day looking at a rack of hoodies thinking, hmmm, everyone who’s anyone wears a hoodie these days.  Maybe I should get one.

The last time I wore a hoodie, I think, I was about 9 years old and fishing with my Dad.  The hoodie I have in mind would have had a Boston Patriots logo and some combination of quahog juice, fish slime, and Almond Joy on it.  (Thanks, Dad.)

Unlike Mr. Lawrence, I’m a big fan of electronic publishing--but I get his point.  Sometimes you have to leave the kids stuff for the kids.  I walked away from the hoodie rack, picked out a couple of polo shirts instead, and went on my way.

Ditto with tennis.

After a few seconds of slightly offended contemplation, I decided to stick with my one-handed backhand.  To prove his point, I guess, my instructor then hit about 100 balls to my backhand, most of which I wafted into the net.

Shortly after that I fixed my backhand when I stopped playing tennis altogether.   I already possess a horrendous golf game, and there's no real need to stink at two sports.

That’s a point of no return from which I have never looked back.

Marketing Myopia on Ice

1960, Theodore Levitt’s “Marketing Myopia” was published in the Harvard Business Review.  It became an instant classic by reminding leaders to focus on the customer instead of the product.  

This challenged CEOs to properly define their business: Railroads should have discovered they were in the transportation, not railroad, business.  When TV appeared, Hollywood should have found itself in the entertainment, not movie, business.  And oil companies should have defined themselves as being in the energy, not oil, business.  (Except for those that went into the nuclear energy business, and then they should have stayed in the gold old oil business.  Every concept has its limits.)

Anyway, that was in 1960, a long time ago.

The other day I stumbled upon a November 1928 (even longer time ago) letter from George B. Bright of George B. Bright Co., Refrigerating Engineers and Architects, of Detroit.  Bright found himself uncomfortably straddling two sides of a great divide, with his old ice manufacturers on one precipice, and the new mechanical refrigeration guys on the other.

In 1928, ice was clearly on the backside of its lifecyle.  An important growth industry for a generation, there had been 35 commercial ice plants in America in 1879 and 2,000 by 1909, while ice consumption tripled to almost 15 million tons annually.  Clever men like Frederic Tudor made a career of sawing pond ice and delivering it mostly intact to faraway places.  The ice wagon became a familiar sight on city streets, the “Ice Today” sign in windows.  Every home had a wooden icebox, and a water pan that had to be emptied daily.

Then, out of the slaughterhouses and breweries came a singularly disruptive consumer technology, mechanical refrigeration.  Ice wagons became a thing of the past and the Ice Man didn’t cometh.  In the 1920s, the household refrigerator became an essential piece of kitchen furniture: In 1921, 5,000 mechanical refrigerators were manufactured in the US; in 1931, over one million, and six years later, six million.

That’s the impossible situation where George B. Bright, refrigeration engineer,  found himself in 1928.  And, in the interest of preserving the peace and cultivating all of his clients, he wrote them a letter:

Things have been and are moving fast in the entire refrigerating field.  Three years ago we saw the ice industry ‘run down at the heels’ while its new competitor the mechanical refrigerator was in the first flush of exultant prosperity.  The old established order of things seemed doomed and the extremes of optimism and pessimism were on every hand. . . 

Today much of the chaff of competition has blown away and tho there is a never-ending group of newly hopefuls entering the mechanically cooled refrigerator field---those most firmly entrenched have settled down to a steadier gait, both as to production, advertising, and ethics.  Much good has already come out of it all.  The mechanical group has learned a healthier respect and a certain tolerance for the older order of things while he in the ice industry on the other hand is learning to become a business man—a merchant if you will—finding curiously enough that there is room enough for everybody and that the other fellows advertising is doing more good than harm. . . .

Now comes the line that Ted Levitt might have referenced, but 32 years later: “On every hand is a growing appreciation of the fact that what we all have to sell is ‘Refrigeration’ and not Ice as a commodity nor even a machine as such.”

Cool, eh?  George Bright, refrigeration engineer from Detroit--when Ted Levitt was just three years old--already had it right.  Nah, he didn’t say it like some high-falutin academic.   But he understood a central truth of Marketing in a crazy time of rapid change: His old clients weren’t in the ice business.  And his new ones certainly weren’t in the mechanical refrigerator business.  

What they were selling to consumers was refrigeration.

Bright seems to have been successful in his chosen field, and with that kind of calming wisdom, you might understand why.  He could well have closed his letter with the Eskimo proverb which says, “You never really know your friends from your enemies until the ice breaks.”

The Echo Chamber: Sounds Just Like Heaven

On an April evening in 1960, small-time crook Rocky Valentine was shot by police, only to awaken and find himself unharmed and in a world where everything he wanted he got. Every wish he desired was granted.

Of course, this all happened on small black and white screens across America in an episode of The Twilight Zone called “A Nice Place to Visit.”  We watched Rocky for most of the 30 minutes granted him--a month in TV time--as he luxuriated in his good luck at having ascended into heaven.

Five Big Fat Business Lies

There may be 50 big, fat business lies floating around the Web, but something happened the other day that encouraged me to jot down the first five that came to mind. 

Number 1 Big Fat Business Lie: There are no dumb questions.

I’m sorry to say that there very much are dumb questions, and if you ask one in front of people you are trying to impress, they will think you asked a dumb question.  If you keep it up they will think you are dumb.

I have seen a manager, in an attempt to encourage give-and-take at a meeting, announce that there were no dumb questions.  Then I heard someone ask a dumb question.  Then I saw some people wince and a few others smirk.  The manager had lied.

My correction to this nugget of wisdom is simple: Don’t ask dumb questions.

Number 2 Big Fat Business Lie: Only bring me a problem if you also bring me a solution.

I would discourage you ever saying this, especially if you have, say, 10 or 20 years experience and you’re addressing someone with, say, one year experience.  This advice is a recipe for disaster.

My revised advice to give a direct report: Solve all the problems you feel comfortable solving on your own, but bring me the ones you can’t solve and we’ll work on them together.

Number 3 Big Fat Business Lie: Fail often in order to succeed sooner.

Try this on an assembly line.  Maybe cooking fries at McDonald's.  How about preparing monthly financials?  The truth is, if you fail often you will not have a job.  There are such things as smart failures which businesses will tolerate because they move things ahead.  But failing often?

I think not.

The big lie really comes from Silicon Valley, that failure is somehow a badge of honor.  If you haven’t failed you haven’t been on the bleeding edge of anything exciting.  Oy.  What they mean to say is that good entrepreneurs (who are often on the edge of something exciting) are sometimes going to fail, and they cannot let it wipe them out.  Pick yourself up, dust yourself off and all that.   But truly, spending three or four years of your life to have nothing but scars to show,  and destroying  $10M or $50M or $150M of someone else’s capital, cannot possibly be a badge of honor.

Think of A.G. Lafley, the former CEO of P&G, who told the Harvard Business Review this month that he thinks of his failures as gifts.  

Only people who are wildly successful can talk trash like this.  (As you know, A.G. Lafley has been wildly successful.)

Coming soon in the HBR: Warren Buffet considers all his losing investments to be blessings from heaven.

Take my advice on this piece of misguided wisdom: Fail as little as you must and succeed as often as you can.

Which turns out to be common sense and not something, hopefully, that you’ll have to put on a motivational poster in your office.

Number 4 Big Fat Business Lie: This isn't really a company function.

Right.  Go ahead and put that lampshade on your head.

Some things can’t be erased from your co-worker’s memories, including that time you over-imbibed after work and didn’t make it to the rest room in time.  That wasn’t really a company function, after all.  And that picture your friend posted to Facebook.  There was nobody from the office within 20 miles when that shot was taken.

My advice: If you are employed and have two feet outside your domicile, consider it a company function.  If you’re on Facebook and you don’t have the flaps down and your tray table in the upright and locked position, it doesn’t matter where your feet are.  It’s a company function--and you’re the star attraction.

Number 5 Big Fat Business Lie: Every problem is an opportunity.

Some are, and it’s not a bad idea to approach them all that way.  To start.  But the truth is, some problems are just unwelcome, aggravating, distracting problems.  And the faster you can figure those out, the better chance you have of not wasting your time trying to make lemon meringue pie.

My advice: Fix problems quickly.  Exploit opportunities fully.  The two don’t really look that much alike, so don’t confuse them.

There you are.  Five big fat business lies.  Any questions? 

Remember, there are no dumb ones.

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