How to Really Succeed in Business

Think of this as Volume 11, Number 5 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I’ve written since 1997. Enjoy.

As a door prize for covering a software conference this week, Rick Chapman of SoftLetter gave me a copy of his book.

In Search of Stupidity was, for me, a ton of fun. It tells the history of the PC business, that part of the business I lived through and covered. Sort of a memoir of my time. And it’s well-written — funny, breezy, and conversational. While most business books are dry tomes filled with charts and buzzwords, Rick’s book is a bedtime chuckle filled with stories and anecdotes.

His theme is that you can succeed in business if you just avoid being stupid. Most companies fail due to easily foreseen, really stupid mistakes, he writes, and he cites endless examples, many of which I personally covered or lived through.

In a way it’s much like this newsletter.  Since launching A-Clue.Com in 1997 I focused on finding those who had a Clue, who seemed to know what was coming, and those whom I deemed Clueless.  Smart and stupid, clued-in and clueless. It’s pretty similar.

But there’s more to it than that.

No one intends to be stupid or clueless. Even getting a business going, any business, requires a considerable amount of insight.

So what happens? Generally, operations happen. I’ve long been interested in the break-points of businesses, where they tend to fall down. There are lots of them. Most businesses fail before they even get going. Others fail when they try to copy themselves, opening a second store. Still others fail at $1 million, $10 million, or $100 million in sales.

The first break point is obvious. You go into business because you want to do something. But once you start your business you are no longer doing that. You’re in business. You’re hiring people to do what you once did or loved, you’re convincing customers to trust them as they would you, and you’re riding herd on everything.

Assuming you get past that, you then have to scale it. And if somehow you can do that, you’re a success.

This is the most dangerous time of all.

Because once any business becomes successful, it has to build a bureaucracy. That bureaucracy looks inward. Bureaucrats are vital in any successful organization — government bureaucrats, institutional bureaucrats, business bureaucrats. Their success, in turn, depends on building their own bureaucracy, and if you listen too closely to them they will drive you crazy, then drive you under. Because they don’t really have your interests at heart. They have their interests at heart.

Assuming you can get past that, you’re the big man. Or woman. You’re the guy or gal in the corner office, at the top of the tower. Everyone defers to you. And it’s natural at this point to see the world from your own point of view. Which in business you can never, ever do. Because business, like politics, is not about you. It’s about them. You must always see the world from the point of view of your customer, and base your decisions not on what makes you comfortable, but on what makes things better for them.

Then you have to know what your business is. Rick tells a wonderful story about Lanier Business Products, which was based just a few miles from my home when I moved here in 1983. Lanier was a leader in the word processing business. It made word processors. That’s what it thought.

But that wasn’t what its customers thought. Its customers saw a solution to their own internal struggles with documents, and as soon as they found a better solution in the PC, a device which could process words, numbers, and so much more, they dumped their word processors like they had mange.

Assuming you can get past all that, assuming you can get the "vision thing," you will find yourself with two trains running. There will be the vision of what the business has to become, which you’ll have, and the actual operation of the business, which someone else will have. Their world is the day-t0-day reality of your business. If you don’t build a strong bureaucracy, which hews to your vision, you’re going to go toes-up in no time. And before you can deliver on any promise, on any vision, you have to get it implemented by your own bureaucracy.

So now let’s assume you did everything right. You understood you were in business. You handled your operations well, and built a bureaucracy for that. You continued to see everything from the outside-in, from the customer’s perspective. You maintained a tight hold on everything. You didn’t let the power get to your head.

Now, how are you going to pass all that on to a new generation? Every great business is entrepreneurial in nature. Every great business has one visionary, and one vision. When that visionary departs, you’re a chicken without a head. Unless and until your people find a new visionary.

You can do that by selling out. You can do that by promoting from within. You can do that by hiring someone from outside. You have to trust someone, and in that decision lies the fate of everyone in the empire you built.

All this represents the plot of Sunday in the Park with George, which remains one of my favorite musicals. Barbra Streisand and Xerox captured one of its most important songs, "Putting it Together," which laments how any scaled artwork, like a musical, leaves the artist with almost no time to actually create the art in question. Having just a vision’s no solution, everything depends on execution.

That’s business. You have to do more than build a business in order to avoid stupidity, in order to remain clued-in. Y0u also have to find a place for yourself inside that business, keeping an eye on the customers and on the future. You have to work on your business, not just in it.

You have to listen to someone.

In the work that we do Rick Chapman and I, and so many others, are a bit like the old court jesters. We are allowed to speak truth to power, and take no stake in the result. This makes us easy to dismiss.

But don’t. Because we’re not aligned with anyone, because we’re true outsiders, experienced reporters may be your best consultants, and our work is often free. Don’t wait for the book to come out. Listen, and don’t take yourself so seriously.

Because every business, every organization, every empire, every one dies eventually. All we can do, in the time we are given, is try and push mankind forward a little bit.

Remember who the ultimate customer is, and try to always speak for them. That’s how you avoid becoming stupid and clueless.