The Business of Business
I have spent forty-seven years in business. I know exactly how that happened. I entered college as an engineering student, typically strong in math and science, or so I thought. I say that with suspicion because where I went to school in Rome, I was way outside the mainstream of American educational enhancement and was quite out of it when it came to the current standards of excellence in high school education. I had moved to Maine for junior high and that state was woefully inadequate in repairing kids for anything other than the deep woods and lobster boats. I then went to a very traditional prep school in those woods that believed in building character, which is a good thing, but it came at the expense of advanced academic excellence in math and science (the cute but useless observatory dome on the science building notwithstanding). I then moved to Rome where the Brothers of the Holy Cross got a hold of me and imbued me with some great ethical training, but hadn’t even heard of Advanced Placement curricula that was running rampant through the urban school network of the United States. That all meant that I was miscast as an engineer and found myself wandering in college towards something that suited me better. That was a combination of economics and government, which was the right place for me, but which meant that the vocational paths leading from it were wither academic, legal or broadly business oriented. I knew myself well enough to know I was not smart enough to be a great academic and not rigorous enough to be a good legal scholar, so like Tom Cruise in Risky Business, I just smiled, turned my head and said, “business, here I come!”
It was the right choice for me because what I did have was this strange blend of drive, rudimentary math skills, an inquisitive mind, a creative bent and a reasonably strong interpersonal capability that included a gift of gab. When combined, those are a pretty strong skillset for a career in business. I was watching a movie recently (actually, I think it was The Offer, which is a series) where the protagonist is told that he has the unique combination of brains and balls and that it will make him a good producer. Despite the anachronistic lack of wokeness in that comment, I tend to find it very true. Business requires enough smarts to get it right, but equally enough chutzpah (extreme self-confidence and audacity) to make it happen. You either have the sufficient amount of intellect or not and that is rather absolute, but also a continuum that can determine your degree of success or as Larry Peters called it in The Peter Principle, the point at which your incompetence overtakes you. But the chutzpah is only somewhat innate, it can also be a function of your nurturing or, more broadly, your experiences. Looking into the abyss can create chutzpah for example, because it absolves you of fear in that you have stared it in the face and survived. Chutzpah is also attitudinal in that there may be a point where you just don’t care enough to let fear bother you and you prefer to just move forward. I sort of think of that as impatience rather than bravery. The point is that I seemed to have that sufficient combination of brains and balls for whatever reason that made me succeed to a certain extent in business.
One always must moderate the degree to which one claims success because while others may look at your resume and declare you successful (this happens to me a lot), a resume does not tell the whole story of success and failure. For that matter, the size of your wallet does not tell the whole story either since luck plays such a big role in success, especially as defined by money. It’s pretty easy for people to define extreme failure in business since such high-profile events like bankruptcy of felony convictions are hard to justify or get-around. And there is a wide swath of in-between outcomes that fall into the never never land between success and failure that can best be described perhaps as surviving. The always humbling part of business (as with most activities in life) is that there is always someone coming along that does it better, faster or with greater profitability to make you realize that success is both relative and fleeting. Some would say that the only measure of success in business is the accumulation of wealth. That is not as universal a standard as you might expect as we see people like Jeffrey Epstein creating a new standard of cautionary tale. But with the Michael Milken, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeffrey Bezos and Elon Musk caliber of people out there that made money and broke serious new ground, there are plenty of high-performance people to admire and simultaneously criticize.
Many people during my career in the higher ranks of Wall Street told me that I was simply too “nice” to be on Wall Street. That is a backhanded compliment if there ever was one. Its someone telling you that you are too soft and not ruthless or shrewd enough for the game at hand. It was a fair comment about me. As much as I was reasonably successful at business on the path I chose, I tend to think that the things that made me successful were things like creativity and enthusiasm more than traditional skills like discipline and tough negotiating ability. I’m not sure where that leaves me in the pantheon of great business leaders. I was very leading edge. I was much beloved and liked by my subordinates, which was a great boon to my ability to achieve goals. I was dogged enough to persevere and break through failure to get to success. Those are all decent business attributes, but they are not the mainstream of business success.
As my readers know, I do expert witness work. In some ways, this is the perfect culmination of my business skills. It allows me to use my resume to gain opportunities. My breadth of experience makes my net wider than most, which is good for business. My inquisitiveness makes me a natural analyst with sufficient quantitative bent to make the analysis somewhat pointed. Then my natural penchant for writing makes me a good advocate for the opinions I develop. And finally, on the stand, my years of high-level business warfare has made me a steely-eyed and somewhat unflappable expert in depositions and testimony. Those are the qualities that law firms like to hire and that make for efficient servicing of client needs.
What I don’t like are all the business aspects of the business. I do not want to hump for business even though I am willing to advocate for my qualities and suitability. I do not want to price my services and would rather someone else figure out my worth. I particularly do not want anything to do with the contractual affairs of the business and the inevitable squabbling and fighting that ensues in any business. I am happy to pay a portion (generally 25%) of my billing rate to have someone I trust do that all for me. My rate is arbitrary to say the least, so I never feel like I am being underpaid by virtue of the administrative slice being taken away from me. As I used to say, the day any of us add as much value as a fifth grade teacher, that is when we have the right to bitch about being underpaid. In the business of business, I demur.