Off Kilter.

Volume 51: 1984 called.
Searching for the signal in the noise of brand, marketing, and design.

1. Salesforce pays $28bn for Netscape Communications Corp.

tl;dr: Salesslack is now a thing.

In the 1990’s Netscape Navigator was the Internet, the browser that gave us the window to the world. A pioneer. The web for everyone. A rocketing IPO stock price even though it was unprofitable, unheard of in its day. Ushering in a new wave of tech startups and ultimately the dot com boom. This was the future!

And then it was dead. Microsoft killed it by featurizing it. Bundling its own browser, Internet Explorer, in for free along with Windows and stealing Netscape’s market in the process.

Now history is repeating itself. Only this time swap Netscape for Slack and Internet Explorer for Microsoft Teams. Unlike Slack, which businesses have to pay for, Microsoft throws Teams in for free when you sign up for one of their Microsoft 365 bundles (for more on that nonsense, see below), stealing Slack’s market in the process.

This is why selling to Salesforce, or someone like Salesforce, was inevitable. There’s almost no way Slack could’ve survived alone in the darkness of trying to compete against Microsoft in an enterprise market they very much view as their exclusive playground. Especially when Slack also failed to innovate appropriately in the area of video conferencing, missing the kind of astronomical user and revenue growth of say a Zoom.

But if the deal was inevitable from a Slack perspective, for Salesforce things look a lot more cloudy. They’re paying top dollar for a business with only very limited revenues and slowing growth. To put that in perspective, Salesforce is borrowing $10 billion dollars to fund the purchase and Slack’s current revenues won’t even cover the interest on the loan. But, hey. That’s never stopped the ambitious before, and Marc Benioff and Salesforce are nothing if not ambitious. In recent years, they’ve been on an acquisitions tear as they seek to expand beyond their CRM roots and establish a broader foothold in other parts of the business.

And there are some really real synergies that might exist here. Deeper integrations of Salesforce CRM tools inside of Slack based workflows has the potential to create compelling solutions that don’t exist today. And it’s entirely possible that Salesforce’s more mature and enterprise grade sales team will be far more capable of inking deals than Slack could ever be.

But overall, I can’t help but feel like they’re paying a lot for what might end up only being a little.

2. 1984 called. It wants its dystopia back.

tl;dr: Microsoft goes all in on employee surveillance.

You may not have seen it, but just before Thanksgiving Microsoft got into a spot of hot water for releasing a new suite of analytics attached to Microsoft 365 under the banner of a “productivity score.” The major problem being less the name and more that it’s a full blown employer surveillance tool.

Initially promising to deliver a person by person dashboard of exactly how many times a named employee attended a Teams meeting, interacted with a collaborative document, or even sent emails. After a Twitter storm blew up, they backed off a little by pledging to anonymize the data, but it’s still a terrible thing for them to be rolling out for three big reasons:

1. The metrics they’re delivering have literally nothing to do with productivity, they’re actually just measures of a persons engagement with Microsoft’s suite of tools, so what this actually measures is busyness. And employees are really, really good at gaming daft metrics like that (reducing actual productivity in the process, btw).

2. Productivity is an outmoded metric for whole swathes of knowledge work, originating as it did with the time and motion studies of the early 1900’s, where men with stopwatches and top hats would stand there trying to optimize production line workers to deliver the same amount of work in less time. That just isn’t how we solve problems in the 21st century, where often the problems to be solved are different rather than the same, and nor does it reflect the value of kinds of problems we’re solving.

3. Productivity is one of those red herring client demands. When you do any kind of research on what businesses are looking for, they’ll all tell you they want to improve productivity. But it’s only a single datapoint. They typically want to improve other things too, like engagement and culture and morale and education and trust and the ability for the employee and their teams to take responsibility and to solve problems and so on. All the things that a “productivity score” imposed from on-high is likely to decrease, rather than increase.

And really, this is the rub. Microsoft sees itself as “the” productivity company, so it’s looking at a highly complex subject through a very narrow lens. They’re then taking that narrow lens and applying an even narrower set of behavioral metrics to it: how did the employee use the tools? Rather than a performance metric: was the challenge tackled effectively? I mean, God forbid, what if an employee was so good that they only needed a single message to solve a problem and not multiple documents, meetings, group emails, sharefile folders and all the rest? In Microsoft world, you’d be passing that person over for promotion due to their low productivity score, and promoting the annoying busybody who schedules the meetings to nowhere and then faithfully shares the results with everyone over and over again instead.

No, this unfortunately has little or nothing to do with actual productivity improvements or anything meaningful to do with how we work or how the very idea of work progresses. No, this was only ever ever about one thing: Showing how much people use Microsoft products through a faux measure of the value of those products to make sure clients keep paying for them and ideally buy more of them.

And, because of this, it’ll probably just end up dying like Clippy did all over again.

3. The “banality of evil” has a name. And that name is McKinsey.

tl;dr: Leave your morals at the door Ivy League graduates.

The opioid crisis is personal for me. In my early 30’s I blew out a disc. Fast forward six months and I’m at the doctor with a back in agony and a numb left foot that kept stumbling on the sidewalk. X-rays and MRI scans proving that what the doctor referred to as “a good one” didn’t in fact mean that I was good. It meant that there was no disc left and that nerves were being impinged. I then suffered a year and a half of severe pain, an incapacity to walk more than a block without sitting down, an inordinately PTSD-like fear of rush hour subway trains without hope of anywhere to sit, and I was in a permanently no good, very bad mood. I discovered that it’s exceptionally difficult to be happy and optimistic when you’re in constant pain.

Anyway, with the diagnosis came a prescription for pain pills. Vicodin to be exact. Two pills to be taken every four hours. Something I never did. Addiction runs in my family, my uncle died of alcoholism, and I’ve always been wary. Instead, I rationed them only for when I was at my lowest ebb, allowing myself one or two per day and only then if I really needed them. Later, after some pretty intensive pilates had fixed my ailing back (fingers x’d, for good) I read an article that hit me between the eyes like a freight train. It was profile of the person experiencing their first overdose: A man in their early thirties, who’d taken opioids initially to address back pain, experiencing their first overdose 18 months after that first script was written. This was literally me. I just had the pure luck of not trusting the prescription, heeding the warning of a dead uncle (thank you Alvar for helping to keep me alive) and being bloody minded and Scottish about the whole thing.

So, it is with absolute and unmitigated disgust that I now get to write about McKinsey and their role in the whole sordid opioid mess. You can read the details for yourself, but here’s the crib notes version: The Sackler family, owners of Purdue Pharma, makers of Oxycontin and other opioids that have killed tens of thousands of people, were driven solely by a historic level of unprincipled greed that was entirely without ethical nor legal constraint and McKinsey consultants were their enablers. Working diligently to write the “turbocharging sales” playbook. How anyone could possibly work on “messaging to counterpoint the emotional distress of mothers with opioid dependent children” is literally beyond me. I’d have told them exactly where they could stick that project.

We send our best and our brightest (and our wealthiest) to the best Ivy League business schools. There they are groomed to run enterprises, institutions and countries. They’re on the fast track to the top and McKinsey is the employer of choice for many when they graduate. And what do they learn at McKinsey? Well, to quote a former McKinsey consultant, they learn “the banality of evil, MBA edition.” They learn to park their morality at the door in the interests of greed. They learn to ignore right and wrong and to instead exploit the grey area between legal and illegal. It isn’t just that people have died here, it’s that the moral vacuum that is McKinsey risks poisoning a generation of future leaders of our businesses and our society.

Purdue Pharma is now out of business due to the sheer weight of the legal cases piled up against their wrongdoing. If there’s any justice in the world, McKinsey will go with them. And none of the grieving mothers of the world would shed a single tear.

Thank you for reading all the way through. If this email was forwarded to you and you like it, you can subscribe here.

If you’d like to talk about anything brand related, or even just to have a chat, that would be awesome. Please reach out. I particularly enjoy helping people solve tricky brand problems.

Cheers for now.

Paul
President, Invencion

LinkedIn | Twitter | Email