So much of how we think are reactions to what came before.In 2010 I left my job at Wolff Olins to do my own thing. It wasn’t exactly pre-meditated. I decided on Friday and resigned on Monday and that was that. I didn’t realize at the time but I was completely and utterly burnt out. The financial crisis two years earlier had brutalized us. In 2008 I’d been leading our largest client relationship with Washington Mutual and when it failed 50% of our revenue disappeared literally overnight. At the same time, I’d been asked to take over as the head of strategy, which meant my first task was to look at everyone on the team and decide who needed to go in order to get our costs under control. Worse, I was taking over from someone who’d been a particularly dysfunctional leader and it quickly became apparent that I was now in charge of a team suffering from something akin to PTSD. Oh, and I’d disrupted a disc in my back and could barely walk. I was not at all prepared in any way to deal with all of this all at the same time. The next two years were an exhausting whirlwind of chasing leads around the world, pitching for business, writing proposals on planes, delivering client work, finding creative ways not to lay people off, having to lay them off anyway, becoming steadily less patient with everyone I was around and generally feeling like I was failing at pretty much everything. However, by early 2010, things were very much back on track business-wise. We’d won more than our fair share of pitches, managed to land the very big fish of Microsoft, and I’d delivered a growth strategy for our business that all of the leadership had agreed to possibly for the first time ever, all of which meant worrying about feeding people could take a welcome back seat for a while. Unfortunately, while things were good with the business they were very much not good with me. I was done working with clients thousands of miles away, I hated that I’d spent my son’s 2nd birthday in the Middle East, and the prospect of many more nights away from my family with clients on the other side of the world was literally keeping me awake at night. Something was about to break. And break it did when American Airlines asked us to pitch for the re-design of their logo. Instead of following the brief, I persuaded our team to recommend AA fix their shitty experience instead. Which I then demonstrated to the client in the pitch with an opening image taken of a very long line of depressed people trying to check in at the single working AA kiosk in La Guardia airport the night before. It was a dumb and unintentionally arrogant move made out of frustration with lots of things that had nothing to do with AA. You could’ve heard a pin drop as they passive aggressively escorted us to the door at the end. Now, I will caveat my dumb move by saying the intent wasn’t wrong per-se. The American Airlines experience was and still is shitty and it should’ve been fixed by now. It was simply that pitching when you didn’t want to win was clearly the wrong thing for the company I worked for and the people I worked with. We could’ve created a new logo for AA in our sleep and it would’ve been 100 times better than what they ultimately ended up with. It was my actions that took the opportunity off the table and I wasn’t OK with that. So the next week, I left. So, what on earth does this have to do with values-based capitalism? Well, when I started out doing my own thing I resolved that there would be three rules. Rules that I’ve just about been able to stick to and that I now realize are some of the core values of my business: I am only going to work with people I like and who like working with me. I will only work on things that I can look my child in the eye and tell him I’m doing and not feel like a creep. If the above conditions are met, I’m going to do my level best to see my clients win irrespective of the size of the engagement.
This means I don’t work on projects promoting tobacco, fast-food, alcohol, sugar, anything bad aimed at kids, and anything that I generally feel is exploitative, wrong or bad for society. And if I ever find that I’m working with people I don’t like or who I think don’t likes me much, then I try to find a way to politely exit at the earliest opportunity that doesn’t leave anyone in the lurch. And for the clients I do work with, I try and work deeply with them to clarify where they are going, be ambitious in their vision, and make them as successful as I know they can be. Striking out on your own is frightening, humbling, exciting and enlightening. I find myself consistently losing opportunities not because I can’t do the work but because I no longer have the right name on the door. I can no longer go after the big fish that I previously built my professional self-image around. Over the last ten years, I don’t think I’ve ever had financial visibility out more than about 2-3 months (and the current economic outlook is much, much scarier than 2008.) And overall, I’ve found it to unexpectedly to be a very lonely path. And yet, I’ve done more satisfying, meaningful work in the last ten years than I did in the previous ten by working with clients that have values that actually mean something in the way they operate their businesses. Clients who aren’t chasing every last dime no matter the consequences, who aren’t loading themselves with debt and paying it out as dividends, and who aren’t driven to hit today’s arbitrary quarterly numbers by knowingly sacrificing their ability to hit tomorrows. Milton Friedman and his merry band of free market nihilists had a profound impact on our society as his monetarist, deregulatory theories laid the foundations for an overwhelming focus on shareholder primacy that then metastasized over time into the almost cult-like hollowing out of the economy we witness today. But, from a certain perspective, the approach has also been incredibly successful as the centralization of economic power has become a feature rather than a bug of the modern economy. Perhaps best summed up by our current pandemic where just six retailers are capturing almost a third of all retail sales while tens of thousands of small retailers go out of business forever. Like my own personal situation, but magnified tremendously, fundamental changes to how we think about the economy tend to be reactions to the context in which they emerge. The embrace of Friedmanism and the Chicago School more generally was a reaction to the profitability challenges of lethargic and inefficient corporations of the 70’s, which came at a time when American business prowess was being existentially threatened by faster moving, higher quality, more efficient companies from Japan and to a lesser extent, Europe. It was clear that a big change in operating priorities was necessary, and Friedman and his political proteges Reagan and Thatcher were in the right place at the right time to deliver that change. Today, the ability of the dominant forces in our economy to make money is no longer at issue. The centralization of economic power makes it exceptionally hard for them not to make money, which explains why just four companies; Apple, Microsoft, Google and Facebook currently have a combined half trillion dollars in the bank. What’s at issue now isn’t how efficiently businesses operate, but how they make money, how they relate to society and the environment, how they treat their employees and their customers and the market, and how they build a legacy that is truly sustainable (in every sense of that word). And while Simon Sinek may wish you to believe that “why” is the most important question, we are rapidly approaching the point where what matters vastly more is “how.” This is why the Business Roundtable recently redefined the purpose of a corporation, why brand purpose (however misdirected these efforts often are) has developed such a head of steam in the marketing world, why B Corporation and Public Benefit Corporation registrations are growing, why ESG investing is rising (despite US government efforts to derail it) and why arch-opportunists like McKinsey are suddenly peddling the value of purpose as a driver of business. These are all reactionary responses to a business world that has become almost too successful in its pursuit of short-term shareholder primacy to the point of becoming almost fundamentally anti-human. This is why values-based capitalism is so important right now. The best talent is still being fought over, even in a pandemic, and they want to work somewhere that’s about more than quarterly returns. Consumers still have some choices (although nowhere near as many as they should have) and talk with their wallets where they can. And most importantly, there is now a generation of business leaders who realize that the making money part of their job often isn’t that hard, but that how they make money and how they treat people and how they address societal issues like racism and sexism and climate change and economic disenfranchisement are really hard, and are something they should be tackling. Because it matters. And if they don’t, their long term prospects will be harmed. The world we are in right now is a messy old mess not just because of a pandemic or because of partisan political divides, but because we’re right in the middle of a battle of ideas in how we think about our economic system, how corporations should act, and why they even exist. On my website, I wrote many years ago that in a fast world you need the strong anchor of purpose. And I really believe that. And then purpose took off and became the kind of corporate wallpaper I hoped it never would. I need to change what I wrote, because this fundamentally isn’t about purpose anymore, or what it became after the advertising agencies, PR shops and management consultancies had their wicked way with it. What I really mean is values. Of transforming a business and a brand on the basis of deep, fundamental values and a moral code that will not be compromised no matter what, and where the focus is on building for the long-haul and not just a quarterly update 3 months from now. Thanks for reading. Sorry for rambling. I’m trying to figure this all out. If you are too, please let me know.
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