Tag Archives: Los Angeles Times

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Are You Smarter Than Elon Musk?

I’ve written before about Elon Musk. He’s impressive on many levels, but he needs a bit of humbling on behalf of his peer group. He knows what he knows. He doesn’t know more.

I don’t need Elon Musk to teach me about free speech. He doesn’t have the credentials.

I also don’t need Mark Zuckerberg to teach me about community, openness, or how we’re going to live in the meta future. He’s a guy who sells online ads. He’s not a futurist.

The opinions of these people outside their realms of expertise aren’t just conflicted; they are arrogant, self-serving, naive, and potentially dangerous.

Wisdom is not fungible. Insight is not fungible. A person can be really good at something and nothing else. They just don’t know it, or perhaps they choose to embrace a platform of pretension. Self-aggrandizement is often a spoil of war.

A thought leader with demonstrable success in one category has no de facto claim to distant adjacencies. A celebrity, even a business celebrity, doesn’t become a subject matter expert beyond their recognized success simply by claiming the public microphone and turning up the volume.

Knowledge is not transferable by sheer force of will or cult of personality. An ego like Musk would have you believe he can layer meaning where none exists. An agenda is not the same as a common belief set, or even a clearly defensible philosophy.

Your opinion of what constitutes the normal social limits or lack thereof around free speech is every bit as valid as that of Musk. He can spend billions and buy anything he wants, but that does not make him right, only influential. He can call himself a free speech absolutist, but he made that up. It’s a pithy expression meant to draw attention to himself, but consider Los Angeles Times writer Michael Hiltzik’s extrapolation of Musk’s mandate in a more chaotic application of the extreme unleashed:

“If that means that users will be able to post anything they wish on Twitter, no matter how redolent they are of ‘sexual harassment, group harassment, insults or name-calling, posting private info, threatening to expose private info, violent event denial, violent threats, celebration of violent acts’ or any of the other violations of Twitter rules that currently allow the platform to shut down an account, that would be bad.”

You may agree or disagree. You may say Musk has agreed to abide by the law, but his interpretation of the law may not be yours. Musk is a contrarian who finds delight in arguing against laws and has no trouble surfacing the means to challenge high court opinions in endless adjudications. As long as there remains an appeal to be had, Musk can prevail with his opinions despite the collateral damage of their impact. None of that makes him correct in the abstract, but too often the power of holding today’s authority is confused with ethical vindication.

Your point of view matters on the issue, because you have the same foundation and standing to express your own point of view. What you likely don’t have are the resources at his disposal or the same hidden agenda he is not going to publicly express. What you probably do have is a touch of measured humility, balanced perspective, and everyday graciousness for those around you.

You’re also likely not putting on a show. Healthy policy debate deserves better than purchased amplification.

Proclamations can be noise alone, or they can have severe implications. We get fooled all the time by the loudest voices in the room claiming an ask that is more than what it appears.

Rich is fine. Successful is fine. Neither offers someone transitive intellect.

In Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye sings, ”When you’re rich, they think you really know.” He wrestles with the irony of his dream. He wants to be sought by his fellow villagers as an all-wise sage and would gladly play that celebrated role in his community. Yet he knows from his deep faith he’s an ordinary man with or without money, not an inspired prophet.

We all have claim to an opinion. The validity of that opinion stands or falls on the credibility of its supporting argument and disciplined construct, not on the bank account or unaffiliated resume of its speaker.

If you think you know more about free speech than Elon Musk, it’s entirely possible you do. That would make you smarter than Elon Musk. I’m not sure it’s a compliment, but hold it in reserve should the foolishness you hear each day give you reason to stand up for your own well-considered belief system.

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Photo: Pixabay

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Tavis and Maya

Tavis and MayaEvery year the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books continues to cement itself in my psyche as a major go-to event. Now the largest book fair in the United States, its bustling aisles fill the USC campus for two days with eager authors and insatiable readers. Each year I joyously look forward to attending, not just for the schedule of talks I plan to experience, but for the inevitable surprises I discover. This year’s surprise was an exceptionally powerful book talk on an open-air stage by Tavis Smiley about his lifetime of interaction with Maya Angelou.

Although I have not yet read Smiley’s new book, My Journey with Maya, my takeaway from the forty-five minutes my wife and I listened to him speak was profound enough to report here as a stand-alone inspiration. Smiley talked openly and honestly about how he personally crashed and burned after a failed election campaign for Los Angeles City Council following a gig on the staff of Mayor Tom Bradley. With a mountain of campaign debt crushing him, he was to be evicted from his apartment with no prospect of employment. A friend arranged a happenstance job for him to travel with Angelou on a brief trip to Africa as an assistant, mostly to carry luggage. That kicked off a lifelong friendship and dialogue between them where they didn’t always agree, but Smiley always found a way to learn.

I’m going to read the book and I hope you will as well, so I won’t go into a lot of detail here on all he said. What I want to share are the two most striking learnings from Angelou that Smiley encoded, largely because they have been stuck in my head and churning ever since we stood there in the sunshine listening to him. I have only seen Smiley a few times on television over the years, but standing in front of him, hearing his passion, listening to the heartfelt words that flowed from his inner being completely coherently without any notes or podium, I was moved completely by the sweat and memory that poured from his soul. The two ideas that Angelou planted for growth in his brain couldn’t have been more relevant to me than if I’d heard her say them to me herself. As far as I am concerned, I think I did hear her speak on both counts, channeled in full energy by his voice calling on hers:

“Baby, we find our path by walking it.”

“Sometimes rejection is redirection.”

If you think those are just broad, sweeping, generic statements of advice from the elevated dais, stop here and go read someone else’s reflection, or perhaps today’s stock market results. On the other hand, if you’re like me, copy those words onto a Post-it and put them in plain sight for the next decade or so. When Maya speaks, it’s a good idea to listen. Tavis did, and his life was reinvented.

I write a lot on this blog and in my books about resilience and reinvention, the lifeblood of innovation. When I heard Smiley put the notion of self-motivation in so few words from Angelou, I was heartened, invigorated, and inspired. She got it. He got it. I wish everyone could get it. And still, transferring the words of others into action is immensely difficult, filled with pain, buried in setbacks, and only on the most wondrous of occasions celebrated in brief victories.

Smiley was adrift after losing his election and identity in public service. He sat stunned and stared at the failed image of himself. He wanted desperately to reinvent, but had no idea how. He was frozen. Angelou saw through him to his core. “Baby, we find our path by walking it.” If it had been a Nike commercial saying “Just do it,” it couldn’t have been clearer advice: Just do something. Do anything that matters to you. Find thought in action, not in dire contemplation. Whatever you do is better than nothing, and it will inevitably lead somewhere. Sometimes I tell people to form a plan—a conceptual roadmap of any kind—not because you will follow the path from here to there, but because if you start with a map, you will go somewhere, and that has to be better than nowhere. You won’t connect the dots—the dots will connect themselves in ways you never could have imagined. Yes, you find your path by walking it. Get busy. The rest will be discovered when you least expect it.

Smiley was crushed because the electorate said no to him. He wanted to serve, but the voters said “no thanks.” Again Angelou saw motivation in the otherwise unfortunate result. “Sometimes rejection is redirection.” If the voting public did not wish to recognize Smiley as an elected official, was that the only way he could realize his dreams? Obviously not, because a few years later Angelou appeared as a guest on Smiley’s national PBS talk show. How about that? From apartment eviction to the interviewer’s chair in so little time you almost think he made the whole thing up. He didn’t. He listened. He accepted “no” as meaning “not now, not here.” Then he went another way, and his dreams were realized beyond all imagination. Can it happen to you? Yes, if you see the negative before you as motivation to go another way. That new way might be a million times more fulfilling than what you thought was your only way. We have no only way, just opportunity to be who we need to be in an as-yet undiscovered path.

Both of these precepts have been guiding lights in my own life, yet until I heard Tavis channel Maya in an unplanned walk by the stage where he happened to be speaking when I was on my way to another place, I wasn’t aware how much I shared with so many others there on the grass listening intently to every word. Maybe we are more similar than different. Maybe we all do share the same dreams of enrichment and fulfillment. Maybe if we all listen to each other a little more closely, we can help each other get from the stagnant to the unstoppable. To quote another dreamer, “Imagine.”

I sure do love the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. I can’t wait until my walking path takes me back there next year for another dose of redirection. See you under the tents. I’ll be the guy taking copious notes, or maybe talking ideas if you start the conversation.

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Words, Words, Words… and Questions

My annual visit to the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books last month was as uplifting and thought-provoking as ever.  Any celebration of the written word and reading will always be close to my heart, and this may be the one time of year in Southern California where I am happy to see lines of cars backed up into the streets waiting for parking spots.  When tremendous crowds of readers and endless booths of authors come out in full force on a sunny L.A. weekend, it just feels good.  It also makes me wonder even more what age-old publishing is destined to become as technological change accompanies us deeper into the 21st century.

It really is hard to assess whether this is the best or worst of times for writers — perhaps in the true spirit of Dickens, it is both.  While it is heartening to see so many authors in person signing their tried-and-true bound paper volumes, there is little question that electronic publishing continues to shake the traditional publishing industry to its core.  Recent contention in pricing models has even brought the Justice Department to bear, arguing there may have been collusion among a number of companies that brought forth an agency publishing model to combat aggressive online discounting in the well-known wholesale-retail model.  Setting aside legal resolution of potential antitrust issues, the question in my mind for authors trying to make a living at their craft centers around price elasticity.  If lower electronic prices really will mean significantly more unit sales at higher royalty rates for a new wave of authors, the profession of writing can flourish.  On the other hand, if the product of writing becomes commoditized to a level where customer expectations of price points descend to micropayments — at the same time market fragmentation approaches chaos with a flood of unrestricted product — too few of these new authors will have the chance to quit their day jobs.  There are clearly two sides to this argument, and I am not sure any of us can predict how increased democratization of publishing will resolve itself economically.

Of course lower prices and more abundant offerings mean virtually unlimited choice at potentially impulse price levels for customers, which from the consumer standpoint is hard to contest as a negative.  There would seem little doubt this should be the absolute best of times for readers, given the astonishing amount of content so readily available in digital form, so much of it free, even legally so.  If the public turnout for events like the L.A. Times Festival of Books reflects continued devotion to the written word in whatever form it is delivered, there is reason to be optimistic — but again, I wonder.  Focused reading is challenging in a Twitter world that offers so many distractions and immense pressure on time.  A recent study highlighted in a Wall Street Journal column by Melinda Beck (“What Cocktail Parties Teach Us“) adds more fuel to the debate over just how good our brains are at handling distractions while attempting to encode information — in other words, can we really multitask?  This is an argument not likely to be resolved anytime soon, but it reinforces the notion that reading requires commitment, and if we allow that commitment to become a luxury, the best of times for readers is not necessarily a given.

An additional question then remains: If there is abundance of content and almost no impediments to publishing for virtually anyone with a keyboard, are we trending toward a more literate global community, or one that is so hard to comprehend it is more overwhelming than instructive?  To the extent that the availability of text continues to compound at exponential levels, the expanding online solution I keep encountering is curation.  While any magnificent library can be well served by organization and editorial review, I wonder if any attempt to curate the internet however noble can be successful.  We know the internet is a place that does not seek to be managed, yet browsing unending digital archives is anything but the pleasant experience we enjoy browsing analog book jackets in a local bookstore.  In the same way that good editing can help focus writing, good curation can help direct us to relevant work we might not otherwise discover before we exhaust ourselves digging into rabbit holes.  The key to successful curation requires the opening of doors we might not otherwise find, while not closing those we would nonetheless appreciate.  Curation is no small trick; it is an evolving art, and as billions more words find their way onto servers, leaving their discovery to search-engine optimization seems too limiting an approach to identifying relevancy.

One of the most interesting panels I attended at this year’s festival was a discussion moderated by L.A. Times Book Critic David Ulin on Narrative in the Digital Age.  This panel included editors from great new sites I was delighted to discover like Byliner, The Atavist, and Grantland.  These sites celebrate long-form writing, in many cases exploring the notion of stories that are too long for traditional magazine articles but not quite approaching the word count of standalone book manuscripts.  Each site offers an entrepreneurial approach to building new businesses where old-school approaches are collapsing, allowing new sources of income for writers who might not attract enough visibility on their own.  Whether these new businesses will succeed at scale is anybody’s guess, but the courage to explore real-world transaction models where too many web surfers have come to believe they needn’t have to pay for the time and expertise of an author’s passion is truly admirable.

So many written words, so much opportunity, so little clarity — no writer or reader will be left untouched by the digital shift.  At first blush it would seem that removal of barriers to entry in electronic publishing is tantamount to the elimination of constraints on distribution, but as long as visibility remains critical to sampling, that is not necessarily the case.  Breaking through the noise in any competitive environment will always be a challenge, and commercial media will continue to walk the line of art and enterprise.  It certainly can be argued that the written word is different from other stuff we lend or sell; it is our precious connection to the past and the breadcrumbs we are laying for the future.  If you get the chance to visit a book fair or take your kids to one, see if any of these questions catch your fancy.  Better yet, just pick up a book and read!

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The Ins and Outs of Yahoo!

Shortly after it was announced that Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz was departing, the always funny Andy Borowitz tweeted:

“The CEO of Yahoo just resigned. I had never heard of her so I Googled her.”

What makes any great comic funny is the truth underlying a punchline.  I wonder if Andy knew just how close he got on this one, which was reported by the Los Angeles Times.  What Andy points to in far fewer words than I will use is precisely the problem of what went wrong at Yahoo.  Yahoo was one of the three great search engines still standing on the web as late as 2009, in fact it was #2 behind Google and ahead of Bing (a.k.a. Microsoft).  Search was in Yahoo’s DNA, it was a core competency, Yahoo was very good at Search and a tremendous amount of self-selected traffic still flowed through Yahoo Search (Microsoft noticed this, too).

Remember that Yahoo bought Overture in 2003, the pioneer of text-link keyword advertising, and honed paid search advertising as mainstream before Google took it to perfection.  Remember also that Yahoo helped put Google on the map when for a long period of time it outsourced Search to Google in exchange for “Powered By” credit and revenue sharing — a business development deal it later regretted because that little “Powered By” logo pretty much put the Google brand on the global map.  At the end of that deal in 2004, Yahoo took Search back and went on to be a respectable competitor to Google.  Sure its Panama search ad buying system upgrade was a little late to market, but it was also very good.

I have great misgivings about the notion of Monday morning quarterbacking any fellow CEO’s performance, since no one on the outside of any problem ever has enough detail or information to make a well-reasoned assessment of someone else’s decision-making. In the case of Yahoo, I offer this personal observation only for the lessons that I believe need to be evangelized.

Early in her tenure, Carol Bartz made a decision to outsource Search and the text ad auction platform to Microsoft. Her rationale seemed to make sense in the savings she would achieve, but that presumed there was no growth left in Search, which had become dominated by Google to the tune of 65% market share, the remaining share going to Yahoo and Bing.  We all know that Microsoft was spending heavily to gain share, up to and including offering to buy Yahoo for more than $44B.  This post is not about that decision, nor does it have anything to do with the circumstances or theatrics of Bartz’s departure.  It has to do with one and only one thing, my own opinion that the decision for Yahoo to exit Search was not a good decision.  Here is why:

In any company, you strike a balance between what you build and what you buy.  Every senior executive and management team struggles with this every day.  No company — not one of the Fortune 500 companies, not the one person startup in your garage — has all the resources to do everything it wants to do or needs to do.  Management must make tradeoffs, sometimes hourly.  Talent is not unlimited, access to capital is not unlimited, time is anything but unlimited.  Management has to decide what it will build and what it will buy.  Will a company hire talent, buy another company, or outsource a task?  These questions never go away, thus management always needs a framework for making these decisions without guesswork or emotion.  Here in a nutshell is that framework:

You in-source that which is strategic — that which is vital and essential and defining to a company’s success in the landscape of its peers.

You outsource that which is tactical — that which is non-essential to the company’s definition in its chosen competitive space

Let’ start with the basics: an intellectual property company — whether technology based, media based, or design based — is a creative company.  That means success begins with an assessment of one’s unique core competency, and that informs leadership through product strategy, not structural adjustment.  Applying unique core competency to product vision drives innovation, forcing a company to determine how it will always be as good as or better than its peer group or competitive circle.   Creative destruction — the continual reinvention of a product or service through ceaseless innovation — begins with the decision not to position one’s output as a commodity, where price rather than differentiation calls the shots.

When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, he applied a product vision to absolutely embrace the internet through leapfrog design, which was exactly the right move at the right time.  When Eisner and Wells took over management at Disney in 1984 when it was on the verge of a breakup, they applied a product vision to reinvent the company’s product lines through best in class storytelling, merchandising, and delivery mechanisms.  When Jack Welch took over General Electric in 1981 and decided he wanted to exit small appliances, he applied a product vision to become a market leader in industry leading medical equipment and aircraft engines.  In all three cases, it was product strategy — knowing what to keep, knowing what to dump, and knowing what to pioneer — that led to unparalleled success.  They did not outsource their winning moves, they owned them.

The turnaround at Yahoo after the refusal of the Microsoft buyout offer was positioned broadly as structural adjustment.  I am sure there were inefficiencies at Yahoo like there are in any big company, but if you solved all those and added no product vision, it really didn’t matter what you solved.  You would have a more efficient machine that produced less visionary work.  That is not a growth company with promise.  It is a factory.  A factory is not a creative company, it is a factory.

For any “portal” platform, Search is not tactical, it is strategic.  I have heard the argument against this for ten years and it just wrong.  How do I know that?  Look at Google.  Search is their core competency, it is their DNA.  So if Search is strategic for Google and you are competing against them, then how is it tactical?  You may choose to decide you can’t compete with them, which is fine, but if Yahoo was not competing with Google, then who was their competition?  Content companies with big editorial and production costs?  Ad networks?  Telecom?  The problem for the Yahoo employees has been that they were never sure, and the company’s valuation is a reflection of that ambiguity.

Imagine that instead of agreeing to the Microsoft partnership, Yahoo had fought with every fiber of its creativity and gained 3 or 4 points of market share from Google on product respect recognized by the public.  Imagine instead of the mass media branding campaign they did two years ago if they had put all of that money into engineering talent and led a battle cry inside the company to take Search share from Google by improving their algorithms, relevancy correlations, and keyword auction technology while mobile was still nascent.  Would the street have valued that commitment and its promise over the one time benefit of cost cutting and the ten-year forecast baked into their financials of the low delta Microsoft contribution?  Would the employees have given everything they had for the pride of winning, not to mention the potential payoff in their stock options?  Was the Search game so over in 2009, just 15 years into the commercial internet, that walking away from Search when you were still positioned as a top 3 player made sense?

And if you were going to exit Search, where was the company’s core creative focus to be redirected?  Long ago, Tandy got out of leather goods to become Radio Shack, a bold move for its time, but one with a rallying cry.  Yahoo got out of Search, so that people today ask, “What is Yahoo?”

Simple lessons replayed:

In-source that which is strategic, outsource that which is tactical. 

If you exit a strategic line of business, you better have a better one to champion as its replacement. 

A technology company is a creative company.

Creative people have a dire need to build that which is great.  That is what they do.  That is how innovation happens.  Creative destruction is how value creation in legendary companies is sustained.

Yahoo may or may not address this on the rebound, but all of us should take the opportunity to ditch the hyperbole and internalize the basics of identifying and sustaining core competencies that are lasting and cherished.  A brand is a promise.  That promise is delivered not by what you rent, but by what you own.