You can’t outrun your corporate culture. It’s the tip of the spear that leaves a scar. This is a lesson I know but was brought home to me in a bizarre interaction I had with a competitor’s representative this week.
Several weeks ago, I received a call from a young man just beginning his career in my industry. He’s working for a competitor (with an atrocious culture) and got my personal contact information from a friend and former employee (who was fired for lack of ethics), and leveraged that relationship to ask for some time to pick my brain. He mentioned my book, A CEO Only Does Three Things, and I told him that I’d be happy to meet with him after he had read it.
Most of the time this will put a person off and I never have to hear from them again, but this young man did as he was told and promptly asked for a meeting. We scheduled it for this week. When I arrived, he was early, in my lobby, dressed professionally and ready to engage.
I invited him to my personal conference room, signed and gifted a hardback copy of the book, and another book, Authenticity: The Head, Heart and Soul of Selling by my mentor, Ron Willingham. We began to discuss the books at a high level until a knock on the door and his manager appeared from nowhere and joined the meeting.
Then it hit me: this was a sales meeting. These guys knew that I wouldn’t meet with them in their capacities as competitors, but they had been told that I’m someone who invests in others, no matter where they work, and they used that to get an otherwise unattainable meeting.
The manager took over the conversation. He followed no sales process, didn’t allow the young man to get any advice, wanted to talk about product in a first meeting, dropped names from people I know and respect (who know and don’t’ respect him), and barely asked for the business. I was embarrassed for him, and for the younger guy who is learning the wrong lessons so early in his career.
See, I know this company very well. So well, in fact, that if anyone ever applies for a job with my company and has this company on their resume, it’s an automatic decline. The company’s sales tactics are smarmy, no other word for it. They are known to promise anything to get the deal, and then disappear with no accountability on the delivery on those promises. We’ve joked for years that we make a good living keeping their promises to clients we take from them.
The sad thing is this. You only learn the way once. If you learn the wrong way, that becomes the way you think things are done for the rest of your career. Sure, you may make modifications, tweaks, and changes, but the path you think is right is locked into your core beliefs.
The young man had more natural sales ability than the manager did, too. He was engaging, a bit unpolished but so ripe and worthy of someone pouring into him so that he grows in his profession and in his soul. He learned this week that being inauthentic and disingenuous was how you make your way in the world. He walked out of my office with a sense of accomplishment. And he was right, he accomplished his goal, but paid a high price to get there, and it’s a price he’ll probably never know he paid.
“Half of the troubles for this life can be traced to saying ‘yes’ too quickly, and not saying ‘no’ soon enough.”
Josh Billings
Are ya’ll following what is going on at Neuralink? The company has implanted a chip into the brain of a quadriplegic who is now using it to play chess, message friends, and rely less on personal caregivers. The story is heartwarming and you can read the update here.
I was listening to a podcast last week and the host asked the guests if they would get a chip implant if it was safe. The question hit me because I never considered it as a question. Of course you would get a chip implant if it meant being smarter and more able than you were before. I brought the question to my family and a huge discussion ensued.
My son said he would get one but only for things like video games and using AI to write his papers. My daughter said the same thing, she’d like to have it as an enhancement to things she does online. My wife was entirely against it, feeling that it violated the boundaries between man and machine.
What say you? These chips are coming, will you take one when it’s offered to you?
“Be careful who you trust. Salt looks just like sugar until you taste it.”
—Trey Taylor
I’ve never been long on Tim Cook. Apple needed a bridge figure to get between Jobs and the next big thing. Instead it got good old steady Tim Cook. When it became clear that Cook was going to be the long-term head of Apple, the Creative folks hit the door, the engineers took over, and the woke-ists got their say.
As a CEO, Cook gets a C+. He rode the momentum of creating the Mac/Iphone ecosystem, no short feat for sure, but has done nothing but stockpile cash, abandoned the development of core ingredients for the future, launched a movie studio, and failed to introduce a single new product worthy of the name (and yes, the VR headset is included here.)
Now today, Apple announces it’s big news regarding AI … it’s going to use someone else’s. OpenAI and Apple are announcing that ChatGPT is coming to deep integration in the Apple universe. Yep, the same ChatGPT that Microsoft owns so much of and uses itself. Mr. Also Ran has done it again.
Apple had the jump on AI. Siri was a much storied thing, an intelligent assistant who could do tasks for you, simplify your life, and all with the touch of a button on a device you use 762 times a day. (I have a theory that 44% of Siri processing compute is used making excuses as to why she can’t complete the request that I’ve just made, and another 44% is her saying “Hmm, I didn’t get that,” because she doesn’t speak South Georgia English despite Lewis Grizzard’s assertion that “God speaks like we do,” being true.)
It turns out that Apple hasn’t been using the trillions of Siri messages and requests to improve Siri. In fact, there’s question as to whether it was keeping those transactions at all. Then we find out that there isn’t a well-funded AI program at Apple at all, just a project team as an offshoot of a piece of the Siri team. This is the biggest miss in Apple’s history, and the buck stops with Tim. Tim, who’s been invited to strategy meeting after strategy meeting advising him to adopt AI in a big way. How do I know? Because I run a 19 life company and 30% of my week is studying AI and how to use it in my little business. If I know it, Tim Cook should’ve known it and the annoucement that came out today should have been: “We’ve invested $10b in AI over the last 5 years and have the most impressive version of Intelligence this world has ever seen. It’s only available on Apple products, the line starts here and your place in it costs $2k.”
But that’s not what we heard. And what we didn’t hear tells the whole story.
RIP the Gravy Train. Killed by negligence and being over your head, Tim Cook.
I find most great companies find their way to the bottom. Sears had a massive distribution network and customer data on everything people purchased. They did nothing with the data or their network. Wonder how long till Amazon becomes the next Sears?
PS - I had a boss like that kid, he blew every relationship up!