It might make for provocative magazine-cover material, but it’s gimmicky and, worse, misleading. I’m talking about the New Rulez angle that biz pundits flog pretty regularly. The latest: Fortune mag’s July 24 cover story insisting that their erstwhile oracle, the irrepressible Happy Jack Welch, is sooo 2005…or is it ’03?
So, is this a subtle jab at Bidness Week for having signed Jack to a weekly column? No matter, the gist in the Fortune piece is that Jack’s Commandments are as outdated as expired cellphone-service contracts and the only thing that matters is whatever matters now. Huh? Oversimplification, of course, but the whole notion of showing how one set of sound-bite precepts may or may not trump another is nothing more or less than an intellectual exercise. But how much of this stuff can you really apply? Is it really news you can use?
In much of what we try to do in marketing and branding, the rules boil down to two: First, reserve the right to be smarter tomorrow than you are today, and (2) come to grips with the fact that your customers are smarter today than they have ever been. Ever. Once you’ve wrapped your mind around this, much of what you need to do will be clarified. For example, Welch has always been, sensibly, a proponent of size. “It’s great to be big,” he says. “Being big doesn’t mean you have to be slow!” Who can argue? Given the choice between having a big budget or a small one, to do almost anything you can name, you can supersize me anytime. Fortune’s comeback: “Agile is best; being big can bite you.” Since when were these two things mutually exclusive?
Citing overstuffed piñatas like GM, Citigroup (C), and Big Pharma, Fortune’s Betsy Morris notes that technological advances and changing business models negate the power of being big. Really? Welch, and good marketers, always insist on agility over magnitude. The landscape is littered with the remains of big companies who forgot how they got that way and refused to get any smarter than they were back-in-the-day. It’s sort of like the way it is in many sports, especially the contact variety. Being fast, and big, is always better than simply being fast.
Comment Preview