| Not long ago, famed surgeon Ben Carson�religious pundit, and now presidential candidate�made a similar statement when comparing slavery to Obamacare. Carson rather hyperbolically claimed that the Affordable Healthcare Act was �the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery.� I say hyperbolic, because no health care law could possibly compare to the violent rape of enslaved women during slavery, or the kidnapping and forced migration of black bodies. Few remember that it was the Second Middle Passage, the forced migration of slaves from the American South into the even deeper South, that not only broke up enslaved families, but accelerated Andrew Jackson�s battles to lead a Native American genocide through the Indian Removal Act, also known as the Trail of Tears. Call it coded luxury. For now, Tiffany�s customers seem be getting the message. It is not moral�let alone historically accurate�to hijack the ethics of slavery to create a tortured metaphor on personal responsibility. I�m pretty sure Christ did not say, �I was hungry and I started a business. I was naked and I created a fashion line. I was sick and I shook it off.� No, he said those who will inherit the kingdom fed him, clothed, him, visited him, and took him in. Maybe, just maybe, personal responsibility is not what we do for ourselves, but what we do for others. Does following Peters and Waterman�s eight principles guarantee you business success? Almost certainly not. One big problem with their research was that they only looked at successful companies. Knowing that all successful companies have something in common tells us nothing unless we also know that unsuccessful companies lack those things. We might find that all successful business founders displayed an interest in entrepreneurship from an early age, for example, or that they all brush their teeth in the mornings. These things tell us nothing about what differentiates successful companies from unsuccessful ones, and neither do Peters and Waterman�s eight principles. Though we�re unlikely to ever distill success into a neat formula or set of principles, there is an alternative approach, which might bring more promise. Denrell suggests that rather than trying to demystify success, we should spend more time studying failure, which may come down to much more consistent principles. Understanding what not to do, if based on more solid evidence, could be much more useful than trying to imitate high-performing companies. And there does seem to be a move toward understanding failure, at least in the startup world, where failure is seen as almost inevitable, something to be learned from rather than avoided. |
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Keep a civil tongue.