Once upon a time, business journalism was meaty. It had gusto, dealt with serious topics, and was centered on reality, not social justice. Those days are long gone, and most of the serious journalism went away after social media conquered journalism in the 2010s.
I just want to cite a few memorable articles. This will be very short.
Cabletron the Mighty (Impatient)
First up is Cabletron, and this piece in Inc. magazine from 1991. Some juicy quotes:
Cabletron's turnover is already worrisome. Last year the company fired more than 10% of its white-collar employees. Thirty percent of outside salespeople don't make it through the first 90 days; another 40% are gone within six months. Last summer Benson joined 40 employees for a Sunday boat trip. Afterward he ordered two of them fired immediately. One had not even started yet. "I hated him," says Benson, who was eventually persuaded to give the new hire a chance. At sales meetings, reports Kenneth Levine, it's standard to conduct private polls on who will go next.
I recall reading somewhere that all of their meetings were stand up only, to save money and time. I guess that's how you have to do it if you don't have meeting rooms:
It's a good thing too, because there wouldn't be anyplace for them to congregate. In all 126,000 square feet of Cabletron's headquarters, now in Rochester, N.H., there is not even one meeting room. While that doesn't prevent get-togethers, both Levine and Benson argue that it does keep meetings to an average of 20 minutes or less. Benson once spied an 18-person meeting going on. Storming in, he threatened, "If you people all have the time for this meeting, then I guess I really don't need this many people."
There are stories about tanks, chasing pizza delivery guys, and lots and lots of aggression. The point is not that Cabletron was the acme of computer equipment vendors. The point is that the article was outstanding business journalism. It was something that stood out by itself, even apart from the company that was being covered.
Stewart Brand, Electric Kool-Aid Management Consultant
The author of How Buildings Learn and founder of the WELL and Whole Earth Catalog, later became a management consultant. This Fortune article published October 16, 1995 sort of tells the story:
Says Brand, who often speaks as if he's polishing raw thoughts out loud into his trademark aphorisms: "If I were ever to do an autobiography, which I won't, the title would be Float Upstream. Being a crank is characteristic of my family. Originality on the cheap. You find where the flow is, and go against it. It's a way of feeling alive."
Brand's boredom and curiosity emerged early, propelling him along a life path so nonlinear it seems almost loopy. In 1954-- three years before Jack Kerouac's On the Road was published-- young Stewart, 16, borrowed his parents' car and rambled with high school chums from his hometown of Rockford, Illinois, to northern California to pan for gold. Rockford's nascent beat poet also began wearing a beret around, dismaying his ad-man dad but merely amusing his out-of-the-box mom, a homemaker with a passion for space travel. But he then went preppy, graduating from Phillips Exeter Academy and from Stanford, where he earned a biology degree. Next he plunged into the bohemian New York artist scene, then looped around to join the U.S. Army, where he served at the Pentagon. "It would amuse my New York artist friends no end when I would come in wearing my uniform, take it off, and put on theirs," he says.
Despite having good vibrations about the military, Brand left it after two years to hang out with San Francisco's LSD-popping merrymakers. One night he climbed onto a roof, dropped a restrained half-tab of acid, and saw a stunningly groovy connection between NASA and flower power--an epiphany that moved him to travel coast to coast in a top hat, selling buttons that asked, "Why haven't we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?" Millions soon did, via his next visionary move: the Whole Earth Catalog, whose cover picture of earth from outer space at once celebrated the Apollo program's far-out tools and chided us not to mess up the only planet we've got. The title page famously declared: "We are as gods, and might as well get good at it."
The Portrait on my Office Wall
John Rutledge wrote a column for Forbes. After I read this piece in the December 30, 1996 issue, I tore the page out of the magazine and put it in a plastic page protector up near the front of my day planning notebook. I still have it.
We believe that when someone wants to do repeat business with us it is the highest form of praise. Allowing your opponent in a transaction to walk away with his dignity, his humor and his hearing intact, and with a pretty good deal in his pocket, is the right way to do business.
Jerry and I learned this from our first business partner, V.P. Baker, or "Bake," as he preferred to be called, more than 20 years ago. We met when Bake was already 89 years old, with a career behind him that included being a WWI fighter pilot, a wildcat oilman, a borax prospector, a mule dentist, an orange rancher and a real estate developer. He was a wonderfully principled man. We keep a portrait of him in our conference room to remind us how to behave.
The article then lists eight principles to live by.
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