Sales Rep? You might enjoy this one as well.
The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition -- September 21, 1998
Manager's Journal
Has the Bull Market Peaked?
By RICH KARLGAARD
The most powerful man on the planet mass-manufactures what Mark
Twain once called "stretchers"--lies told without so much as a blink, a
squint, or a dew drop of sweat on the upper lip. You have to hand it to Bill
Clinton. Until his famous lower lip got the yips a few weeks ago, he was a
master of bull.
This is no puritanical tirade against lying; a little bull never hurt anyone. Bull
is the glue of marriages, the lubricant of social interaction, a credit line in
commerce. Imagine an entrepreneur or a salesman heading out on a
Monday morning without a bagful of bull. Economic life as we know it
would suffocate.
The entire essence--indeed, the life
force--of any entrepreneur is the ability to
look a patron in the eye and sling it high and
fast. A hypothetical example: "Guppy
Capital just wrote a check for $2 million.
I'm sold out, John. The train is leaving the
station, man!" When it's apparent that the
raw baloney has been swallowed, the next
thing you see is our happy entrepreneur
skipping down the street to Guppy Capital.
There he declares: "Bob, John at Seed
Corn Ventures just hopped aboard. I just
might be able to give Guppy a small piece of it. But I need your check
today."
Such acts of high-wire hogwash are an American hallmark. Our applause
for the guy who beats truth to the finish line goes a long way in explaining
why Americans stand supreme in the world economy. It's in the American
DNA to cheer for Huck Finn.
Mr. Clinton's great political gift is that he knows this. Or knew, anyway.
Some time ago, our president forgot his limits. Bull, after all, is just a credit
line. The immutable law of bull is that the bullslinger always must deliver
more than he promised, or risk drowning in his own poop.
The digital age pours out conflicting messages about the proper use of bull.
On the one hand, the velocity of change would seem to favor its greater
use, especially in business. On the other hand, the Internet, by putting vast
quantities of information out into the open, has the potential to act as the
world's biggest bull detector.
Is bull getting worse in the age of microchips and Clinton? I posed the
question to several headhunters, venture capitalists and money managers.
Here is what they had to say:
Yes, bull is on the rise. "There has always been b.s. in business,"
says Silicon Valley investor Roger McNamee. "But in the past you
could filter it. . . . These days you can look a guy straight in the eye
and he may still tell you something he knows isn't true. Half the time,
he knows that you know it isn't true. So you confront him with it,
and without the slightest trace of irony he says, 'What's your
problem, man?' It isn't just inexperienced entrepreneurs doing this,
but officers of public companies."
Product bull is good bull. Our experts agree that while lying
outright is a no-no, verbal whiffle balls about your products are
encouraged, especially in software. "The job of every new software
company is to raise money, declare victory, and build a product . . .
in that order," says venture capitalist Ann Winblad. She insists this
approach is necessary because software is a momentum game. First
movers can parlay their advantages into an 85% market share. No
software CEO will ever get tossed out of the game for upstaging a
competitor's product launch with a hastily written midnight
"vaporware" announcement of his own.
The proof that software product malarkey works is its corollary: the
decline of Mormon-led software companies. A decade ago WordPerfect
and Novell were riding high. Not so today. The honest Mormons were
buried by bull. Novell is rebounding, but only because it picked as its new
CEO a barker of the modern bent: Eric Schmidt, the brains who launched
Sun's Java--the most-hyped new software in years.
Pump it and dump it. Russ Irwin, a venture capitalist at
Convergence Partners, admits his industry has changed. "We don't
build [companies] to last anymore. We build to sell." Fast megahits
like WebTV, Yahoo! and Amazon.com have ballooned
expectations. Every entrepreneur flush with seed capital thinks:
Jeez, only 18 months more of this death march and an IPO--then
I'm outta here! Or, since IPOs are down, pump it and dump it! Sell
to Intel in nine months for $200 million.
Résumé stuffing. The granddaddy of business fudges is lying about
one's past accomplishments. Mike Moritz, the venture capitalist
who funded Yahoo!, moans that he sees résumés from 24-year olds
who claim they "grew the company" from zero to $500 million at
their last job. "What, all by themselves? Whenever I see that
phrase--'grew the company'--I know it's pure fandango," says Mr.
Moritz.
Lies about extraprofessional activities are frequent, too. The late Steve
Ross of Time-Warner told friends he had played in the National Football
League. Perhaps sensitive to such an overreach, Steve Florio, the Conde
Nast publisher, claimed to have been a mere minor league catcher. Larry
Lawrence, the late Clinton Administration ambassador to Switzerland, lied
about being a World War II hero. He was buried in Arlington National
Cemetary in 1995 but was disinterred and moved two years later when
the truth was discovered.
A sampling of bogus claims I've seen during my tenure with three business
magazines: (1) Advanced degrees, always in macho subjects from top
universities. We nabbed a big-league tech CEO for falsely claiming to have
a master's degree in theoretical physics from the University of Chicago. (2)
Military heroics, e.g., "flew Marine fighter jets" or "took shrapnel in the
neck from jumping on a live grenade to save a buddy's life." (3) Athletic
derring-do; see Messrs. Ross and Florio, above. Among savvy
bullslingers, though, pro sports are out. Too easy to get caught. In are
esoteric claims of running cross-country with Steve Prefontaine at the
University of Oregon in the 1970s, or of women who say they climbed
K2.
Such McGwirian swats of bull entertain and delight. But, alas, more
common are the ordinary Punch-and-Judy hitters of career bull, who slap
out Résumé Enhancers like so many Texas League bloopers. Any kid
applying to Harvard learns the trick in high school. You stop saying your
parents shipped you and your loutish friends off to South America for a
summer because they couldn't stand the sight of you. You learn to twist it,
buff it up: You led an expedition of National Merit Scholars up Mt.
Aconcagua.
Resume Enhancement is way, way up. Mr. Irwin says every Israeli
entrepreneur he meets insists he was a commando or paratrooper. "That's
a hard one to sift through. Military service is mandatory in Israel."
It certainly seems as if we're drowning in bull. But one senses that in this
Clinton era, we have reached a high tide that will soon start to recede. The
First Bullslinger himself is trapped, perhaps fatally, in his own brown
quicksand. The supreme irony, of course, is that the best bull cleanser of
all is the Internet itself, as Mr. Clinton surely learned when the Starr report
hit the Web. The gossipy village nature of the Web, combined with its
bottomless databases and blistering fast search tools, means that airy-fairy
floaters get shot down faster than before. Shaded truths can't be painted
away. "Inoperative statements" can't be erased. They remain frozen in
somebody's server.
As in politics, so also in business. Internet outfits that only weeks ago
asserted that price/click outweighed price/earnings as a valuation
benchmark now lay stunned and flattened. A few weeks ago I attended an
event where a CEO of an Internet startup blew hot air from the podium
about her role as product inventor at her previous employer. The next day
my e-mail box was jammed with letters from other attendees who
expressed grave doubt about her claims. The letters were noted and
forwarded into the ether at light speed, multiplying throughout the week.
The truth was getting out and, last seen, this CEO's bull was beating a
retreat.
Mr. Karlgaard is publisher of Forbes.
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