Every year at our annual meeting, I announce a word that I want to characterize our company for the upcoming year.
One year it was “outside.” I don’t know about your company, but at ours, it is too easy to start believing that what happens within our four walls is reality. Reality, of course, is what happens outside our four walls.
Another year it was “curiosity.” To my mind, it’s the antonym of complacency.
This year I picked two words, “stupidity” and “fear.”
We have built a profitable, well-respected little company. If we aren’t careful, we may start to think we’re smart. And if we ever start thinking we’re smart, we might get a little cocky about it.
But we’re not smart. And if anyone here starts to think we are, I’ve got a litany of mistakes we’ve made—most of which can be traced back to me—to remind them that, at the top at least, we’re not very smart at all. In fact, I can report to you with confidence that stupidity is pervasive throughout our company. In fact, I would list it as one of our major assets.
What’s the danger in admitting that we might know what we’re doing? For one thing, we might begin to believe that our competitors don’t. Every time a new magazine pops up, I ask what its publishers know that we don’t, what they are doing that we aren’t, and why clients might choose them and not us. We start out with the premise that they are smart, and we are not. As a result, most of what we know we’ve learned from our competitors.
For another thing, we might start to believe that our customers need us. In business, it’s safer to assume nobody needs anybody. Our readers are busy people, and busy people already have too much to read. Advertisers have a hundred choices, and we’re only one of them. So we have to work hard for every precious minute we gain from a reader and for every precious dollar we get from an advertiser.
Lastly, we might begin to be horrified by our own mistakes. That might lead us to stop making mistakes. The only way to stop making mistakes is to stop doing anything remotely risky. But we like risk. We’ve built our company on risk. Only by staying stupid enough to keep making mistakes will our company grow.
We’re not only stupid, but we’re scared. To my mind, there is unhealthy fear, and there is healthy fear. Unhealthy fear paralyzes. Fear of making a mistake stops a person or a company from taking risks. In a company where stupidity is pervasive, there’s not much chance of that.
But the fear that someone, somewhere, somehow is gaining on us—that’s healthy fear. Our company operates in a media world where the giants of old—the metro and national newspapers, the major television networks, the radio conglomerates—are crumbling before our eyes. In this kind of topsy-turvy world, where Google strides the earth like a colossus one year and people are talking about its imminent demise the next, our little company is like an ant colony in Manhattan. The next street-sweeper could be the agent of our apocalypse.
Fear motivates us to know our business better and deeper, to engage our readers more richly and more usefully, and to serve our clients with an ever-higher level of performance.
Success is a drug. It is known to inflate egos, create arrogance, diminish accountability, and wreak havoc on customer relations. The only known antidote is humility. Admitting our stupidity and our fear is our way of reminding ourselves that our humility is well-earned.
