I recently read two automotive industry books, first was Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors, and the second was Driving Honda, Inside the World’s Most Innovative Car Company. Those two companies could not be more unlike wile still being in the same industry. One company (Tesla, if you’re clueless) is driven by a narcistic megalomaniac and the other is driven by a company philosophy. The cars produced by the two companies are equally different: Teslas are all about status and “belonging” to a cult and Hondas are primarily reliable, flexible transportation. One company exists to promote the fame and fortune of its owner, man-boy Elon Musk, and Honda exists “to provide products and services that expand people's dreams and potential.” The difference is apparent, even obvious, in the products, the employees, and the customers.
I committed a fair portion of my working career to manufacturing and, even, a substantial portion of my early audio engineering experience to producing products of my own design . In fact, from my perspective it was hard to beat the best moments I experienced in manufacturing products I cared about. Likewise, I would have rather died in a motorcycle crash at 30 than having gone through my worst half-dozen moments in manufacturing (which all occurred during my 10 years in medical devices). Manufacturing anything is a team effort and that includes designing the equipment necessary for manufacturing. Anyone who claims to have designed a product that was mass produced is a lying sack of crap. From the original concept to the finished product, there are dozens if not hundreds of hands and minds that shape and finish a product into something that is useful, safe, and cost-effective.
Weirdly, there has never been a shortage of people who are willing to do the hard work that is necessary to make and improve a product or service. Usually, those people go unnoticed not just by the public but by the people who have the most to gain from their hard work. Every rich asshole from Henry Ford to Elon Musk has lucked into a few hundred dedicated, talented, hard-working people who foolishly bought into the rich guys’ bullshit and made the lucky idiot rich in spite of himself. I’ve had a ringside seat for a half-dozen of those rags-to-riches lucky business histories. In only one of the lot was the “founder” a critical (or even useful) component in the companies’ success. In most, the founder/founders was/were an impediment that employees had to work around to keep the business alive. In none of the second group of mismanagers were the people who had the most to gain even mildly aware of their good fortune. In that one instance where the founder was a critical component, he was also very aware of his own shortcomings and consistently grateful for the contributions of the people who carried his ass from rags to riches (although he started out pretty rich).
Luck usually has more to do with success than does brilliance, talent, strategy, or even hard work. But yiou’d never get that story from the lucky few who are successful, or at least rarely is that kind of self-critical honesty present. Most “founders” do everything they can to purge their institutions of evidence of their mindless luck as quickly as possible. Some do it ruthlessly and fairly successfully, like Musk and Tesla or Jobs and Apple, and many more do it ham-handedly often killing the golden goose before it is fully hatched. But they all depend nearly totally on being lucky enough to con the right people into committing to what is presented as a “mission” early in the business’ history and doing all of the hard, boring, detail work that is necessary to actual success. Some, like Trump, not only misunderstand how little he contributed to the success of his one-and-only public corporate meltdown but blame the people who did the work for dying on him. Most are like Henry Ford who carefully scraped away all of the evidence of his own good fortune so ruthlessly that he “destroyed” his only son, Edsel, to keep his own competence myth alive. Without the fatal consequences, the same went for Musk and Jobs.
The next time you hear some half-wit babble about his self-made zillionaire status, try to imagine what it would be like to have built something spectacular,—believing your hard work and contributions would result in some kind of recognition and reward—having to listen to a non-contributor brag who ended up on top of the corporate turd-pile purely out of luck and conniving viciousness. It happens more often than not, but the public perception is one more example that “history is written (and advertised) by the winners.”
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