Malcolm Gladwell is an extraordinarily smart and interesting writer. Sadly, I haven't read any of his books (though all are queued up currently). Today I read an article in which he made some pretty bold points.
Gates is the most ruthless capitalist, and then he wakes up one morning and he says, 'enough.' And he steps down, he takes his money, he takes it off the table.
"I firmly believe that 50 years from now, he will be remembered for his charitable work, no one will even remember what Microsoft is.
"And of the great entrepreneurs of this era people will have forgotten Steve Jobs. Who's Steve Jobs again? There will be statues of Gates across the third world.
He points out that the best businessmen are amoral. They are so hopelessly and ruthlessly focused on their enterprise that they shirk much of their responsibility to society. I think this is somewhat of an obvious fact and that entrepreners, even business in general, should be concerned first with their survival. Those such as Bill Gates need not worry anymore, they have made it, and are able to pursue other ventures such as philanthropy. It is well chronicled Steve Job's resistance towards philanthropy and provides an interesting juxtaposition between two great men.
"We venerate entrepreneurs in our culture," said Gladwell. "They are our new prophets. Literally, we worship them. If you read the literature about great entrepreneurs, it is iconography," or "hagiography," he continued.
So do you monkeys think that Steve Jobs will be a footnote in history compared to Bill Gates? Can businessmen be moral leaders as well as innovators?
You should definitely check out Gladwells work. He is an excellent writer.
I do think he is right in saying Gates will be remembered for charity, but every tech nerd will know what he did for business and technology. As for Jobs, he will be remembered as one of the greatest presenters of all time.
There is anew generation of businesses and business leaders who believe in social responsibility. I don't think we can lump all entrepreneurs as amoral. Many have a mission to change the world, through their businesses.
I firmly disagree about people forgetting about Jobs. Always remember that those who are successful always write the history books.Gates will be remembered, but Jobs will be remembered longer. People see Jobs not as a capitalist but an innovator and icon. Gladwell is misguided.
I think this is a very poor statement of a man such as Gladwell who's books such as Outliers I link are pretty interesting.
However, he is absolutely wrong. I know dozen's of amazing business men with many philanthropic desires. To rebut specifically in big tech as well I would just look at Mike Murray (http://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemur) who after having a very successful career in tech went on to co-found Unitus (http://unitus.com/) - a foundation that has helped bring over 15 million individuals out of poverty. Another co-founder of Unitus was one of Bain Capital's top 3 MDs as well.
The impact investing industry is valued at USD $50 Billion currently and has been estimated to grow to $500B over the next 10 years. I worked for a social impact deal focused Investment Bank in India and the individuals involved on all ends of the deals were amazing businessmen with world changing ideas and genuine desire to improve the lives of others. Of course however the definition of "double bottom line investing" is to create a profitable and viable business model that also (sometimes secondly) achieves a social impact as well.
Honestly I could go on for quite a while. Yes many amoral businessmen exist in the world, but the idea that amorality has a strong correlates with business ability and leadership is just wrong to me.
Neither will be remembered.
Lord Lloyd Blankfein and Goldman Sachs will be.
I refuse to recognize the validity of any premise that pronounces the proactive achievement of one's own values by his own independent devices as anything other than the most moral of statement a human being can make. It is not the role of society to impose collective values upon individuals, so long as that person's value does not depend on the disruption of the values of others - anything short of the complete noninterference of a self-sufficient motivation is a form of outright oppression. It denies the rights of the individual and forces them to sacrifice their own interests to the faceless collective in order that they may be moral.
Great men like both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates have no duty to society whatsoever; they earned their fortunes in the private sector by voluntary exchange. Their vast profits were not GIVEN to them by anyone, everything they received was EARNED, and therefore cannot be owed to anyone but themselves.
The fact that Gates became an active philanthropist is perfectly fine; he did so on his own terms and in order to promote his own values, nobody forced him. The fact that Jobs decided otherwise is completely his prerogative and any morality judgement upon this decision is not yours, mine, or Malcolm Gladwell's to make.
That's great point. Morality truly is subjective when you come down to it.
However, for the sake of argument, I'd say most moral bases put a lot of weight behind helping other people, and you get extra points if you seem to put your own benefit aside to do it. If you're going off on your own to start a company you're going to get smacked in the face over and over with rejection, adversity, and whole bunch of other nonsense that a lot of normal people wouldn't put up with.
I think a good psychological way of protecting against all of those personal attacks is to attach yourself to your idea to such an extent where it's the only thing that matters. The idea is so important that its realization would make up for sacrifices you or other people might have to make. I think it's a great example of a mindset where "the ends justify the means".
Malcolm Gladwell is a fucking jackass. Fact.
Whether or not Jobs is a footnote to Gates is irrelevant: Gates won. Why? He was much richer, much longer, bought computers to the masses, and had a satisfying life outside of his work. And he's still here. Jobs was a great man, but 2nd place to a greater one. Both Gates and Jobs took turns ripping each other off, but they both derived their inspiration from the same Xerox prototype...Jobs was just better at manipulating public opinion.
Business skills roughly overlap with politics, and most successful politicians have been successful in business or law. Very few presidents have come from the underclasses, and this last 90 years has seen more than any other rise from very little to the heights of global power. Military, business, law, and public service are the platforms from which politicians usually make their bid. The common denominator is whether they're right for the period of time they're running in.
Could you be more specific about what responsibilities to society business leaders are shirking by committing themselves fully to their business, or why total commitment to a venture would be considered amoral?
What if said business leader was totally immersed in the business of creating a tool that allowed fields such as healthcare, education, energy, transportation, government, philanthropy, and everything else to run 1000x more efficiently than they had before the advent of this tool?
My point is making broad strokes that business leaders' actions are inherently amoral and that they only become moral once they've earned a large enough fortune to "give up" on capitalism is wrong.
What's really funny is that when I went back and re read my post it sounds like I agree with him. haha. I agree 100% with you.
I would think, however, the counterpoint would be that business leaders have a moral responsibility to give back to society because society afforded them the opportunity to succeed in the first place. Without society and the framework provided you would not be where you are. I don't agree with that line of thinking because I don't think society gives two shits as to whether you make it or not and would certainly step on you in a heartbeat if you let it. But that's a similar argument I had with someone in a class.
They actually built their businesses on technologies that had been funded by the government/military, i.e. taxpayers/society, especially in their initial stages, until these technologies became close to commercially viable.
this:
leads to: End of story. This line of thinking has been the standard for captains of industry since well before the formalization of America's Constitution. Somewhere in the last few decades, this idea, this myth, of the "self made person" and the cult of "the rich deserve everything they want" has taken hold. They earned their money, but the systemic platform they used as a springboard is being abused. Look at the infrastructure problems.To be fair, most business titans delved into philanthropy AFTER they made their fortunes, so they could afford to have this view. But compared to many of history, this generation, notably the Koch brothers, is populated with those operating under the premise that they're going to take their billions to the grave with them, and that their wealth, companies, and very lives operate in a total vaccuum from the rest of humanity. Younger and less wealthy (as in everyone on this site) are under a much lesser obligation to 'give back' but this is primarily why banks and bschools like to see charity work on resumes.
It shows that yes, you can make a buttload of money, but there's more to the person than just greed. Greed is good. Charity is good. You need both.
This says nothing about the underclasses. They have to work. Simple as that. Everyone on this site works. We get that. But there are different rules for people at the top of the spectrum. Just look at freedom of speech / slander laws vs the public figure clause in the entertainment law field.
Do you mind elaborating on this with respect to Jobs?
Was under the impression that the Apple I came about when Jobs brokered a transaction with the Byte Shop by selling Woz's design and bootstrapping their company on a short-term credit line. Woz's initial design came from his own mind as an alternative to the prevailing personal computers of the time because the alternatives were too expensive for him in his early 20s.
Which part exactly did the government have its hand in? To which specific technologies are you referring?
Don't care as much about MSFT, but wouldn't mind knowing the answer for them as well.
(Please note: I'm not trying to be contentious. I'm genuinely curious to know.)
Apple I was based on prior scientific advances in computing that were funded by the government. Jobs picked it up from a point at which a lot of the work needed to go from the first large computing rooms to microcomputers had already been done at the taxpayers' dime. They might have altered the original design, but the groundwork was already laid to a great extent so that they had something to alter and didn't start from scratch. So it's not that he didn't benefit from society.
It is the same story with the Internet, which was initially funded by the taxpayer through military spending and on which MSFT's and Apple's business models are based now.
Nothing of what Gates or Jobs have achieved would have been possible if they had to pay for all that scientific research out of their own pockets.
As for Gates, the same holds true. He learned to program on a computing technology developed with taxpayer's money; he also used the computing facilities of the University of Washington, again funded by the taxpayer.
So it's not like we can say that Gates and Jobs started from absolutely nowhere, did it all on their own and society had absolutely no part in that. If you live in a developed society, you never start from point zero and chances are that many things that have already been done and make it easier for you to achieve somethig have been created with public resources.
I'm not downplaying the individual factors that led to the successes of these people, but we can't say that society had no input. Whether they should feel morally obliged to society is an entirely different point, which I'm not discussing here.
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