Business Darwinism and the will to survive

A while back, Charlie Green over at Trusted Advisor did an interesting riff called Built to Last - Not.

Given that title, it's not surprising that Charlie argues that being built to last doesn't really have all that much meaning anymore.

The continued existence of a particular corporate organization is a pretty un-inspiring goal, when you think of it...The point is not to last. The point is to do great things for all your constituents. Where continued existence helps, great. Otherwise, standing water stagnates. The visionary thing works; but these days, the vision had better be to change, morph, grow, evolve, turnover, shift.

This set off a little comment storm in which people argued the point back and forth for a bit. (Take a look for yourself. Just remember to come back here.)

For me the bottom line is agreement with Charlie that just surviving is not much of a goal in and of itself. I did a lot of time (nearly 10 years, in fact) in a software company that really only excelled at one thing: survival.

Sure, we had brilliant technologists.  Truly brilliant.

And they produced brilliant technology. (Just ask Microsoft, which picked up some of it on the cheap and plunked it in the middle of Windows 3.0, and which copped another idea from us.)

But our sales and marketing never matched the technology, and we never figured out how to exploit what we had.

What we did get very good at was survival.

In the early days, survival meant our charismatic (and downright loony) chairman would fly off and find someone to give us $1M so that we could stay open for another month or two. Even in retrospect, it still amazes me that he was so able to keep geting people to throw good money after bad for so long. (I'm talking years here, and I'm also talking way pre-dot.com spendathon.)

In my catbird seat position as corporate business plan and preso writer, I saw this happen, again and again.

One time I told the chairman that he reminded me of Mighty Mouse. Us employees, I suggested, were like the villagers in Mouseville. We would plea in chorus, "Mighty Mouse, oh save us." And our own personal MM would leap up, singing, "Here I come, to save the day."

Since my pal hadn't grown up in the States, he had no idea who Mighty Mouse was - the analogy definitely lost something in the translation - but our ability to survive without bringing in much revenue most quarters was phenomenal. Cartoon-like, as it were.

Eventually, even our laissez faire investors had had enough, and they sent in a turnaround guy.

We did turnaround, but by the time we turned around and looked, the investors had, for the most part, zipped their pocket books closed.

We were on our own.

We got clean and sober and managed to boot-strap ourselves into becoming marginally profitable.

But we never, ever, ever got enough energy going to do more than eke out an existence.

One difference in the company, however, was that we no longer relied on one individual's ability to gull investors for our survival.

No, it was the entire focus of everyone, from receptionist to president, and we all knew the drill.

Some of us knew it better than others.

I was one of those who had to sit down with our finance guy every month and figure out who to pay and who to stall. I was also second on the list of those who wouldn't get paid if we missed payroll (which, fortunately, never happened).

We did anything and everything we could to get the deal, make the sale, please the customer. It didn't matter if the big deal ended up costing us in the long run, as long as the short run income let us survive another quarter.

This went on for years.

This got tiring.

This I learned: you can tread water for a whole long time.

And that's what we did. But what happens when you tread water is that your arms get tired. You lose the ability to start stroking toward shore. You're just there, bobbing along, taking an occasional gulp of seawater and hoping that somebody will come and reach an oar out to you.

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This post was triggered when I read John O'Leary's current post over on Tom Peter's, where he has resurrected a Fast Company article by Adam Hanft on The Death of Corporate Permanence. I've spent my career learning up close and personal about Business Darwinism. Most places I've worked are no longer around, but in no case did they disappear over night. Maybe in the grand scheme of things few if any companies will be built to last.  But it's amazing just how long the ones that are so unbuilt to last can hang on if their only goal is survival.

More on corporate permanence and impermanence to follow....