Stuff Matters: Genius, Risk and the Secret of Capitalism. Harry Bingham
making friends and working for others. A shyness over self-promotion is part of the complex set of mental tools and dispositions that guided our ancestors through that maze.
That was then, however. In today’s world, where Tom has a few million potential punters to part from their cash, the ancestral safety-check has pretty much stopped working. If a sales-woman allows her ‘sales call reluctance’ to get the better of her, then she’ll either move to a more congenial job – or be fired – or buy some books which will teach her, step-by-step, how to overcome her instinctive mental-emotional circuitry.
Nor is it just her emotions that she’ll be learning to deal with. She’ll be learning to manipulate ours as well. For example, you know those little consumer competitions where you have to write in ‘just 15 words or less why you love’ a particular product? They feel like a throwback to some older, gentler world of consumer marketing, an anachronism. Yet research shows that if you can get someone to write about their love for (let’s say) a breakfast cereal, then their resulting purchase behaviour will reflect that ‘love’, no matter whether or not they believed what they wrote when they wrote it. The act of writing itself cements a relationship that might not even have existed beforehand. That’s why those contests endure.
Or why is it that a competent car salesman will seek to avoid discussion of all those optional extras that come when you’re buying a car (paint finishes, alloys, extended warranties, and the like)? Surely, he should want us to expand our shopping lists. Again, however, consumer research indicates that if you introduce these extras too early, they become confusing – and the sale is less likely to happen. Once the sale is agreed, however, all those options come straight back onto the table. They’re no longer confusing. They’re complementary to the decision that’s just been made; they confirm and complete it.
The list of such sales tricks is ever-growing and many of them are now widely known. We know what a supermarket is doing when it pumps fresh bread smells out around the bakery, or positions the premium variants of a particular product at eye-level, or packages its value brands in a way deliberately designed to look cheap and unappealing. On the other hand, though we know these things, we are still influenced by them. Our savannah-designed brain circuity doesn’t rewire itself simply because we’re aware of some of its fallibilities.
If modern consumer marketing can sometimes come to seem like scientifically developed mind (and wallet) manipulation, it’s also too simple merely to blame the seller. As I read Tom’s memoir of his time at the rough edge of sales, it became clear that at its most elemental, sales is a game played out between buyer and seller, a kind of seduction. It’s not that the buyer has no interest at all. If they didn’t, they’d simply hang up. There wouldn’t be a sales tactic that could influence them to buy. But each buyer also has an obstacle, a resistance to that sale. The salesman’s task is to find that resistance and overcome it. Yuri liked to be shouted at, so Tom shouted. The elderly woman wanted a friend, so Tom became her friend. The bargain hunter wanted a bargain, so Tom transformed his sales patter into a dumb story about a once in a lifetime bargain. And so on. Each form of resistance met with Tom’s inimitable response.
I don’t even think that those lured into buying necessarily believed Tom. Did that old lady believe Tom was nattering away to her about fox-hunting because he really cared about her and her interests? Almost certainly not. From the way Tom reports the conversation, she was elderly and lonely but of perfectly sound mind. In effect, she was allowing Tom to talk her into making an investment (the thing that mattered most to him), because he was giving her the thing that mattered most to her. It was a tit-for-tat bargain, where the rules were understood by both sides.
Viewed like this, the artificiality of Tom’s sales techniques didn’t much signify. For sure, that elderly lady would have preferred a genuine friend to a phoney one, but a phoney one was better than no friend at all. Yuri would probably have liked being shouted at in any context, but if all that was on offer was being shouted at in a way likely to cost him several thousand euros, well, heck, he’d take whatever was going.
Just to be clear, I’m not suggesting that this collusion between buyer and seller made Tom’s activities ethical. They were nothing of the sort. Coke-dealing also works off collusion between buyer and seller. So does prostitution, illegal gambling, backstreet abortions, and plenty else. From a business perspective, though, the real problem is the essentially ephemeral nature of any scam. The businesses that Tom worked for and created so outraged the responsible authorities that they were certain to act and act aggressively. No successful business can operate unless it’s animated by a strong sales impulse, but if that sales impulse is permitted to run riot, it’ll end up throttling the business.
The way that successful entrepreneurs resolve this paradox is with integrity. Nearly all the businesspeople I spoke to talked unprompted of the importance of straight-dealing, of decency, of doing things right. For a fair while, I simply didn’t understand why this theme should recur. I hadn’t been accusing my interviewees of anything. Why were they so keen to defend themselves? When I met Tom and read his account of his life on the dark side, I understood. All business people are caught in a tug of war. On one side lies the lure of the easy sale, the slick deception, the deliberate manipulation of the buyer. Quick sales and fast profits are the potential reward. On the other side lies integrity: the desire to build a business that buyers will respect and return to; a business whose sales tactics are professional and goal-directed, but not abusive; a business that largely respects the unwritten rules of our savannah-society. More than the rest of us, entrepreneurs are subject to temptation and, more than the rest of us, entrepreneurs need to guard against that temptation by disciplining themselves to think, be, and act in an upright way. That’s not to say that all businesspeople always get it right. They clearly don’t. But few businesses of any size or duration have got where they’ve got without at least some attempt to do things right.
Risk-taking, drive, and the ability to persuade: these three traits lie at the heart of the entrepreneurial instinct, a kind of holy trinity of business. But the trinity would be radically incomplete without the joker, the maverick, the upsetter of norms – the entrepreneur’s appetite for invention. It’s to that restless and renewing talent we turn next.
Hell, there are no rules here – we’re trying to accomplish something.
– THOMAS EDISON
Entrepreneurs are, by and large, straightforward people. Whereas with the large companies I have spoken to there has been a certain amount of bureaucracy involved in securing an interview, entrepreneurs did not mess about, even if it was to say no.
In thinking about my chapter on invention, however, I found myself stumped. It wasn’t that people were refusing to talk to me; it was more that I was uncertain who to ask. I wanted to find inventor-entrepreneurs; people who could spout patents and new technologies and visions of the future and have utterly novel ways of attacking old problems, not simply tweaking existing designs to make them work better. Furthermore, I wanted companies that were still in start-up mode. Although there are dozens of big, inventive technology companies who’d have been happy to show me around, they have existing technologies to trade off, existing brands and dominant market positions. I wanted to talk to the people who had started out with an idea and nothing else. No money, no market position, no brand, no sales force. But how was I to find such people?
Then I realized I was being a twit. I live close to Oxford, home to one of the world’s great universities and the hub for scores of high-tech businesses. Almost certainly the people I wanted to meet were living right on my doorstep and before long I found exactly what I was looking for. An Oxfordshire-based company, Reaction Engines Ltd is a young start-up that boasts a small but select group of engineers and technologists. Their website baldly summarizes the corporate mission: ‘to design and develop advanced space transport and propulsion systems’.
Now, I feel my duty to my readers very keenly. Rocket scientists aren’t exactly two a penny, even in Oxfordshire, but at the same time I wasn’t going to be happy with a common