Poetic Business
Don’t Let Your Startup Be Your Frankenstein
What is the ROI of legacy?
Daring entrepreneurs exploit new technologies to the fullest, overthrowing traditions that get in their way. They force the world to react to their products; often through force of will, birthing, and then defending their innovation until it spreads through society, changing everything, like a drop of red dye in a bathtub.
At the time a novel technology bursts onto the scene, society only asks: “What will this new technology do?” and almost never: “What will it undo?”
But every innovation is a trade-off. Sometimes the cost is outweighed by the benefit, but where that is so, it is only by accident. Even in those cases, the costs are borne unevenly, as are the benefits. As a society, we have convinced ourselves that it is moral to pull white ball after white ball from the technological lottery machine, hoping the red balls either don’t exist or are so remote or so preordained, as to not be worthy of concern.
So what is an entrepreneur to do? At the moment a new modality or technology bursts onto the scene, the dithering entrepreneur will almost certainly fail if she falls into self-doubt, trying to think around corners she cannot comprehend, imagining every possible misuse of her invention, and then only advancing the technology once she has done so.
That’s not how innovation happens, just ask Marie Curie or Alfred Nobel or Bill Gates. Innovation happens because some combination of optimism, stubbornness, and daring defines the entrepreneur’s inward character, and forces her to create something to which the world reacts.
It’s also, sadly, irrelevant to the legacy of the entrepreneur how awful her product may be, so long as she can create a lot of wealth, endowing charities, opera houses, hospitals, and schools.
The Whitewashing of Legacy
That’s what Alfred Nobel did. He saw firsthand how his product defined him when he read his own obituary. When his brother died, the newspaper goofed, believing it was he who had died instead. The newspaper remembered him as a merchant of death, the man who, more than any man before him, made it possible to manufacture death on an unimaginable scale.
Nobel so abhorred his own legacy, that he started the Nobel Prize to change it. By so doing, he made his name synonymous with “peace” and made himself the arbiter of the Nobel Peace Prize. If he had died that day instead of his brother, there would be no Nobel Peace Prize, and the few who would remember his name at all would remember him for his much deadlier innovations: dynamite and the blasting cap.
Little has changed in the twenty-first century. Entrepreneurs still create, and the most successful ones whitewash their legacy with their billions. The capitalist ecosystem ensures that the entrepreneur moves fast, and in Facebook-speak, breaks things.
What is the ROI on safety?
Society could ensure the entrepreneur not create or move forward her invention until an independent government board greenlights the idea after a fulsome study of the likely negative effects. Of course, such a future is as dystopian as it sounds. The board would have no special knowledge of those effects, and it would ensure existing power structures remained entrenched.
I was asked this week on a panel along with executives from Lego and large advertising boards “What is the ROI on safety?” My response was: “What’s the ROI on being able to sleep at night? It’s infinite.”
What entrepreneurs and companies do, whether they admit it or not, is to force people to react to their products, for good or for bad. It is incumbent on business owners to lessen the negative externalities that they spew into the environment. And, yes, all products, down to the apps on your phone and the video games your child plays, emit some form of negative externality. Mass distraction is one emission from the modern-day smokestack, but it’s hardly the only one.
Traditionally, society bears the cost of the negative externality of innovation, the company profits, then leverages those profits to lobby governments to ensure the bill for the negative externality is never paid directly. It’s why beverage companies pretend that plastics can be recycled if only the end user takes responsibility for the product they brought into the world. With billions to protect you, you can leverage whole industries to shift blame.
A moral imperative
What society needs is a way of moving beyond narrow-minded measures of responsibility, some way of expanding the concept of fiduciary duty to other constituencies, who matter at least as much as shareholders, like employees, customers, and the communities where the companies operate.
While such measures may be far off, entrepreneurs today have a moral imperative to ask themselves how their products are being misused and then to take action to prevent that use. They must develop the language, the metrics, and the transparency to confront these issues head-on.
They must recognize they are one player in a larger ecosystem, and they must collaborate with competitors and other industry groups to mitigate the issues endemic to their products. The ROI on such an investment may only be the ability to sleep at night, but it will have been worth it.
The poet Rumi said:
“Any wine will get you high — drink the pure wine.”
We can spend our 80 or so transits around our star on countless distractions doing countless tasks in countless ways to provide for our families, but a lasting, obituary-defining business will only emerge from the generosity to share with others. For an entrepreneur, for someone who believes the measure of her life must include her product, then her legacy is what she has shared with others, good or bad.
What is the ROI of legacy?
Special thanks to Vishal Thacker, on Clubhouse at vishalkthacker, who co-hosts the weekly Clubhouse talk of the same name, Poetic Business, on Mondays at 3 pm ET. You can follow me on CH at geoffcook. Through the lens of the poets, we connect poetic thinking to practical business advice. Or, if you prefer, you can always pitch me an angel investment here.😊
