“The easier it looks, the hotter it hooks; there ain’t no such thing as easy money.” –Rickie Lee Jones
One of the characters I met in college was a slender, nervous peddler of fake IDs who called himself Easy Money. Despite that name–and I never heard him referred to by any other–he was diligent and industrious. He was a money gymnast; it only looked easy.
And it wasn’t too long thereafter when an avalanche of easy-money ploys was started by a single stone, the Pet Rock. I’m not certain whether the Pet Rock made anyone any money, but I know that it lost a lot of people a lot of money via the power of suggestion.
For years after its brief popularity, the Pet Rock remained a standard against which to justify bad ideas. No matter how ridiculous the product, its inventor could always invoke holy idiocy: “Well, the Pet Rock worked, and my idea makes a lot more sense than that.” And thus began a great gimmick chase, the search for that one little idea “just stupid enough.”
And doesn’t that explain what went awry with the recent e-commerce boom/bust: It turned into another gimmick gambit, a “just stupid enough” competition. Turns out there is nothing easy about being just stupid enough. Oh, Rickie Lee, where are you now? Yes, the easier it looks, the hotter it hooks.
What got me thinking about the Gimmickization of the Internet was talking with Mary Westheimer of BookZone, a company that provides Internet services to publishers, and one that lives on the old-fashioned principles of customer value and solid financials.
She says: “People laughed at us, at how we were missing out on the e-commerce boom by adhering to the old principles. And now we are seeing the refugees of the dot-coms washing up on our shore. It’s unbelievable how these people have been treated, the stories they tell. Their employers did not look at people as people.”
Indeed, what I’ve seen happen often in tech companies is that their employees become a continual disappointment, the human body being Old Tech, the part of the process yet to be automated. And so, when the dot-coms crossed the border from just stupid enough into plain stupid and started to fail, when it came time to pull back and to lay off employees, the creativity vanished.
I spoke to an e-commerce veteran, Eric Olsen, who told me that he was called into his boss’ office and told to fire 12 people. These were people who were in a training program, who had rearranged their lives to join the company, and who had all been with the company for just one month. He took them aside, one by one, and gave them the bad news. After all the clever benefits Olsen had dangled in hiring them, there were none for firing–just take your possessions and go: the lowest tech of all, the empty box for your personal belongings.
After he had axed the dozen employees, he called his boss to say, “Well, it’s done, and nobody is burning down the building.” His boss’ reply was, “OK, then fire eight more.” Two weeks later, Olsen resigned.
I also spoke with Donovan Montierth, recently laid off from a dot-com. He took a cut in pay when he went to work there, and then, at the end, didn’t get paid for his last 10 weeks of work. But even though the company failed, he still walked away the winner, still is glad he took that job. Why? Because he didn’t go in search of easy money. He went for one of those old-economy reasons: to learn. He went for the chance to follow his passion and work as a writer.
The company that hired and fired him was full of gimmicks, including, ironically, the free lunch. Now, working at conservative BookZone, he says, “For the first time in my career, I feel like I’m getting more than I give.” No gimmicks, just a family feeling and being respected as a person, including the opportunity to learn as much as he is able.
He says of his new employers, “They do things they don’t have to do.” And isn’t that all it takes to be a great employer? It only looks easy.
