" Competition, Compeshmishion", Bill Shay would have said in his distinctive Boston brogue, dismissive of the subject. Bill had experienced REAL competition back east in the newspaper wars of an earlier age.
For the kiddies: Newspapers were yesterday's equivalent of today's blogs, a compendium of the commonplace and consequential everyday happenings. Mostly commonplace.
As I write my very first blog post, I am drawn to thinking of Bill.
How do I compete?
I am excited and terrified writing here for the first time. Excited that I am (FINALLY!) part of the technorati. Terrified that I won't measure up to my two partners in crime.
Three bloggers becoming we are.
They have weighty thoughts and Harvard educations and a wealth of business experience, which is pretty important to a blog on business issues.
Me? I grew up in a cornfield and barely understand business, really, just an intellectual intellectualizing it. They LIVED it..
So I thought of Bill and his likely commentary on my all-too-mortal fears.
He had few peers on the copy desk where he was the chief. (I shudder what he would think of my effort here). He had fewcompetitors though many worked around him doing the same task, cleaning up others missives, tightening them into powerful but terse statements of fact. He would shudder at the banal blandishments of today's bloggers. But he needn't worry about it now, as he takes his dirt nap.
He was an inspiring model for a puppy dog, and an object lesson on the subject of competition, something all successful businesses must face to be successful, the price of entry into that exclusive club.
He put his head down and did his job. He looked neither left nor right, and took a 20 minute lunch, then worked after the clock said to go home. No doubt when there he no doubt kissed his wife then spent a good part of his evening noodling on tomorrow's tribulations.
He would repair and then go on and do the same thing the next day. And the next day after that. For 40 years until he retired and became irrelevant.
The result? Today he's still talked about by those of us who loved him.
Those "in competition" fail usually. Who they compete against are the winners, and those winners aren't thinking much about them.
This all came crushing into my consciousness 20 years after Bill when my then-company shoved a non-compete form under my nose to sign.
I looked incredulous at my partner, sheepishly waiting for me to get the deed done. I admired him a year earlier when he talked tough about not worrying about others copying us since we'd be so far ahead of them by that time.
But advising accountants and lawyers with too much life under their belts have a way of worrying successful business owners who covet the wealth a captured intellectual capital can bring, planting seeds of less , blind to the abundance around them which is the truth in an unprotected world where the abundance is the only protection available.
I at first, fumed. Then I rebelled taking a week to sign, writing all sorts of caveats in the margins to the ridiculous opaque paragraphs taunting me. I struggled to figure out the traps and shoals therein and pursuant to, herewith evidenced by its impenetrable logic.
The lawyers didn't like those caveats, asking me to excise them. So I conformed (sort of) but in an impotent last show of rebellion I wrote them anyway on the backside where their copiers could ignore them. They felt better. Never noticed was my dad's signature with a different middle initial, on the document, our names being the same otherwise.
Dad loved signing that paper, an old dog enjoying his feisty last stab of the middle finger to the monied controllers of us all. He advised me to "pull the pin"— a euphemism he often used when he walked off a job, pissed at a contractor fucking with him.
I later learned his signature was fraud according to those same lawyer's mentality. But it made no difference since the deed was long past, and now I was in a settlement procedure on my severance with that company.
They had seen my cancerous inclusion in their midst as the next thing needing excised. That cancer began after signing that paper, rebellion notwithstanding in the light of legal precedent as I, the first, made it necessary for all others to sign similarly afterword.
Cut the head off the snake and the body writhes inevitably to silence.
But I noticed my cancer had a carrier cell in the form of my company becoming diseased by the signings as well.
Once upon a time, we were innovative. But the innovation stopped after that non-compete signing, never to be recaptured in the same way. Perhaps coincidentally. But I don't think so.
A leader in an industry focused on it's competition, all springing from its loins, doesn't look ahead so well. And innovation is all about looking ahead.
Bill had taught me to ignore the competition. He knew he couldn't do anything about them. He knew he could do something about himself. If not worried about "them" he was free to look ahead and see where the river bends and the rapids are and the rocks located in the rapidly flowing water. Never mind about those in the wake. Doubloons are under the water to be found, but are often passed over when nervous that a pirate is mounting the mast.
Little understood by business but understood by Bill was that you carry a force field around you when you are not worried at all, repelling those rappelling your ship.
Better yet is to make them friends and not competitors, a holy antidote to the problems with competing. "Coopetition" is one of the healthier new phenomenons I've seen in business.
But this is about as popular to our human natures as turning one's cheek to a slapper. Some philosophies take millennia to sprout as Mr. Christ no doubt realized.
Yet there is hope in this down period that businesses will adopt Bill's ways, as the crunch forces out deadwood, and a new consciousness aborning becomes possible.
I remember Bill was helpful to others on the desk.
"Don't WRITE, Mr. Shakespeare. REPORT" he'd growl.
Imagine.
Helping those that would replace you if they could.
Maybe Bill's views on competitive issues defined him as peerless. But helping others that would replace him I suspect is why we still remember him.
Bill Hinsch
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