One of the biggest dirty little secrets of the business world that all to often those who haven’t done much get to positions where they try and influence those who are trying to do it. To me experience is a valuable teacher and those who don’t have experience should not be telling those of us who are doing it how to do it.
I recently read a press release that a PR firm had hired someone from a company as their VP of PR for health. Now I’m happy that this person is moving up but when you look at his credentials he has never worked on or launched a brand and left his company just as they were getting ready to launch a new product against some heavy competition. In other words no experience in results that matter.
With the explosive growth of social media comes the bottom feeder experts who get their ego stroked by trade magazines. When you ask them to provide how they actually helped drive business needs and meet business objectives they’ll try and confuse you with vanity metrics or double talk. But this is what they do because they get money from it and money drives too many damn decisions.
When I read recently that more MBA students were itching to join Goldman Sach’s I was stunned. I mean these guys are scumbags and have no ethics at all. So why would so many MBA students want to join Goldman ? Because most students are going to graduate with huge debt and to them you need lots of money to live the American dream. Why work 10 years to get ahead when you could make huge bonuses by getting on both sides of the economy ?
One thing that Gordon Gekko said that sticks with me from the movie Wall Street “Give me people who are hungry and know how to get things done”. He was a greedy SOB but he was right about that !
