No matter how big a cult you create, sometimes things go wrong. Just look at Apple.
I just read a book called Why People Fail, by Australian adman Siimon Reynolds. Reynolds added an extra "i" to his name when he was 18 for some flaky alphabet feng shui type reason.
You won't be surprised then that he is a celebrity across the ditch for epitomising the notion of the advertising wanker. He looks a bit like ageing pop star Simon (one "i") le Bon and used to describe himself as a "Human Heathrow" - referring to his romantic life and fear of commitment.
One blogger posted a photo of Reynolds smiling smugly on the balcony of his fancy Sydney home, yachts in the background, with the caption: "I am rich and date lots of women. I am authentic. I was the original prodigy. I am alone." He is a git. And to my dismay, I found his book is not really about failing. Instead, it is about how to succeed by creating your own creepy cult of personality.
According to Reynolds, all you need to do not to fail is install a negative ion generator in your office, vacuum a lot, drink lots of wheatgrass juice, do yoga and tell yourself every day that you are a champion. He sounds like he has a touch of the OCDs.
I shouldn't sneer. This may work. But no matter how much of a cult you create around yourself, sometime or other you are still going to fail. Just look at one of the world's biggest religious cults: Apple. New Zealand doesn't often get many column inches in the Wall Street Journal but we made it this week with the wonderful headline "Snafus plague New Zealand iPhone debut". (Snafu: Military acronym for "Situation Normal All F**** Up".)
Academic scholars are in no doubt that Apple's consumers are religious devotees and liken Apple to the creation myth (Apple Mac was created to save us from PCs), the hero myth (Steve Jobs is the hero), a satanic myth (Bill Gates is Satan), and finally a resurrection myth (Jobs returned to save the failing Apple company and fought his own battle against cancer to rise again).
Lovely stuff, but no matter how powerful the spiritual narrative, when your phone doesn't work it is still a failure. And quite a few of our businesspeople are having long dark teatimes of the soul.
Not that you would know it from reading the National Business Review's latest Rich List. Everything is good.
Thankfully as a nation we are less chippy and more admiring of people who take business risks than we were when I started researching the Rich List in 1994. But despite a global financial crisis of existential proportions our local 2010 Rich List feels it has to preserve an unrelentingly perky tone.
Nowadays we do admire business success, at least when everything is going swimmingly - we're just in denial about the dark side.
So the Rich List in its righteous quest to promote wealth-creation feels obliged to gloss over the tectonic plate-shifting changes caused by the collapse of the empires of some of our wealthiest people. If you based your view of the business landscape solely on the 2010 Rich List, you would think everything was tickety boo.
Oh, and thank you Siimon. I did learn something from your book.
Not that I need to vacuum more. Simply, that instead of trying to avoid failure we would be better off learning to deal with it.
dhc@deborahhillcone.com
