Best Left Unspoken: The Serially Disrupted Language of Business

There are certain words and phrases that creep into the business lexicon.  At first they’re clear, useful and appropriate, but, squeezed beyond their means, become burdensome and hackneyed.

Paradigm is a word like that, and more especially, paradigm shift.  When I first heard it in 1980 or so it was like hearing “weltanschauung” for the first time in high school:  It was so cool we tried to fit it into every conversation (as in, “when I heard the new Three Dog Night single it upended my weltanschauung.”).  So, too, with paradigm.  Pretty soon, every time someone launched a new product, reorganized a department, or entered a new market, they were shifting paradigms.  It got to be silly, wincingly so.

Now, if my wife came home one evening and told me that she had another husband and eight kids in St. Louis, and had been taking care of both families for 25 years, that would be a paradigm shift.  

Otherwise, I suggest we let the word be.  At this point, fortunately, most of the business world agrees.

“Crossing the chasm,” itself an interesting and highly useful concept, became so clichéd by 2004 that I had a Board member once tell me I’d be fired if I ever blamed a missed budget on not being able to “cross the chasm.”  (He’d heard that excuse in his last three board meetings.)  At that very moment I struck the phrase forever from my business vocabulary.

In my early years we were always sticking to the knitting.  Then I was working to improve my business from good to great.  Recently, as you know, everything wanted to be free (making it, I might add, very difficult to make budget).  And it's extraordinarily rare when I visit a company that I don't hear at least one tech guy described as a genius, or a rock star.  It may be true, but it may just be a function of grade inflation in college.

  

Today, lean and lean start-up are headed the way of the paradigm shift.  They are used everywhere ad nauseum and, I note most recently, are now applied every time a lousy product gets rejected by the market.  “Don’t worry,” we hear, “that’s part of being a lean start-up.”   A month ago my alma mater informed me that the “Lean Start-up Changes Everything”; I have not had my weltanschauung so disrupted since Three Dog Night.  The truth is, like all good ideas, the lean start-up recipe is right for some businesses in some markets some of the time.  (Ask a medical device manufacturer to place a “minimum viable product” with doctors and patients, or a consumer goods company to launch a “pretty good cereal” with shoppers.  Maybe that’s what Boeing tried with the 787, offering a pretty good plane?)  In the old days we called the lean start-up a "ready, fire, aim" strategy.  I just keep thinking: this too shall pass.

One unfortunate outgas from the lean start-up has everyone “pivoting.”  Beware pivoting.  

It also relies on “untested hypotheses,” which we used to call “lazy.”

Likewise, disrupt has now taken the place of most every action verb in business, and one or two nouns to boot.  We used to launch a service; now we disrupt a market.  A recent grad once wanted to do marketing, or finance, or write code, or maybe build a cool product; now he or she wants to disrupt an industry.  Every time we redesign a website we are being disruptive.  Every time we meet in convention we disrupt.  Truly, we might give this poor word a rest. 

And then, of course, there is the most pretentious word in business: serial.  I am not just an entrepreneur (itself plenty pretentious), I am a serial entrepreneur.  (Not just an angel, mind you, an archangel.) 

Let me ask this: What activities come to mind when you think “serial”?  Right:  Serial philanderer.  Serial arsonist.  Serial quitter.  Did I miss one?  Serial killer.

And now: Serial entrepreneur.

If a pilot has 1,000 successful flights, perfect take-off and landing each time, and works for five airlines plus the military during his career, he is just a pilot.  If a teacher teaches every day for 40 years in six school districts, he is still only a teacher.  But, if I am involved in just two start-ups, at almost any level, I can claim the title of serial entrepreneur. The start-ups don’t even have to be successful—in fact, the fastest way to serialhood is a stinker or two.

It was a bad day when “entrepreneur” went from being an occasional activity (as Schumpeter imagined) to a full-blown, 24x7, LinkedIn occupation.  But it became something akin to a paradigm shift when it went serial.

Posted by Entrepreneur Generations

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