Entrepreneurial Advantage Over Legacy Businesses

I subscribe to The Ladders jobs site, not just because I am always seeking new opportunity to make a difference, but because I believe the site seeks to provide excellent service and does not fleece the customer in the process. It is a job site that offers true value just for providing your e-mail address, unlike some of the other sites which are just posting board revenue-generators. As a consumer, I like that.

Each week I receive a newsletter from The Ladders that includes a blog-like story from the President, Marc Cendella. Much to my delight, I often find these interesting. I recommend them to anyone that is in the job market or thinks they may be someday.

Today, Cendella posted a newsletter that really made me smile and get on my soapbox. I've included a link to the full text of "Man, I hate American Airlines". (Catchy title, eh?) The general line of the excerpt was this: Cendella was on an American Airlines flight (we all know how bad that can be!) and encountered a flight attendant wearing a pin that said, "I have no idea why I work here." His reaction was this:

"And while Mom said if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all, I wish the Katherines and the American Airlines of the world nothing but failure. Failure in their campaign to pull down the productive people, failure in their efforts to keep winners from winning, and failure in the marketplace so that better people and companies can serve American Airlines customers."

Wow. Cendella really hit the nail on the head. I too wish these companies and people nothing but failure. They hold us back. They hold our culture back from achieving excellence by forcing us to deal with complacency. Our government (supposedly Republican) has taken to bailing these businesses out of their own self-created problems. Let them die I say. They are dinosaurs, struggling to survive in a world no longer suitable for them. It is time they go extinct.

The typical argument to this path is a lamentation about "all those jobs". That is extortion and altogether bogus. If those people are enterprising workers and seriously about their careers, they will quickly find jobs with new, growing airlines that deliver great rates and great service. or they will find jobs with new companies that will emerge in the cities in which they live. They will prevail and be better for it. We can teach them and help them do that.

But we can no longer subsidize complacency. It will cripple our economy and our culture. Not just for the inertia it creates, but for the opportunity it blocks. Just as the dinosaurs gave way to better adapted and ultimately more successful mammals, these crippled legacy business must give way to new, innovative, flexible ventures. The opportunity we are missing is the opportunity to build something bigger, better, faster, more efficient, which is most easily done from the ground up. Let's take those industries completely apart and rebuild them. Already you can see this happening all over the world, mostly in Asia. New car companies, new airlines, new electronics, building better products for less money. They will inherit the earth. They are entrepreneurs.