My Problems with The Bloke Who Bought the Company

Victor Kiam was the guy who bought the Remington electric razor company in the mid 1970s, and then fronted those strangely irritating television advertisements which ran though the 1980s in which he told us that "I liked the shaver so much that I bought the company".

For six bucks, I picked up a copy of his autobiography at the local second-hand bookstore. Although the book had travelled via a local high school library, one little bonus was that it contained Victor's signature on the inside cover. Well, it might have been Victor's signature or it might not. It looked genuine, although it may as likely have been the scrawl of a bored Year 10 student sitting in the library looking for something weird to do. Actually, I suspect that Victor's real signature would always have a drop of claret from a shaving nick smudged through the blue ink.

Anyway, Vic provides us with his secrets of his amazing entrepreneurial success, first as a salesman selling bras for the Playtex company (now there's a job worth thinking about), as a wildly successful importer of jewellery from China in the days when few westerners travelled to the Orient, and as the guy who bought Remington razor company, amazingly acquiring 100 percent ownership of the company for himself along the way.

Vic thinks that hard work is good, harder work is better, and that a version of self-slavery is best. Listen to his thoughts, "I was putting in 75-hour work weeks while my peers were toiling for only 40 hours or less. The difference showed in my results and my bosses took note of it.It takes more than talent to come out on top. If you work 20, 30, or 40 hours per week more than your peers, you're bound to outperform them just on the sheer strength of the extra time you've invested"

It seems to me that old Vic's views might better mirror reality if he added the following: "All this is possible, as long as you don't mind not having a life. Geez, on your deathbed, you might be able to tell those nurses that there are 10,000 more women in the world in your D cups, 50,000 more gals who wear your baubles, and a million men who don't buy shaving cream anymore"

I tried looking up Vic's biography on the net. It seems he died in 2001 at the age of 75 of 'an unspecified heart condition'. On the biographies I read, however, there is something missing. While it says that old Vic owned Remington and the New England Patriots football team, there is nothing to say that he did anything to actually help people. There is little sign of any philanthropic pursuits, and few lines about his concern for others (apart from his obvious concern about their looks). There is no sign that he actually supported anyone who needed a break, although much of his career was about providing a particular kind of support for the fairer gender. In fact, Neil DeFeo, the chairman of Remington when old Vic went the way of so many disposable razors simply said, according to a BBC story, that "he was a wonderful man and he'll be missed by many people. And he made a difference in American business."

I guess that's the nub of my problem with old Vic. Making a difference in business isn't enough to sustain an epitaph, let alone a eulogy. If you don't make a difference in business then you can bet someone else will in your place. It's the way of our market system. If the folks don't buy your widget with the extra shiny end-piece and the extended warranty, they will buy the next guy's widget with its new fashion colours and its hyper-extended warranty.

I think that there is more to life than that, but the busyness of the corporate life makes truly accepting this reality an incredibly tough challenge. And, while you are probably nodding in agreement with me, living this reality is much tougher than it sounds, isn't it? After all, it probably took most of your time and energy to reach the point you have on the corporate ladder, and even more to get to the next level. Now you are there, your actions support the culture that you see as undeniable in this dog-eat-dog world, a culture in which only the fittest and fastest survive.

Without this, as surely as night follows day, the competition will eat you alive. And the stories of Jack Welch and his ruthless weeding out of the "C" and "D" employees at General Electric hint that doing less than this is nothing more than a demonstration of weakness, if not gutlessness. Mmm, so what are we to do about all of this? For me, it's about at least starting to model more gentle, and potentially more productive, behaviours in the workplace. Going out to lunch and dressing casually on Friday is a start, but nothing more. It's about showing our people that we are deadly serious about coaching our kid's soccer team and getting home twice a week when there is still enough light to have fun outside. It's also about pushing our people out the door before they wear out or burn out. When it comes down to it, it's really about encouraging a culture which doesn't see endless hours of toil as a substitute for energy and creativity and quality, the kinds of values which suffer when we are so tired that we can hardly make it home, let alone communicate when we get there.

I think that we also see an interesting myth at work here. It is dead Vic's myth that you can never spend too much time at work yet you can spend too much time at home, since it is "quality time" that counts. It seems to me that there have been very few more dangerous myths as prevalent as this one in our society. My friends, we have to confront this ourselves, in our own contexts and in our own ways, since otherwise old Vic's epitaph will be our own,
"Here lies a corporate who spent more time in his/her office than anyone else. Dave (substitute your own name!) was the cleaner's friend, and he gained a special satisfaction in turning the office lights off each night and being the first to turn them on again the next morning. In the end, we know that Dave was there for so many others, including his customers, his colleagues, and his clients. Unfortunately, however, they were the wrong others"

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