BASTARDS DON'T ALWAYS WIN

Pete Shuttleworth, the founder of a new and very successful Film Production Country, Hoi Polloi, leaned over the table of Café Coho near Brighton Station and asked me if “bastards always won”.

Outside the sun was shining and people trudged along the pavement. In Brighton there’s a curious “sod you,” lumbering walking style which I put down to a shortage of hunger. In London everyone sprints.

Being a bastard works best if you’re a rich genius like Jobs, Bezos or Zuckerberg. It worked for Stalin and Attila too. Bezos comes up with great put-downs like:

“Are you lazy or just incompetent?”

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey tried not to be a bastard. He sent an internal memo out last Tuesday announcing that 336 employees were leaving the company. He wanted to avoid corporate speak, messed up by talking about “roadmaps” and “streamlining” but, to be fair, it was a reasonable try. The corporate bastard took over in the hands of HR (aka the Grim Reapers) closing down Twitter and e-mail accounts of the unfortunate 336 with the cryptic words  “you have been removed”. 

Anyone who hasn’t seen the opening of “Margin Call” should. In a major downsizing exercise, HR assassins in the film swoop into the New York offices of a New York Investment Bank slaughtering as they go,.

But the fictional CEO (Jeremy Irons) and Dorsey aren’t bastards, they are just doing what CEOs do when under critical profit pressure, they cut cost.

The really nasty people are the prevaricators and those who stop talent being as good as it should be. These are the death-eaters of management who suck the energy and creativity from people who work with them. I worked for one of these. There are a lot of them around. And one of their characteristics is they interview well and they’re brilliant presenters. But deep down they are evil. They feed greedily on the talent of others and they are devoid of any generosity of spirit.

Back to those lumberers outside the café in Brighton - well at least they were all smiling - and Pete who got it spot on in saying the key to the business who knew best - advertising - was to be “smart and hard.” 

You also have to strive to work with the best people. As Bezos (again) said:

“Life's too short to hang out with people who aren't resourceful”

At Netflix they say what makes a great business is not perks but “stunning colleagues” who are smart, hard and driven to do great work. When you work alongside really great people, as they also discovered at Pixar, great stuff happens.

But this is a competitive world and to win you have to remember this - the words of George C. Scott in the film “Patton":

”Now I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his county. He won it by making the other poor bastard die for his country.”