PoliticsMediaBusiness
Politics, Media and Business Form an Identity
When I got the courage up to first ask my future wife, Dawn, out on a date, she said: ‘no’. Being a somewhat persistent individual, I asked ‘why’.
Dawn Said ‘No’
She told me that she ‘didn’t want to date a business man’. ‘Why not?’ I asked. ‘Because business is dirty and, at the top level, business, media and politics are all the same and I am apolitical.’
I suggested that we downsize from dinner to just meeting for drinks and I would prove to her that she was wrong.
So we met, fell in love and have five children together.
But years later, I called Dawn at work and told her, she was right; at the uppermost reaches of business, there is an unholy alliance between the media, politics and big business. So now I write on the board for my students this equation:
P = M = B,
where P stands for Politics, M for Media and B for Big Business.
What I had realized is that most national economies are controlled by a handful of families or a few hundred at most. And they like their oligopolies and their positions of power and are highly motivated to keep both.
As entrepreneurs, we often run into these entrenched positions and that is why so many entrepreneurs live by the credo that: “It is better to ask for forgiveness than it is to ask for permission.”
Centralized Control Over Media Including the Internet
Promotes Political and Big Business Agendas
Wilderness
I was speaking to Joe Kowalski, Founder of Wilderness Tours
(WT), last weekend when he and his wife Sue took Dawn and I and some of our
kids rafting down the
Joe (in stern) Calmly Takes the Raft Gently Down the Stream
I was particularly interested in how he started because he
was the first to recognize the power of the white water on the
Joe told me that he started on the Ottawa with ‘no money’
plus two rafts and he just started—he was a river guide and he hired a summer
student from back home (Joe hails from Pennsylvania) and they just set up shop.
He didn’t ask anyone for permission. He just put the rafts in and took them out
and enough folks came that he carried on … for 30 years. Wilderness
If he had asked for permission from, say, the local Council, this would have started a process that might easily have brought in the Provincial Governments of both Ontario and Québec (the Ottawa is the boundary between these two Provinces) as well as the Federal Government, which is in charge of navigable waterways.
They would have formed a study group; they would have studied the issue for at least a year. They would hold public hearings. Potential competitors would have been tipped off. Outfitters in other places would learn of Joe’s plans. Existing tour operators (e.g., canoe places, say) would object.
Joe would have had to hire a lawyer.
Tens of thousands of dollars and two years later, Joe would have quit and Jean Chrétien could not have proved that he was still youthful enough to lead the GOC and the Liberal party through a third majority government by staging a photo opportunity in a WT raft on the 25th Anniversary of WT. Oh yes, thousands of person-years of employment would never have been created either.
Federicos Gondolas
Compare this with the experience of Darcy McRae, who started
a Gondola business on the
He launched in September 2002 in the scenic and historic
He docked at the Dow’s
Darcy on Mooney’s Bay,
Well, in
They sent an armed RCMP officer in full body armor to give
Darcy a cease-and-desist order that not only banned him from the Canal but also
forced the management of the NCC-controlled Dow’s
Interestingly, the berth next to Darcy’s was occupied by a
boat that provided charters on the Canal but somehow, rather mysteriously, that
was O.K. with the NCC. The reason for banning Darcy? The NCC had earlier given
a monopoly to a major tour operator whose boats hold 150 personas each. There
are no Gondolas on the
Oh yes, Darcy was also banned from the Rideau Canoe Club, the Casino du Lac Leamy and just about everywhere else he tried to put in. Finally, in June of 2003, Denis Giacobbi and his family (from www.fitnessleaders.com and www.fitbug.com) were kind enough to allow Darcy to use their dock on Mooney’s Bay.
Darcy continues to be harassed by Government representatives to this day. P = M = B.
When OBN was started by yours truly in the mid 1980s, we wanted to break into the newspaper market which was then totally dominated by one newspaper, the Ottawa Citizen. Advertising rates reflected that newspaper’s dominant position and we thought that OBN would provide a useful B2B advertising vehicle and it was a way to bring the maturing business community together.
We wanted to drop paper boxes on every street corner. These are amazing devices—they just sit there and advertise your product 24/7 and they don’t cost very much.
We then faced the question: ‘Do you ask for permission first?’
Our answer was ‘no’. If we ask for permission to drop paper boxes on the sidewalks of the City, the City will convene a study group. They will hire a consultant. The Study Group will be made up of representatives of the established media (e.g., the Citizen folks, the billboard people, etc.). It is not in their interest to allow paper boxes since that is a leg up for startups like OBN. And they have the perfect political cover—paper boxes are ‘visual pollution’.
So what we did was send around a young fellow in a costume
(thanks, Duncan MacDonald) to put quarters in expired meters to save folks from
the dreaded Green Hornets and their parking tickets. (By the way, after we did
this, Ottawa City Council passed a bylaw making this illegal. They were afraid
that their parking ticket revenues would decrease if this became a habit. So
now, in
This was the first time anyone had tried this PR stunt and it got OBN’s mascot a lot of good media coverage. That was our political cover.
Then we just dropped a couple of hundred paper boxes all
over
Of course, the reaction was to get us to cease-and-desist but we made two effective arguments: 1. this was a freedom of the press issue; 2. the City should license paper boxes (we suggested $25 per year per paper box). Rather than ban them, the City should make money from them by ‘regulating’ them.
This is quite persuasive because politicians love power and they know that power comes from money. In fact, let’s add that to our Dawn equation P = M = B = $.
The end result is that there are a ton of paper boxes in
Conclusion
Established enterprises don’t want you to succeed. Even very large countries tend to be controlled by a relative handful of political, media and business interests. One of the keys to their continued power is the ability to create concessions for themselves—newspaper monopolies, cable empires, television licenses, for example, are all tightly controlled and doled out according to arcane rules that hugely favour the incumbents.
One of the keys to long term business success is control over some type of factor of production. If you want your business model to be sustainable, you need some type of ‘pixie dust’, some type of long term competitive advantage. You need to be able to execute well but you also need to have ‘access’—to capital, to boat launch facilities, to City sidewalks, whatever.
Again, it is better to ask for forgiveness (sometimes) than to ask for permission. The caveat is that, like so many things in the field of entrepreneurship, this is a grey area and one has to be careful about legal liabilities (another closed system, I am afraid).
But nevertheless, great businesses have come about because people like Joe Kowalski and Darcy McRae have faced down entrenched interests so there is hope that you can too.
Copyright. Dr. Bruce M. Firestone,