Conventional wisdom holds that a business owner's top asset is her people: The office employees, staff, salesmen and managers who keep her business running well. But conventional wisdom is getting stale, at least according to venture capitalist and author
Andy Kessler.
He spoke at the
Drucker Business Forum in Pasadena this week. (BTW, they host a terrific series of free presentations. If you're in Southern California, I highly recommend them.)
In an entertaining slide show, Kessler laid out a dozen "unapologetic" rules for entrepreneurs from his latest book,
"Eat People." His thesis, which reflects the book's
Soylent Green title and fork-stabbing-man cover, is about relishing the fact that technology is displacing people in the workforce.
Yes, I said "relishing." The jobs he's talking about, which range from attorney to newspaper editor to toll booth attendant, are unproductive and not worth preserving, in his estimation.
Kessler's book includes dismissive titles for the non-creative people who do such jobs: Sloppers, Super-sloppers, Spongers and Thieves (the latter term apparently reserved for government employees). And he's celebrating the fact that soon they all will be out of work.
What will happen to them? Kessler didn't offer any thoughts. What of human kindness or social concerns for these displaced sloppers and slurpers, who after all could be our mothers, our brothers or ourselves? Yawn.
When asked about social entrepreneurship, Kessler agreed (less-than-enthusiastically) with the goals of philanthropy, though he termed the issue "very complicated." Certainly none of the creative geniuses who profit enormously off the backs of their workers should be criticized if they don't pull a
Bill Gates or a
Warren Buffet, he said. After all, their marvelous innovations have enriched society to untold proportions anyway.
In a week when
machine triumphed over man and the New York Times speculated that
news editors could be replaced by algorithms, I left Kessler's talk in something of a funk.
Then I got a message from my college-aged son. And I remembered a story Kessler told about his own son getting a summer job doing computer work. When Kessler suggested that the job be automated, his son objected to the idea of putting his friends and colleagues out of work.
Kessler was clearly disappointed in the boy.
But thinking about Millennials - a group I know well - cheered me right up. They are as idealistic, people-oriented and community-minded as any '60s hippie. Yes, they'll get cynical and have their own problems to deal with, but they're not going to eat people. Not even if they're starving.
