A fascinating article in the New York Times provides a perfect object lesson for young entrepreneurs on the subject of Executive Foot in Mouth (FIM) Disease.
The background: There's a very cool program in Boston, Inner City Entrepreneurs, that helps small business owners who are new to entrepreneurship figure out how to grow their businesses. The group of 25 entrepreneurs meets like an MBA class and has lectures, projects, and sharing of ideas.
One of those entrepreneurs is Alex Whitmore, co-founder of Somerville, Mass.-based Taza Chocolate, which make stone ground organic chocolate bars. Alex is trying to decide whether to hire a sales director -- a big decision for a 25-person company. Here's the FIM moment...I've added bold-face to reinforce my point.
Mr. Whitmore said he asked his classmates whether he should hire an experienced marketing manager: "Is now the time to hire a $60,000 or $70,000 sales director?"
Taza, Mr. Whitmore's company, produces fair trade chocolate. It has 25 employees, most of whom he hired "on the cheap," but who are still "excited about what we're doing."
"They say when you pay with peanuts you hire monkeys, but we have some smart monkeys," Mr. Whitmore said. "I'm not experienced as a marketing director. I don't know what I'm doing. I want to hire someone with experience and pay them what they deserve, which is a lot of money."
Wow! Are you wondering if the cheaply-kept brighter-than-average monkeys are smart enough to read the newspaper and learn that a) they are monkeys, b) they are underpaid monkeys and c) someone else is going to get paid "what they deserve?"
Note to the Inner City Entrepreneurs: add a course on Emotional Intelligence and perhaps Media Relations. Note to Mr. Whitmore: shut up!
Funny. It’s interesting that we’ve all managed to say the wrong thing at the wrong time, but social media comes a magnifying glass to these blunders then the web spins and continually spits these foot-in-mouth moments back at you (and the world).
There but for the grace of Google,go I.
David, thanks for your post. “There but for the grace of Google”….love it. That may replace the original line! Now I feel a bit guilty for picking on the poor guy. It’s not like I haven’t done it myself. I will pray for forgiveness to a statue of Eric Schmidt.