T w e n t y S i d e d
So now I’ve told my story. It didn’t end with a bang, but that’s how it goes sometimes. I realize this might be a bit of a let-down for the reader. We had all of this buildup of stress and tension, only to have the story end without any fireworks. Not only did Chekhov’s gun never go off, but it turns out Chekhov pawned it halfway through the second act, and anyway it was just a replica. While this makes for a dud of an ending, for me it was a tremendous relief. I’m very glad I didn’t have to live through any fireworks.
But as a way of artificially creating a sense of having some kind of denouement, let’s try to figure out what I learned. These events left a huge impression on me, and that has shaped how I view business, leadership, and accountability. In turn, that has shaped a lot of the articles I’ve written over the years.
What Went Wrong?
Like most of the other dot-coms, the virtual mall guys built something nobody wanted or needed, and it went bust. I can’t say for sure what went wrong at the top, because I never had a clear picture of who owned what or which people were in charge of which others. I couldn’t see anything going on above my bosses.
But from my viewpoint in the trenches it seems pretty clear that everyone embraced a fundamentally flawed idea to put a layer of videogame on top of a regular web store, and then tried to do it in too much of a hurry. Lots of business types jumped in, thinking that their previous experience at running companies would see them through in this new frontier. Their weakness was that they were so uninformed about technology that they couldn’t see just how serious their knowledge deficit was. They didn’t know what they didn’t know.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Crash Dot Com Part 10: Blame Goes Uphill”
