Legitimate Value?

If it is true that you learn most from failure, then the protagonists’ lessons from what they themselves term “the biggest mistake in corporate history” must be really worth taking on board.

It’s been all over media this week as a result of Jeff Bewkes’ keynote Royal Television Society address.

As chairman and chief executive of Time Warner he has a boardroom view of their disastrous merger with AOL.

A supposedly new epoch-forming $164bn glittering purchase in 2001 spawned an incomprehensible $99bn loss a year later, before the ultimate demerger last year.

Here’s one core takeaway.

“It is the legitimacy of any business enterprise that, in order to deserve business and financial support, you should be doing something valuable and legitimate and not something else.”

I realise that when I meet customer-facing souls, they often struggle to pinpoint either the right value of what they provide or from where its legitimacy hails.

Undoubtedly the circumstance where I’ve encountered this mist the most is with unleashing a brand new product into the sales team’s playground.

It struck me that if you can accurately and beneficially answer these two demands, then any launch will be likely to succeed both quicker and better.