WHAT THEY DON'T TEACH YOU AT HARVARD BIDNESS SCHOOL

 

By Jim Carey, Core Strategies

My partner went to Harvard Business School. It doesn't come up much around the office ... if you don't count weekdays. Harvard is the school to go to if you're going to run a big, industrial company. On the other hand, I had what could be politely be called a "checkered" academic career. It's a distinguished, but fading, tradition in direct marketing. (On the advice of my attorney, I don't recall anything between 1968 and 1975.)

So I've been forced to get my learning on the fly. It's a mindset that works well for us as direct marketers. We're not dogmatic... we're experimenters open to new ideas. We immediately look for the commercial applications of new innovations. We try things just for fun, and then we watch the results like hawks. And, "It's worth a test," is actually a winning strategy in turbulent times.

What We Can Teach Harvard

In the rock-n-roll business environment we live in, being able to think like this actually has significant advantages over classic B-school theories. Because the world isn’t static, it not U.S. Steel no more. In fact, the world is changing so fast, the theories can keep up.

So amazingly, we direct marketers have a better grip on how to exploit what's happening than many brand name MBA's stuck in old order orthodoxies. We deserve to be proud of that. Like Dizzy Dean said, "It isn’t bragging' if you done it."

What Harvard Can Teach Us

But there are also a few things that we can learn from Harvard Business School. They may understand the global implications of our strategies better than we DM'ers do. For instance, they saw how e-commerce is really paperless mail order on steroids, and they made billions. (I didn't.)

And they're smart enough to translate our axiom about mailing the house list into great thinking about customer loyalty. Check out Fred Reichheld's work on loyalty - it's good thinking, but we DM'ers already knew that profits come from repeat business of satisfied customers. So why did he write the article in "Harvard Business Review," and not one of us? And why do Fortune 100 CEO's pay attention to Fred, and not us? That's a game we all still need to master.

How Chicago Can Rule the World

One of Harvard's stars, Michael Porter, writes about competition. In The Competitive Advantage of Nations, he asks how local industries can dominate world markets. Why are the German so good at chemicals? The Italians at shoes? The Swiss at optics? The Japanese at cars? For that matter, the Americans at movies?

Porter concludes that great international businesses grow out of intense local competitive environments. Sinatra was right, "If can you make it there, you can make it anywhere." I'd like to think that the same potential is true for us in Chicago. There are really only two candidates for the world capital for direct marketing -- Chicago and a city back East.

Our winning advantage, and one that we truly can leverage, will come if we can cooperate as much as we compete. The B-school guys call it "co-petition." So if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.

That's something that I hope the CADM can do for us … to be a clearinghouse for best practices, and a place where we can share insights about how to grow businesses today and tomorrow.

It's a challenge worthy of all our talents. Let's do it.