The Personal Grooming Edition
You don’t have to hang around in boardrooms for too long before someone trots out this classic bit of management speak:
“Revenue is vanity, Profit is sanity” 1
It’s a sensible, grounded, business principle, which people regularly seem enthusiastic to ignore.
To cite a recent example from the automotive sector, take a look at the #MarketFrenzy #DumpsterFire that was Cazoo. There are so many long-form post-mortems online of what happened to Cazoo (the FT has a few good ones), but the answer is pretty short-form: They spent much, much more than they were ever going to make. Or as CityAM put it…
“costs outpaced revenue generation, resulting in substantial losses”
You don’t need an MBA to realise that the correct and only response to that assessment is “No shit, Sherlock”.
But people got excited: they surrendered their sanity, gave in to their vanity, and lost sight of the basics. You could argue that with a company like Cazoo “the basics” don’t actually apply, but if your business isn’t in the business of making more money than it spends, can you really call it a business?
What’s especially sad about that particular calamity is that as comet Cazoo blazed its trail towards the heart of the sun, it managed to consume a multitude of small, promising businesses along the way.
In a recent conversation, I encountered VanitySanity again and it got me wondering if I could offer something similar: a golden nugget of timeless wisdom that could serve decision makers for generations to come.
After a little contemplation, I think I’ve got it.
As a folically-challenged person, this is my guidance for others whose hairlines have receded towards the back of their cranium.
If, like me, you occasionally find yourself short of time in a morning, you may be presented with the most agonising of choices: the choice of what to shave.
When this moment strikes, try to remember this:
“Face is Vanity, Head is Sanity“
Because let’s be honest, in most circumstances, the smooth head and fuzzy chin of Walter White is likely to serve you better than the fuzzy head and smooth chin of Keith Flint2.
Though the fact that “sociopathic drug baron” is a more socially acceptable look than “pioneering musical talent” does make me a little bit sad.
- What I didn’t know until researching this piece was that there is an extended version of VanitySanity – a directors cut, if you like – that ends with “…but cash is king”. That makes it a tricolon made up of tricolons (if you can overlook the intrusion of the “but”). That’s nothing short of rhetorical dynamite! ↩︎
- The obvious link here would be firestarter, but lets do theoppositeof obvious – I always prefered No Good anyway. ↩︎