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I Fought The Law And The Law Won And I Feel Fine

By the mid-1990s, I had become a leper. My office stank of death and humiliation; everyone knew that it was only a matter of time before my department was shut down by the mysterious and inscrutable whims of upper management. And still I worked at my desk, pulling fresh and bloody rabbits from my hat, performing increasingly-amazing tricks to show that there was profit still to be mined from this mysterious software business.

Technically, I had managers to tell me what to do, but my department had become such a vaccuum of ambition that only two types of managers would be assigned to me: Boneless incompetents who were too harmless to be fired, and up-and-coming sharks. I soon learned that I could ignore the incompetents, and frequently just sent emails to the vice presidents who really ran things without bothering to cc: my so-called superior. Sometimes, I forgot that the boneless ones existed entirely, and held important meetings directly with the vice presidents and CFO, who had forgotten about them as well.

The sharks were a little more troublesome, because they actually wanted me to do things. However, they were transitory; within three months, they'd impress the brass enough to be promoted. However, the sharks were useful because one by one, they revealed the mystery of what it was that impressed upper management. Slowly, they taught me the language of spreadsheets and profit margins, and I learned eagerly.

With every manager, I grew smarter.

I had been assigned the position of New Media Buyer because I was enthusiastic about software, and smart. If I had been smarter, I would have realized the entire project was doomed from the start; the mathematics were all wrong, the management too mesmerized by the "technology is the future!" rhetoric of the mid-1990s. Those were the days where anyone who could burn a CD-ROM could get forty venture capitalists to throw him a million dollars to make his "A History Of American Waste Management" CD.

It was multimedia! Multimedia was king!

It seemed like a fine idea; Voyager Software was releasing award-winning multimedia programs that described the works of Marshall McLuhan, or the interactive efforts of music pioneer Laurie Anderson. Borders sold thousands of niche-market intellectual books, and had singlehandedly revived the seemingly-dead Jazz and Classical music business... So it was but a small leap of faith to believe that we could sell culture on CD-ROM just as easily as we could sell culture on pages or in mugs of coffee.

When I started at Borders, I was the Golden Boy. I was going to lead them into the new age of computers.

But the math didn't work out, and it tarnished my shine. For one thing, books are hugely - obscenely - profitable. You can buy a book for $10.00 and sell it at full cover price for $20.00 - a full 100% profit. Furthermore, the book industry is very genteel, and they have an amazing business agreement that no other genre has:

Buy as much as you want, then return what doesn't sell.

In other words, you can buy 500,000 copies of Joe Millionaire's autobiography - and if it turns out that nobody's interested in a himbo's latest gossip, you can ship all 500,000 copies back. No penalty, except for a slight restocking fee and shipping.

The upshot is that there's next to no penalty for buying poorly. If you're buying books for Borders, you can take wild chances and you'll still come out in the black even if everything fails. Yes, you'll have the incremental costs of loss - namely, that you just locked up $2,000,000 of your sales budget in buying this flop book, and that $2,000,000 could have been spent purchasing other items that customers actually wanted to buy - but in essence, it means that you are subtly encouraged to buy big.

Oh, and the terms are also ridiculous. You buy those Joe Millionaire books, and you don't have to pay for them for ninety days. Which means that if they flop and you ship them back soon enough, there's a good chance that you may have returned all of them before the bill comes due.

So Borders was based on a business plan that involved very profitable items that could sell slowly. Software was nothing like that. The profit on software is less, for one thing: A game that sold for $49.99 cost us $42.75, meaning that we skimmed a measly $7.24 from each game sold - one-third the profit that Borders could have made by selling a book. And shoplifters hit us harder and more often - they not only stole our $7.24 in potential profit, they stole the $42.75 that we paid for it in the first place. That means that if one copy got stolen, we had to sell another six copies of Phantasmagoria at a $7.24 profit each to just come out even.

God help us if two get stolen. Which they did. Regularly.

Oh, and our warehouse shipped everything two weeks late, so our software arrived late and got stolen. And our customers needed tech support to buy it. And if it didn't sell, we could only return 10% of what we bought. And the bill was due fifteen days after we received it...

I faced all of this - and I battled it. I realized that I couldn't match CompUSA's prices... So I dug deep for rare software that nobody else could sell, and then marked it up 70% to make up the difference, tripling our overall margin. I worked out arrangements to have the new hot games drop-shipped directly to the stores, and then called each of the stores to ensure that they got it and had it out on the shelves on Day One. (Over half of them had signed for it and then left the box, unopened, in the back.) I led the fight on getting anti-theft source-tags into our stores, and sold advertisements in custom-made catalogs at obscene rates to eke out more profits. I found new distributors who'd give us better terms, led sales initiatives, and trimmed our lines to the bone.

Every time it looked like software was doomed, I came up with a new way to make it work. I poured blood and sweat into the program.

But it was doomed. I had worked myself into exhaustion, but the core assumptions of software had been completely misread. They weren't books, they were never going to be books, and management only wanted things that could make book-like profits... And when they did understand what they were facing, they immediately realized that they were in the wrong business.

But the management also admired me and my amazing efforts. They felt bad about killing the program, because a) they would have to admit that they had been wrong about it in the first place, and b) it would kill someone who had been doing an exemplary job. So they couldn't just say, "Hey, thanks for trying, see ya!" Instead, they cut it by inches, slashing budgets, axing store support, slowly bleeding away personnel.

Eventually, it was just me. In my office. Holding the fort, for about six months of hell.

Then my manager came to me and told me that I had to lie to our distributors. We were cutting the program off, but we weren't going to tell our distributors that; we were going to lie to them, saying that we were going full-steam ahead, in order to shovel as many returns back as possible.

I've always been ethical. I said I wouldn't. Phil said I would. I told him that this was bullshit, called him an asshole, and went home.

A week later, I was promoted to a much better job at Waldenbooks, they found someone in New Media to lie to them, and it was done. Two years of my life's work was dead; parts of it twitched and would be as long as there was still software in the stores, but New Media was effectively over.

And you know what? I was fine with it.

What I learned in that day was that sometimes, failure is your only option. You might have to whittle away a bunch of false leads to discover that you're doomed, but in the end you can't make gold from pigshit. There are times the deck is stacked and it doesn't matter how smart or talented you are... It's over before you began.

I also discovered that an honest failure is freeing.

Most of the times you fail because you didn't do enough; yeah, maybe you gave 70% - a good solid effort - but you know deep down there was 30% of you that could have tried harder. Or 20%. Or 10%. But if you genuinely give 100% to something, you know with an absolute certainty that there was nothing more you could do.

I gave Borders everything, including my guilt.

And that's really the point: Failure is an option, and there are too many people who don't try because it might all collapse under them. They don't really try - they hold back a little, not dotting every "I" or crossing every "T" because that way, it's not really their fault. Some deadlines get skipped. Some room for wiggling is made.

But in the end, you can't fool yourself. Maybe everyone else will applaud your valiant effort... But late at night, when you're drifting off to sleep, you'll be able to catalogue your insufficiencies in fine detail. You'll know that you held back, and maybe the worst could have been avoided if you'd only tried...

Give it all up. Throw everything you have in. I've seen everything I worked for go up in flames, and the fire was mighty warm because I tried. Everything I owned went up in smoke, and I came out clean and shriven, born anew.

Failure is an option... But don't fear it. Fear holding back, because nothing burns like regret.