Leave Fashion on the Runway: Don’t Let Trends Divert Your Resources

From 17th-century powdered wigs to 1970s bell-bottoms and peace signs to goat yoga, fashion plays a meaningful role in human culture and economy. It can express joy or anger, individuality or collective power. Just as quickly, though, one-off fashions can fade away, and the spotlight of social attention wanders on. If you aspire to build long-term foundations for a business, a career path, or personal health, you must search beyond fashion. So let’s consider the pitfalls of trend-chasing.

You Can Play Ping Pong with a Clipboard  

I know it’s possible to play ping pong with a clipboard; I’ve seen it firsthand. How is this relevant to the pitfalls of fashion? Because the seductive call of the latest equipment bells and whistles can be hard to resist, especially if you’re struggling with your technique. You might buy that new carbon-infused ping pong paddle, extra-strength grip tape, or other products promising overnight improvement, when the real remedy for your weak backhand is something else entirely.

Whenever I find myself drifting dangerously toward equipment worship, I snap myself back to an entertaining but useful memory: top-20 world player Dimitri Ovtcharov of Germany playing a fun practice match with a regular, brown office clipboard at the LA Open in 2013 (find it on YouTube).

The ease with which Ovtcharov wields the crude clipboard instrument is pure poetry. It’s also a reminder of the value of talent over tools. With a $3 clipboard, he could beat 99 percent of the best recreational players armed with the finest paddle money can buy. Tools matter, of course. To optimize your game, you will want to keep up with the best technology. However, you’ll save money and time overall, and see better results, when you invest your resources in honing a process rather than acquiring a well-marketed doohickey. As former table tennis world champion Stellan Bengtsson puts it, “Find a good combination of paddle and rubber for you, and then just go train. There are no shortcuts; it’s all about time at the table.”

This principle applies well beyond the ping pong table. All the way to the Fortune 100 and Oracle.

Taking Unfashionable Advantage  

In 1999, at the peak of the dot-com frenzy, Oracle was a leading provider of ecommerce software. As CEO Safra Catz recounted at a Wharton School MBA graduation ceremony, “All we had to do was wake up in the morning and the stock would go up. Whether we made good decisions, bad decisions, or no decisions, the stock would go up.” And that’s when Oracle did something unfashionable, against the conventional wisdom of just running with the huge profit streams. They took advantage of the good times to optimize and standardize their dozens of diverse, far-flung global processes. The streamlining was neither easy nor popular with many managers, who had been operating very independently rather than striving for a unified company workflow.

Inevitably, in 2001, the dot-com bubble burst, along with the stock market. But because of the optimizing that Oracle chose to do (and their competitors did not), Oracle emerged even stronger. By 2003, Oracle’s R&D department, critical to future competitiveness, actually had a higher head count than before the crash. Meanwhile, their competitors had been forced to reduce their workforce.

Catz emphasized that when you go against conventional wisdom (another form of fashion), you can expect to be criticized by those with a vested interest in that conventional wisdom. “Just take it as noise,” she said. “You are going to be called an idiot moments before you are called a genius.”

Practical Ways to Avoid the Fashion Trap  

• Weigh the GCF (Goose Chase Factor). Maybe you’ve been on this receiving end: Your COO breathlessly describes a new productivity app they discovered at an innovation conference last week in Tampa Bay. It sounded fantastic at the happy hour, and the COO suggests you look into it immediately because the intro pricing expires soon. Okay, it might be a cost-saving efficiency boost, OR it might be a time-wasting and expensive wild goose chase to investigate, try out, and watch fail. Either way, it’s important to be clear about the GCF. When casually assigning an innocuous “look into it” directive, there are associated costs in time and resources for yourself/your team. An IT (or other) director will, hopefully, be comfortable enough to say, “First, I’m happy to research this new platform, and here are the other priority items we’ll need to push down to take a deep look. Second, here are the potential transition costs in terms of training, implementation time, and topline financial investment.” And there’s an unspoken third: If your current system is working well, then it’s equally important not to push for change for the sake of change – a principle that your underlings may be hesitant to bring up with you.
• Check(list) it out. Create a “Core vs. Trend” evaluation checklist. When discussing any potential new process or tool adoption, start by examining how it relates to your core business metrics (revenue, marketplace awareness, customer satisfaction, operational efficiency, etc.). If a proposal would not clearly improve at least one or more core metric, place it into your “watch and wait” category rather than immediately implementing. This prevents reactive decisions based on C-suite FOMO or industry buzz. It also allows time to evaluate success and failure of others who are adopting it, utilizing your “Second Mover Advantage.” Ideally, get signoff on your checklist from all stakeholders as an independent exercise, untethered from any heat-of-the-moment deliberations.
• Keep your balance. In your professional life, think about the sources you refer to for industry knowledge, self-development, or domain-specific learning. Do these tend to be long-standing institutions or flashy new upstarts? Neither is necessarily good or bad, so it’s best to strike a balance that keeps your business acumen fresh but grounded. For example, in the financial world you might want to explore bold insights from relative newcomer outlets like StockNews.AI, Money Morning, SeekingAlpha, The Motley Fool, and various financial-themed subreddits. But certainly, don’t ignore the stalwarts like Barron’s, The Economist, CNBC, Financial Times, and the Wall Street Journal. There’s also a cornucopia of hosted podcasts, ranging from mainstream analysis like Planet Money or Financial Times’ News Briefing, to the less established but still insightful We Study Billionaires, Clark Howard, or (crypto-centric) Real Vision. This holds for any industry in which you’re ascending, or want to.
• Read the large and small print. Obviously, fresh new software, hardware, and service vendors are in the business of making money, so it’s important to separate the marketing hype from the real value. Filter suitors by their client track records: How relevant are their case studies, and were they just pilot programs with lower stakes (investment)? Read between the lines (and bios) of the testimonials: Are they sparse, sourced mostly from one enterprise, or do they show subtle links to the vendor? Especially for software, ask for a free trial period to kick the tires; legitimate operations aiming at long-term market success usually offer reasonable experimentation windows. Determine how closed the proposed system is: Will you be locked into an exclusive, long-term service and support deal that ensures repeat revenue (and high margins) for the vendor? Dig deep into their revenue model to see where you, the buyer, fit in, and you’ll get a clearer picture of the actual value you’ll receive. Finally, tread carefully when feeling pressured to “buy now or pay more!” For both new ventures and established leaders, pricing is rarely non-negotiable.

If a fashionable new product helps you collaborate better in meetings, save time on payroll, speak better Spanish, or grow sweeter tomatoes, that’s terrific. At the same time, committing to your core strengths and taking a non-flashy path may be quite unfashionable, but advantageous. In many industries, trying to keep up with the latest shiny toy can leave you exhausted and distracted. Experiment, learn, and evolve – but on your terms, not someone else’s.

Written by Justin Bookey.
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