Gongol.com Archives: December 2023
December 9, 2023
Americans who watched any amount of mainstream commercial television in the 1980s likely grew familiar with the name of Victor Kiam, who "liked the [Remington] shaver so much, I bought the company". He became a household name strictly by virtue of his salesmanship on behalf of an electric shaver -- not for gossip-page theatrics, nor for having a seat on a game show for entrepreneurship. Television commercials alone did the trick. ■ Kiam may have had a gift for the sales pitch, but there was an earnestness about his style that stands out. "A company must be honest and it must insist that its representatives be honest", he wrote. "Some hyperbole is expected in any pitch, but never promise anything that you can't deliver. If you do, you may get the order this time, but you'll never get another." ■ It's jarring to contrast that flavor of rule-conscious enthusiasm with the words of Elon Musk, 2023's most famous entrepreneur, who goes on vulgar tirades against advertisers and keeps moving the target date for his plans to colonize Mars, while amplifying antisemitic social-media posts from his own giant platform. ■ Victor Kiam's style was shaped by Cold War sensibilities, which above all included the perpetual existential threat of Communist aggression. The shadow of that threat may have created an environment in which Kiam could write, again in self-evident earnest, "If you're a sales clerk who thinks he's wasting away on a mundane job, find your self-esteem. You are a vital cog in the free-enterprise system. You are the public representative of thousands of entrepreneurs whose products are sold in your store." ■ Those words are, in fact, no less true today than they were in 1986. All of them. But today we see a "Target run" as an exercise in "retail therapy", not an act of freedom-loving defiance against the godless Communists in the Kremlin. ■ Only a bona fide lunatic would want to bring back the Cold War. But we ought not to lose sight of the fact that freedom still isn't universal, nor that some of the world's most heavily-armed militaries belong to some of the world's most awful regimes. Having the Soviet Union around back then to define a stark geopolitical contrast may have been convenient to how we organized a certain American worldview, but that only serves to underline why business and entrepreneurship and values need to be consciously stitched together in the public mind today.
