I caught an interview of Joe Perry, one of the core members of the band Aerosmith, the other day on satellite radio. He was shilling a new book, which is apparently and in part a rebuttal to the book that his bandmate Steven Tyler released a while back. Tyler and Perry have been feuding on and off for a while, adding them to the list of famous bandmates who, after years or decades, break ties. The Beatles, Van Halen, Guns n Roses, The Eagles, Black Sabbath, Pink Floyd, and Simon and Garfunkel are just a few of a long list of hugely creative and successful musical acts that split over personality conflicts. The radio host asked the obvious questions: What is it that causes this to happen seemingly so often? Is there something inherent in whatever it takes to create great art that also leads to strife?
Joe Perry began his response with a simple statement:
Pressure makes diamonds.
Short, sweet and to the point. I had never heard the phrase before, so of course I googled it. Turns out that it’s a quote from General George Patton. No surprise there – it’s too strong an observation not to have been made before, and George was a smart guy.
A few months back I watched a documentary about the rock drummer Ginger Baker. Baker, famously irascible, was a member of the English rock trio Cream. Baker, bassist/singer Jack Bruce and legendary guitarist Eric Clapton played together two years and released four albums that set the music world on fire. The documentary, in discussing the well-known rivalry between Bruce and Baker, suggested that Clapton’s brilliant virtuosity was driven by that rivalry and stress. As any fan of rock knows, Clapton’s had a long and brilliant career both before and after Cream, but most Top-10 lists peg his work on the song Crossroads at #1, and Cream, despite having only a two year run, is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for a reason.
Most of us have been in pressure situations that involve other people. Sometimes, we step up to the occasion. Sometimes, we don’t. Sometimes we work things out. Sometimes things explode. And, sometimes, we exceed, we go beyond, we achieve something we didn’t expect. Athletes excel when they compete. Runners do better when they have running partners. People push harder when they feel job competition from others. Similarly, deadlines motivate workers to get jobs done, and competition drives businesses to innovate.
When Apple first released the iPhone, competitors scrambled to make their own versions, and Samsung eventually caught up and in the eyes of some surpassed Apple. Recently, the competitive pressure from Samsung has pushed Apple’s response to consumer preferences for larger smart phones. Does anyone doubt that, if the pressure of competition wasn’t there, the smart phones we have in our pockets wouldn’t be nearly as capable?
Clearly, competitive pressure can be a very good thing, and as consumers, we should welcome the fruits of the pressure that others feel. Unfortunately, we allow ourselves to be talked out of encouraging that pressure by those who’d rather not have to respond to it. Yes, of course, I’m talking about government.
Whence do bureaucrats and government workers feel pressure to perform? Certainly not out of job security fears. One must do something truly egregious to get fired from a government job, where underperforming usually means one gets to stay in one’s job rather than being given more responsibility. The same can be said about most public school systems, where monopolistic control and an aversion to choice, charters and vouchers that borders on the pathological ensure that “pressure” can be dismissed or ignored. The services government provides us are well-insulated from competitive pressure, and thus their quality is dependent only on the interest level and responsiveness of politicians and the bureaucrats they manage. Rather than operating in an environment that naturally produces pressure, someone must choose to apply pressure. The latter is never as good, as strong, or as inexorable.
Many in the private sector look longingly at the way government avoids pressure and seek the same for themselves. Cronyist rules and regulations, protectionism, handouts, bailouts, licensing requirements, price floors, product mandates and the like are all exercises of government force that are meant to alleviate competitive pressure. Despite being sold as protection for consumers, these tend to harm consumers by reducing the need to innovate, to create better or less costly goods and services, to come up with new ideas, to build better mousetraps.
Pressure on others is a good thing for us. We should challenge our government when it seeks to alleviate it for the benefit of a few. That said, we must also keep in mind the message in the opening paragraph: pressure can and does break things. Great success stories born out of competition are only one side of the equation. A fundamental part of free markets and capitalism is “creative destruction,” and for every iPod there’s a Zune, for iPad there’s a Sony Tablet, and for every Coca Cola there’s a New Coke. Yet even those who break things, like then-CEO Roberto Goizueta of Coca Cola who spearheaded New Coke, can make new diamonds. The public’s outrage with New Coke is legendary, and in response the company “re-introduced” Coke Classic just a few months after New Coke drove people to despair. In doing so, in responding to pressure, the company turned a disaster into a success. Coke had been losing market share and people had been drifting away from colas, but the great big controversy ended up re-energizing demand for the product.
People often justify government involvement in this or that by declaring that purported failures of capitalism necessitate the intervention of a guiding hand. What they mean is that they personally don’t see how market forces can bring about a goal they deem desirable. But, even those with the best intent, in looking to guide things to a better outcome, often accomplish the opposite. By removing the market forces that drive improvement, they remove the factors that drive innovation, and in doing so leave us all with poorer choices, poorer products, poorer services. Without pressure, we wouldn’t enjoy so many of the things that make our lives great.
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