7 Rules of Power: Surprising - but True - Advice on How to Get Things Done and Advance Your Career by Jeffrey Pfeffer

Author:Jeffrey Pfeffer [Pfeffer, Jeffrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781800751262
Google: aPLrzgEACAAJ
Publisher: Swift Press
Published: 2022-06-15T21:17:50+00:00

STAND OUT BY BEING APPROPRIATELY CONTROVERSIAL

In addition to building relationships with media people and making their jobs easier, another part of brand building entails becoming newsworthy. In today’s world of pursuing clicks and eyeballs, getting attention—being newsworthy—mostly entails being controversial. Once again, Jason Calacanis has much to teach us.

In the 1980s, Calacanis started a publication called Cyber Surfer. When a dispute with the owner/backer caused it to fold, he started the Silicon Alley Reporter to cover the New York technology scene. Five years later, the magazine, built off his credit cards, was generating $12 million a year in revenue. In an effort to get the magazine more visibility, during its first year of operation Calacanis started the Silicon Alley 100, the hundred most important people or companies in the area. Of his desire to rank the contenders, he said:

My team is desperately trying to get me not to rank the list because they are afraid it will upset people. And I said, “That’s precisely why we’re going to rank it.” So who is number one? It’s obviously DoubleClick; they have more money, a product, more employees. So I say, “Great, they’re number two” . . . I want everybody to be talking about this list, and why the person who’s number one is more important than them. So I picked Esther Dyson. She’s a woman, Bill Gates calls her for advice . . . she’s a tech visionary. For the next seven, eight years, my entire life was consumed with people lobbying me to figure out where they were on the list for the next year.16

If the Calacanis strategy seems familiar, it should. John Byrne drew attention to the first ranking of business schools published by BusinessWeek in 1988 by selecting as the top-rated school not Harvard or Stanford or Wharton or MIT, but Northwestern, which at the time was not nearly as prominent. An unobvious choice, a controversial position, draws attention.

People who knew Calacanis commented that his hero was Howard Stern, the shock jock, author, actor, and producer. When Travis Kalanick got into trouble for Uber’s “bro” culture, Calacanis came to his vigorous defense on CNBC’s “Squawk Alley.” Calacanis was always willing to say what he thought, which made him a desirable guest and why CNBC had been after him to become a regular with his own show. At a party, Michael Ovitz, former president of Disney and cofounder of Creative Artists Agency, told Calacanis that he loved him on CNBC. Why? “You always tell the truth. Whatever anybody’s thinking, you just come out and say it. You take a side and you defend people and you don’t split hairs.”17

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