I’m just finishing up the book Hard Drive, which is about Bill Gates and the early days of building the Microsoft empire. Gates is now one of our most celebrated business figures, and has a folksy sort of aura around him, thanks to his foundation and other endeavors like Gates Notes.
The problem with that picture is that Gates was ridiculously, almost comically aggressive as CEO at Microsoft. Microsoft used its position as the OS of choice to eviscerate applications from other companies (at one point the internal tagline for MS-DOS was apparently "DOS isn’t done until Lotus won’t run"). It dangled partnerships to get a look at competitors' tech, and then dropped the offer and replicated the tech. It used its huge amount of leverage from owning both the most popular OS and the most popular languages to force other companies (including Apple) to bend to its will.
This is all very relevant to the university admissions scandal currently rumbling Wall Street and Hollywood. In those worlds, as in the rest of the business universe, aggression is expected and rewarded. McGlashan et al undoubtedly knew what they were doing was wrong. But in the context of "everyone else is doing it" and the college “legacy” system that rewards alumni fealty, they probably felt that an aggressive move would again be rewarded, as it had been for their entire careers. Once turned on, aggression isn’t so easy to turn off. And this is not new:
The story is the same in tech. We always hear about how employees at Facebook are ‘well intentioned people’ but went a bit too far, were a bit too zealous. But aggression gets rewarded, so what do you expect? When the target is MAUs or DAUs, that’s what you get. I don’t know anyone who would argue that Facebook’s product has improved on the individual level, or that they’re more engaged with it than they were five years ago (let’s exclude Instagram here). But in aggregate terms it looked like more DAUs which looked like more ad dollars which is an Unassailable Good.
The difficulty with aggression is that it needs to be buttressed against a moral/ethical standard that puts aggression in its place. And that standard can't be static, it has to move in pace with the times in which it exists.
My first job out of university was in the commodities trading markets. Aggression there looked like ‘acquiring flow’, aka providing extremely tight spreads to your customers so that people want to trade with you. When a lot of people are trading with you, you have a pretty good sense of what's happening in the market. And when you know what’s happening in the market you can trade on it (or ahead of it). In the 80’s, 90’s and early 00’s that type of aggression was rewarded extremely well. Then the LIBOR scandal broke, and that aggression was rewarded with DOJ investigations and, for the worst offenders, jail time.
Aggression will continue to be rewarded as it always has. But applied without limit, the rewards to aggression will be harsh.