A personal reflection offered by Nick Hanauer.
I hadn’t come across Mr. Hanauer before but thanks to some Facebook comments by Patrice Ayme found this YouTube video that is well-worth watching. That’s an understatement!
The fundamental message that is contained in this short video seems critical, well to me it does, to society (that’s all of us, by the way) understanding why so many things seem to be going so very wrong for so many people. But let me stop there before it becomes another of my rants!
Who is Nick Hanauer? Here is a small extract from Nick Hanauer’s website,
Nicolas J Hanauer is a partner with Second Avenue Partners, a Seattle venture capital partnership specializing in early state startups and emerging technology. He has had a hand in such companies as Amazon.com and aQuantive among others.
Hanauer’s career began with a position as executive VP of Sales and Marketing at Pacific Coast Feather Company, a family owned manufacturer of basic bedding. In his time in that role, he helped grow Pacific Coast from several million dollars to more than $300 million in sales. Hanauer subsequently served as the company’s Co-Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer and remains Chief Executive Officer.
In 1988, Hanauer co-founded Museum Quality Framing Company, a company that has emerged the largest of its kind on the west coast with 60 locations. Hanauer was also one of the first investors in Amazon.com in 1995, where he served as a Board Advisor until January of 2000.
In 1996, he founded and served as CEO of internet media company Avenue A Media (later re-named aQuantive, Inc.) and became Chairman of the Board upon the first public offering in 2000. aQuantive was purchased by Microsoft in August of 2007 for 6.4 billion dollars; the largest acquisition in Microsoft history.
Now the video; less than 6 minutes long – do watch it!
As a one-time entrepreneur back in the 80’s I can vouch for much of what Mr. Hanauer proclaims in his video. The essence of successful marketing for any business, large and small, is understanding your market. Seeing the customer’s world through the customer’s eyes would be another way of putting that.
In plain language that means carefully and closely understanding what your customers, both actual and prospective, require, objectively and subjectively, and providing it to them profitably. As the middle-classes (don’t like the term but it will have to do) are often the largest market opportunity, then it does follow that a healthy and vibrant middle-class is going to be best overall for the health and vibrancy of a country. Indeed, in this very inter-connected world, that really equates to the health and vibrancy of our planet.
Which so easily leads on to a core truth. This one. If all the Governments democratically elected on this planet truly acknowledged the democratic foundation, as Lincoln so ably put it, “government of the people, by the people, for the people” then those governments would be united in the one most important task facing the people – creating a sustainable way for us to live on the only planet we have!
Apologies, it did turn into a rant!
You may also want to read this TED and inequality: The real story.
Learning from Dogs 
Thank you for highlighting that not all capitalists have a totally blinkered view of their own worth!
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Apologies for the reply to my own post, but: intriguing… I followed the link in your postscript and read the article there without realising that the talk being discussed was the very one, from Nick Hanauer, that you talk about above. And this kind of makes me feel like retracting my comment above…
TED’s stance in this definitely rings hollow to me — but then, it would do, I’m biased in favour of the idea that inequality is at an all-time high. We’ve done more than enough forelock-tugging; if we’re all in this together, it’s high time that the wealthiest among us stopped behaving as though they are somehow so very much better than everyone else, and started paying their share. Heads have rolled in the past, for less…
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Apologies not required, just lovely to have your comment. Oh, and if you want to republish this Post on ‘Wibble’ please do so. Paul
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Mr Hanauer needs to have a quiet word with George Osborne and David Cameron in the UK; because one of the few things that the Liberal Democrats are not challenging the Conservative-led coalition government is their well-publicised and enacted policy of lowering Corporation Tax to the lowest level of any country in Europe – if not the World. They have also lowered personal tax on the wealthy – on advice from those trying to collect the taxes who say so much money is spent on tax avoidance that it is not economic to try and collect it all… Next stop for the UK may be Greece – where so little tax is collected from anybody that it is only good for cheap summer holidays, fine-sounding literature and philosophy, and ancient monuments.
Mr Hanauer’s appeal for the wealthy to shoulder more of the tax burden (not less) is welcome evidence of altruism sadly absent from the pronouncements and behaviours exhibited by most of the super-rich. It is somewhat reminiscent of the refreshing demand of the owner of a peat-extraction business calling for carbon to be taxed or even banned; in order to encourage demand for and investment in alternatives.
With people like Mr. Hanauer around, there may yet be hope for humanity to avert the catastrophe awaiting us all if we choose to ignore science, history and economics.
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Thanks Martin, yes this message is so powerful because it comes from the mouth of someone sufficiently brave to stand up and say not all the wealthy are plutocrats.
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Is he, indeed, the exception that proves the validity of the rule that “power corrupts; and absolute power corrupts absolutely”?
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I’m tempted to track down the man and ask what was his motivation behind the TED video!
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@ Martin: “power corrupts; and absolute power corrupts absolutely” — there may in fact be no exception to the rule here, even though it appears at first glance that there is: ‘corruptible power’ (the status quo) may well have ensured that Mr Hanauer’s words have reached a somewhat smaller audience than one might, at first, think is the case… Paul’s postscripted ‘You may also want to read this…’ provides valuable context.
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First thought that comes to mind is that, simply stated, the taxation structure is illogical. As the author Carlos Fuentes once stated “yesterday’s communism without freedom, today’s capitalism without justice.” Amen…
Merci
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Merci, what a wonderful quotation from Fuentes. Thank you for your thought, always lovely to read your comments, Paul
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First Pedantry is right: inequality is at all time high in the USA (at least since the 1930s). That’s measured by GINI.
Taxing the wealthy is just a matter of mathematics of the exponential, and the nature of interest. This was known already in neolithic societies. That this is forgotten today shows that some societies yearn towards prehistory.
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‘… yearn towards prehistory’! Like that! P.
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