Let me tell you a quick story.

It’s 1944, June 6th, in fact. A special group of American soldiers known as “Rangers” are speeding across the English Channel on a small troop carrier. Their objective? A place called Pont du Hoc.

Pont du Hoc is a rise in the Normandy Beach. In all, it stands about 125-150 meters above the sand.

The Nazis had placed some very nasty long guns atop this cliff. These guns, some 12 inches in bore size, had command of the entire bay of Normandy.

Consequently, they had to be taken out.

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In Walter Isaacson's biography entitled "Steve Jobs," the author (page 143) paraphrases the Great Reality Distorter's belief that there is no sense in "researching" a market or a specific product offering if yours is an innovative company.

This is not new; I have been preaching this to my students for at least a decade. After all, if you are "ahead" of the populace in terms of technology and trends, then why spend your time and effort to further confirm an immutable belief?

To quote Mr. Jobs, "...customers don't know what they want until we've shown them." He said this as he showed his Macintosh development team a device that was about the size of a desk diary. "Do you want to see something neat?" he said. He flipped open this "desk diary" and it was a mockup of a computer that could fit on your lap and included a keyboard and screen hinged together just like a notebook.

"This is my dream of what we will be making in the mid-to-late 80's" he said. In essence, Jobs was building a company that would "invent the future."

And who is to argue with his Royal Highness? When you have that kind of prescience, why ask people to confirm whether or not you're already in the ballpark? Jobs believed, and right up until the day he died, that he knew best insofar as computer and computer software products were concerned, and thus no one was going to dispel his beliefs by presenting insincere consumer surveys.

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Back in the mid-80’s, just after having filed for bankruptcy (personal and business) I had to basically start all over again.

It was a tough time --- here I was 34 years old with a negative net worth (I owed the IRS three quarters of a million dollars and I had other personal debts of approximately the same amount).

But I had to start somewhere, and so I took a job with a company in Ohio that enabled me to earn huge commissions if I was successful.

And I was successful; in fact, I became that company’s top producing salesperson (out of some 300 reps) within a year.

But I always marveled at the fact that getting deals done (and I should point out that these were very large deals --- a typical sale for me was in the seven figure range) involved two sales; the obvious sale to the customer, and then the internal sale to the company I worked for.

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A dear friend of mine, John Lee, texted me. His text pretty much read, “What up?”

He sent this text sometime in mid-January and it has been a standard greeting between he and I for nearly 35 years. You see, we grew up together.

I, and at the time, had just begun to experience the beginnings of my current medical adventures. I had neither the time nor the interest in writing him a big long explanation.

But I had been keeping up with my Twitter account @RonMorrisBiz. I started this account a couple months earlier, and it was designed just for this particular type of text message. So I wrote back to John, “Check my Twitter account, ‘RonMorrisBiz,’ for an update on all recent issues related to medical.”

His response came back: “Don’t know Twitter,” followed by, “Don’t use Twitter,” and then closed with, “Don’t even understand how Twitter works.”

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The other day, a friend asked me, “Why is it so damned hard to build a business that makes you a multi-millionaire before the age of fifty?”

“Good question," I responded, “And certainly one that I have thought about many, many times. Tell you what --- I’ll give you a list right off the top of my head and then you can ask me questions if you like.”

Here was the list I came up with:

Be very careful with publicity. I know that a lot of people might say, “But if I get my picture into TEQ Magazine, we’ll get customers. But will you? Methinks not --- at least this has been my experience. Remember, what you’re telling the world is, “Hey, we’re a start-up, making start-up mistakes without much money or depth. But we’d really like to have your business.”

What you will get is competitors - and LOTS of ‘em. Problem is, some of them will be well heeled and have existing channels of distribution.

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I seem to be only focused on student and education-related issues these days.

This could be because of my own kids’ recent report cards. You see, I have two children, and the one that I have come to expect higher grades from dropped in both his academic and comportment standings this most recent grading period; while the one that usually does very well socially and yet whose grades are not generally as high, turned in some unbelievable academic scores while maintaining the “family standard” in the area considered “good citizenry”.

Or, it could be what I’m seeing right now with my own students at Duquesne --- which is yet another episode of cheating.

Or maybe, just maybe, it has everything to do with a simple little movie entitled, “The 3 Idiots” --- a film that I had never heard of and a film that was sent to me in the U.S. mail by a regular listener to our radio show (himself a very bright guy --- he obviously pays close attention to the things we talk about on the show and the philosophies I hold dearly, especially as it comes to higher education).

Some more on this.

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All the tough guys are gone! – This should be self-evident --- professors who would look students in the eye and say, “Yes, you failed the course --- and you deserved to fail the course. So what do you want from me?”

One of the toughest of the tough guys was Tom Murrin. Tom’s motto (though I never actually heard him say it) was, “You take a pass … he’ll have your ass.”

When I joined Duquesne back in 1999, Tom was probably the first (and for a while, it seemed like the only) individual on the faculty and/or its management that not only welcomed me to the program, but that also showed me which way the wind was blowing. His support was so very important to me. To have a guy of his caliber (he was also once president of what he liked to call the “Dirty Hands” businesses of Westinghouse) who really never cared much about whether or not you were slick, glib, and/or hip. He only cared about results.

Many a night, Tom and I would sit in his office and he would tell me stories about the halcyonic days of Circle W. The stories were great --- the truth even better. I never knew that so much fun could be had in an environment of growth and learning.

But as one who had grown up in the world of small business, I soon came to realize that there was a significant gulf between that which happened in a start-up and that which took place in a major corporation.

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Every company in America has a niche --- something that they do differently; hopefully better --- than their competition.

Sometimes this niche can be significantly different (an example that comes to mind is the Apple iPhone --- which for an inordinate amount of time enjoyed a completely monopolistic position) while at other times the amount of differentiation is virtually imperceptible. A good example of less-dramatic differentiation might be the service one receives at a local restaurant.

Sometimes you have to look very hard and very closely, but it’s really hard to fathom a business that is without some kind of differentiator.

This “special distinction” is generally known as the “value proposition” offered by that particular business. It’s the primary reason why the client patronizes that business in the first place.

I bring this up in light of the fact that, and even though every company in America has some way of differentiating itself from others, the salespeople for these companies still persist in selling based on price and price alone. Allow me to illustrate.

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For those of you (like me) who study the great entrepreneurs, you may have already figured out that the individual I’m describing here is Walter Elias Disney, quite possibly the greatest non-scientist entrepreneur in the history of this great country.

Why Disney? Simple. Because I’m writing this column while with my family at Disney World, his “touch” is everywhere. You can hardly not think of him.

Moreover, Walt would have been proud of the fact that my family is with me while I’m working on this article because it was his belief that “family is everything”. In his own words, “The most important thing is the family. After all, family is the backbone of our whole business.”

I knew very little about WE Disney when I and my family recently traveled from Pittsburgh for a four-day mini-vacation to the Magic Kingdom. Oh, I knew that he was the driving force behind the magnificent Walt Disney Corporation (magnificent then, not necessarily now, unfortunately) but I never really studied the man himself. And, neither did I study the events in his life that propelled him to the great successes he achieved.

Entrepreneurs are a tough-minded bunch. And here, I’m talking about the real ones --- not the, “Look at me, I’m an entrepreneur, too” --- as they accept and then burn millions of dollars in start-up capital --- kind.

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Last month, I was consulting with a software company on a deal and it seemed the more they tried to pin down the various flanks and end-points of the agreement, the further they (hereinafter “we”) got from defining anything that might work for both sides.

What we were writing (or, attempting to write) was the working definition of a software product/service for a brand-new client. The buyer didn’t wish to pay for the product up-front. Instead, he wanted only to do a “pay-as-you-go” deal whereby his monies would be released only when he was “satisfied” that a particular software program “worked.”

This, of course, brought up a number of issues and definitions. Chief among them:

And these were only the “Big” issues, of course. There were myriad other points of negotiation, including such classics as:

I had been hired to help both parties get this deal DONE! And as I sat in the room watching and listening to the back-and-forth, I realized that this negotiation was doomed; for the more definitions and “work-arounds” the two parties came up with, the more complicated the overall deal itself became.

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The other day, I was talking to our young sales guy about his sales prospects. I was just trying to get a handle on which accounts might be closing in the near-term.

As we went through each name, the salesman began to tell me about one particular account that he had forecasted as “90% closed.”

In other words, the only thing that was missing from this deal was the check and a signed contract.

I probed some more and in doing so, I asked him when it was that he had last spoken with the economic buyer for this account.

His answer floored me … “November,” he said, “the first week of November.”

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In the spirit of the holidays, I give you three short, rather than one long, columns. Enjoy.

Bob Dickey

The last of Pittsburgh’s old-time newsmen, Bob passed away on Christmas Eve. He was 85 years old, just five days shy of his 86th birthday.

Bob’s daughter, Carol Finelli walked into my broadcast studio on my birthday, December 10. When she closed the door behind her I just had the feeling that something was very, very wrong.

And it was, for not a minute or two later she confided in me the fact that doctors had found cancer in Bob Dickey at a routine examination just a month earlier. She told me that he “might not make it to Christmas,” and then asked that I keep this to myself.

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You know those famous aphorisms about, “there are just two kinds of people in the world?”

Well, here’s yet another:

There are just two kinds of people in the world: “initiators” (I’ll also call them “creators” or just “I/C’s”) and “reactors.”

An initiator is someone who can’t stop thinking about the business or the task at hand. He or she is goal-driven. His/her mind never stops thinking of ways to succeed.

The reactor is the opposite. They think up nothing and they wait for their next set of “marching orders,” which they secretly hope will never come.

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The other night, and just after having completed a radio show; Brian McMahon, Andrew Rossi, and I stood outside of the Renda Broadcasting building.

It was a balmy night and so we had plenty of time to converse. Plus (and this very, very rarely happens) no one had to be anywhere else at that particular time.

We all walked Andrew to his car and as we reached it, we noticed that the front right fender had been seriously “assaulted.” It was badly dented and scratched.

“What the hell happened to you, Drew?” Brian questioned, “Did you clip somebody in a parking lot or something?”

To which Andrew replied, “No, this actually happened while I was asleep in my apartment (he lives on the Southside). Somebody actually threw a garbage can at the front of my car.”

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The change is so imperceptible that you probably don’t even see it.

But it makes sense. Total sense. And along with other drivers such as the Marcellus/Utica Shale, high-tech start-ups, and healthcare, this quiet trend is doing a great deal of good in terms of “saving” our fair city.

I’m talking about Pittsburgh’s role as a back office “home.” I’m talking about moving the “glamour” work to the coasts (along with the requisite glamour people) while the grind-it-out people and the stuff they produce stays fixed within the boundaries of your favorite three rivers.

A good friend of mine, Mark Laskow, calls Pittsburgh the “Bangalore” of big industry. And he’s right. He’s right because big industry is no longer characterized solely by manufacturers. Instead, we’re talking primarily here about industries like law and medicine and banking.

The idea is simple and, really, as old as this country itself. You put your “pretty boys” --- those who can sell, those who can hustle deals --- on the east and west coasts. You allow them to throw lavish parties and ink outrageous contracts. You then take the business they generate this way and send it back home for the “muckers and grinders.”

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