Seth Godin is considered a marketing genius – and I admit I receive and read his posts every day via email. I have exchanged a few emails with him and always found him genuine and interesting, just like his columns. But today he wrote something that really resonated with me. I quote:
The fifth Beatle
It’s an insult. If someone (who isn’t John, Paul, George or Ringo) calls you a fifth Beatle, they’re not being nice.
For fifty years, people have been proclaiming that they’re intimates, part of the story, a key component of the success of the Beatles… Just as there are people who would like you to believe that they were instrumental in this startup, that project or the other initiative. Success has many parents, failure few.
Here’s the deal: you don’t get to be part of the success narrative unless you were fully exposed if there was going to be a failure narrative instead.
Innovators need your support, without a doubt. But if you want to be a Beatle, start your own group.
My first thought went to Sharron Watkins, of all crazy people. I was thinking how she wanted so badly to be seen as the “mother of Enron’s failure”, the architect who brought it all down. And yet she wanted no part of Enron’s success. This is literally the only case I can think of in which there is more leverage to fail than to win.
The Enron story is full of reversed “fifth Beatles”. There are people who make quite a good living traveling round the country, proclaiming from the rooftops that they saw how corrupt Enron was, that they were responsible for the collapse of Enron.
And yet the people who have something to be genuinely proud of are considered the bad people. Those who birthed and nourished the company, who produced magnificent technologies and intriguing new ideas, are considered criminals. They now live quiet lives, distancing themselves from Enron and its accomplishments, as if that era of their past is something to be ashamed of.
It is really heartbreakingly sad that the Enron story has become a negative of the norm. The truth is that those men who built Enron are heroes. They should be venerated. Those who seek acknowledgement for bringing the company down are parasites. They’re the Fifth Beatle and it is disgusting.
Cara who besides Rich Kinder would put as a builder of Enron into something great and someone to emulate. I know the goood people never receive enough credit for the great work they do and what they contributed to the great success of Enron? Although its funny in a way that there is and are great legacies of Enron still around besides Rich Kinder and what was the starting point of KM which which was the Enron liquids business but also EOG Resources which has made great strides in fracking the Bakken Shale in ND.