The shift toward individual credit throughout journalism is not due to any upsurge in the public’s curiosity about who is writing what. It’s because journalists are now selling themselves. They have less job security but also greater opportunity to make it big. Many move in rapid succession from one publication to another as they build their reputations. Among the highest achievements for a print journalist is to be invited to appear on television, and thence to be a “regular” guest. Magazines and newspapers, continuously seeking talented people, are willing to accommodate their growing desire for visibility. Besides, a celebrity journalist on staff can help sell the magazine.
It is much the same in computer software, where individual credits are appearing more often at the start of programs and even on the packaging; and in law firms, investment banks, and other professional partnerships, which increasingly advertise the names and accomplishments of their major partners. All are moving toward what’s been standard practice in the movie industry for many years, where the size and positioning of credits has been among the most contentious issues in contract negotiations. Hollywood has long been inhabited by talented people who are forever building their names.
In politics, today’s up-and-comers are more interested in building their personal brands than in building their parties. Increasingly, they’re targeting their own donors, developing their own images independent of their parties, seeking personal credit for legislative accomplishment, and creating their own personal buzz. In the old system, a Jesse Ventura would have had to toil for years in the vineyards of party politics before becoming governor of Minnesota. Instead, he built his name as a wrestler known for fighting with a pink boa under the klieg lights of the World Wrestling Federation and then as a radio talk-show host. Pat Buchanan, a perennial candidate for president, belongs to no particular party. His brand identity is as a pugnacious TV pundit. For a short while in 1999, the press gave respectful attention to the possible presidential candidacies of Hollywood star Warren Beatty, entertainment mogul Oprah Winfrey, and New York real-estate tycoon Donald Trump. None got far, but the mere fact that anyone with name recognition can now run for President of the United States suggests how far we’ve come toward a system of self-marketing politics. American politics is also going the way of Hollywood. “This whole relationship between Hollywood and Washington is as natural as marriage,” says Norman Lear, the television producer. “We’re basically in the same business. We’re coveting the audience’s attention.”
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PUTTING YOURSELF IN PLAY
Years ago, most people didn’t know what they were “worth” on the open market because there wasn’t much of an open market for their services. They were part of an organization, and they tended to remain inside it. For them to solicit offers from rival enterprises would have been as unseemly as for rival enterprises to try to lure them away. But increasingly, people know what they’re worth on the market because they’re “in play,” as are their colleagues. Specialized Internet chat boards (like “Greedy Associates,” for young lawyers) keep them apprised of the going rates. They let it be known they’re looking for new opportunities, and rival groups bid for them with abandon.
A rising star typically solicits an offer from a rival firm that is considerably more generous than the star’s current compensation, and then dangles the offer in front of a senior executive. “I really don’t want to leave here,” the star says sorrowfully. “This is a great place to work, and you’ve been damn good to me.” And then, innocently: “What do you think I should do about
this
?” The message is clear: Match the bid or better it, or I’m gone.
Some enterprises depend on rival bids in order to establish appropriate pay levels. When an acquaintance who is a computer engineer recently sought a raise, the head of the software house where he works asked him to get a bid from a rival software house, and the executive would match it. The executive explained that there was no better way to determine the engineer’s market value than to test it in the market.
Not long ago, it was reported that the president of Brown University, after only eighteen months on the job, received a salary offer from Vanderbilt University roughly three times larger than the $300,000 a year Brown was paying him. It used to be an unwritten rule that Ivy League presidents remained at their posts for a decade or more. Apparently, that is no longer the case. The still-new Brown president told the Brown trustees about the offer from Vanderbilt, and then departed for the more lucrative position, leaving in his wake a lot of hurt feelings as well as a powerful lesson for thousands of Brown undergraduates about money and loyalty in the new economy. The Vanderbilt trustee who recruited him said she didn’t see what all the fuss was about. She runs a large wholesale book business. “People take people from my company all the time,” she said.
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“Headhunters” maintain stables of prospective candidates for potential spots even if the candidates are now happily employed elsewhere. “Eventually they’ll want to try something else,” one headhunter explained to me, referring to the people in his stables, “and eventually something will open up that will be perfect for them. We want to establish long-term relationships in advance, with both sides—people who are hot prospects, and hot groups that are likely to need them.”
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It’s been this way in professional baseball for years, ever since free agency. Ball clubs have valuable franchises in their brands. Up-and-coming players develop their own brand names. I used to take my son Adam to see Red Sox games in Fenway Park. His favorite player was a big hulk of a first baseman named Mo Vaughn. Mo could hit balls out of the park with greater ease and regularity than anybody else on the team, and when Mo came up to the plate, Adam silently prayed that the pitcher wouldn’t walk him. As Mo’s star rose, he attracted more fans to Fenway Park; and as he did so, his compensation package kept rising. A few years ago, Mo wanted more than the Sox were willing to pay him. He rejected their offer of about $64 million over five years. “It’s been a great time here,” he told his disappointed fans on his way to a somewhat more lucrative contract with the Anaheim Angels. “I hold no grudges in the situation. I want to thank my teammates. Best wishes to the Boston Red Sox and
their
fans.” The italics are mine, because I wanted to emphasize the shift in the pronoun. The two brands—the Red Sox brand and the Mo Vaughn brand—were now going their separate ways. As Mo explained, “I’m not moving, I’m just going somewhere else to work.”
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One important consequence of the bids and counterbids is to widen the gap between the highest-paid and lowest-paid members of any team or group—reflecting their relative drawing power. You can see the phenomenon in law firms and other professional partnerships, where rainmakers who pull in clients now take home pay packages that are multiples of those received by lowly partners who simply do careful professional work. This is because the “rainmakers” aren’t just selling the firm; they’re selling themselves. They pull in clients because of their carefully cultivated reputations and connections. Years ago, that wouldn’t have mattered; all partners received approximately the same compensation because they were partners, and they expected to remain with one another for most of their professional lives. But in the new economy, valuable rainmakers can go anywhere. Naturally, they expect compensation to reflect the value of their personal brand. If they don’t receive it, they’ll go to another firm that will treat them more generously—and bring their personal brand (and a bevy of clients) along with them.
About the last place you’d expect to see this bidding game is among the tenured professoriat of America’s great universities. It used to be that tenured faculty within such rarefied environs stayed put for decades, unto death, occasionally even beyond death—delivering the same lectures to generations of students within the same lecture halls, writing variations on the same papers (read and commented upon by the same circle of colleagues), attending the same annual academic conferences. It was assumed that these institutions were sufficiently prestigious that the mere honor of being associated with them satisfied most ambition. The late C. P. Snow, author and philosopher, once said that Cambridge dons were not distinguished men, but merely men who conferred distinction upon one another.
And yet, even in these musty climes, there are rumblings of a new order. In the fall of 1998, Columbia University agreed to pay Robert J. Barro nearly $300,000 a year if he would leave his tenured position at Harvard and join Columbia’s economics department. To put this sum in perspective, it was at the time roughly twice the top salary paid to arts and sciences faculty at Harvard, Columbia, and other elite universities. According to the
New York Times,
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Columbia also agreed to give Barro three spacious offices (office space inside a typically cramped university building is coveted almost as much as parking space outside) and a sizeable research allowance, as well as the opportunity to recruit a number of promising younger economists. This was not all. Columbia would also place Barro’s son in an exclusive Manhattan private school, give Barro’s wife a $55,000-a-year university post, and install the entire Barro family in a 2,300-square-foot university-owned apartment on Riverside Drive, which Columbia would renovate and rent to him at half the estimated market rate.
I do not know Barro, but I am sure he is very able. His theoretical work has had considerable influence in the economics profession, and he was distinguished before he came to Harvard. The offer that Columbia University made to Barro is significant not so much for what it signals about him, or about Columbia, as for what it suggests about the new market in personal brands even within the most hallowed of academic sanctuaries. Heretofore, there was no question but that the brands “Columbia University” and “Harvard University” were far more significant attractions than were the names of any individual members of their respective faculties. Both universities had built their faculties slowly, nurturing their star doctoral students, culling their postgraduates, and only occasionally, painstakingly, selecting a few rising young stars from elsewhere. And despite the inevitable deadwood that accumulates in tenured ranks, both universities continue to house many great and lively minds whose reputations have deservedly grown over time.
But even Harvard and Columbia are transmuting into fast-moving networks whose continuing ability to attract talented people—both teachers and students—depends on the talented people they already have been able to attract. They need to maintain virtuous cycles in which the reputation of their brand enhances the personal reputations of their faculties and students, who in turn enhance the reputation of the university brand and in that way attract more illustrious faculty and students. With talent now on the move, such a virtuous sequence cannot be taken for granted. Greatness can be bought wholesale. An entire department can be poached if the package of pay and perquisite is sufficiently generous.
Columbia was willing to pay Barro an extraordinary sum by university standards because it thought his reputation in the field of economics would burnish Columbia’s reputation and accelerate just this sort of virtuous cycle. In fact, through Barro, Columbia could create an even more lustrous economics department, wholesale. In one of his rounds of negotiation with Columbia, Barro submitted a list of ten to twelve rising economics stars whom he wanted Columbia to snare as part of the deal. Presumably, many of them would be attracted to Columbia both by Barro’s presence and by the presence of the other young stars in the package. Rather than painstakingly build its department person by person, Columbia would buy a whole piece of it. “[I]f it’s successful, it will change the way people think about the build-or-buy decision,” a University of Chicago economist commented about the package deal. “Money will talk and blitz campaigns will work.”
Before making its initial bid, Columbia measured the worth of Barro’s drawing power by consulting other stars in the economics firmament. A Columbia dean sought the advice of Milton Friedman, an eminent conservative economist. “Milton was very positive,” the dean told the
Times.
“He said, ‘Barro’s young. He’s got visibility. People are drawn to him.’ ” One Columbia economist described the deal in terms of costs and benefits. “We’re capturing a lot of the surplus that Robert will generate,” he said.
The raid shook Harvard to the core. Was it just possible that the Harvard brand was no longer sufficient, in and of itself, to guarantee that the school’s more illustrious faculty would stay put? The dean of the faculty, who until then had bragged that he had never been forced to match an offer from another university, invited Barro to what was described as a “long, wine-drenched dinner” to present Harvard’s counteroffer—involving a new research center and more. Whatever was put on the table apparently worked, because in the end Barro decided to stay put. Yet it was a close call for Harvard, which the dean apparently does not want to repeat. He is reportedly building a “war chest” to fend off future raids.
The Barro case is also interesting for the subtle tension it reveals between the two brands for which Barro was working: the Harvard brand and the Barro brand. For much of his career, Barro’s research and writing had contributed to developing the Barro brand while simultaneously burnishing Harvard’s reputation. By working for Barro, he had also been working for Harvard.
But not even Harvard can survive by relying solely on individual entrepreneurs. It also needs people who invest in the institution as a whole. Suppose you are a young Harvard assistant professor, having witnessed Barro’s near defection to Columbia. Harvard clearly wants you to do research and writing. But it also wants you to do many other things that will uniquely help Harvard but not build your own reputation in the field. It wants you to teach students, advise them, make speeches to alumni groups, and serve on faculty committees. How much of your time and energy are you likely to devote to these institutional activities, as opposed to building your own brand? Probably as little as you can get away with. You know that the odds are against your remaining at Harvard for your career. You can now see quite clearly the considerable rewards of building your own brand as diligently as you can.