“She was never some algorithm trying to give us more of what it thinks we want, or something driven by A.I. She was a person who judged and decided based on her own haughty sense of what was best.” Those are the words of writer Amy Odell, at the New York Times. That’s how she recently described Anna Wintour, outgoing editor-in-chief of Vogue.
Odell’s description of Wintour and how she built the Vogue “book” each month should be pinned on the wall of every would-be MBA, along with anyone else harboring dreams of enterprise or entrepreneur. It will exist as a reminder that “know your customer” might be the most overrated, oversold, and simplistic notion in commerce.
The greats of business lead needs, as opposed to meeting them. Think of how drab, and limited fashion would be if Wintour had sat around all these decades trying to feed Vogue readers. If so, Anna Wintour wouldn’t be Anna Wintour and Vogue wouldn’t be Vogue. The value of Wintour was precisely rooted in her deeply held view that the customer was wrong. Readers would adapt to her vision, not the opposite.
It's a comment that Wintour is an entrepreneur, first and foremost. Which is a reminder that entrepreneurialism isn’t a choice that people to go to college or business school to become, rather it’s a state of mind. Entrepreneurs are revolted by how things are done, even when done well, only for them to lead people in new directions they never imagined being taken.
True entrepreneurs can’t not do as they’re doing. Evidence supporting this claim can be found in the abundant and supercilious skepticism that follows them into their ventures. Talk about discrimination, but then they frequently see what’s not obvious to others, including the biggest of big in business.
Considering Wintour through the eyes of the MBA students of today, they would be wise to remember that the present of commerce is already the past. The latter is vivified by the copious amounts of investment that finds its way to Silicon Valley and other pockets of innovative commercial activity. The mindset isn’t to meet the needs of customers sated by the present, it’s total revulsion at how badly “business” is presently being done.
It speaks to how different the venture capital business model is. If most of their investments don’t fail, that just means they’re not taking useful risks. Translated, they soon won’t be venture capitalists.
Real VC investing is defined by the pursuit of the impossible, as opposed to what might kind of, sort of do well. Exactly because just about every VC-backed startup fails very quickly, incredibly rare successes that transform how we do things are required to pay for the myriad failures.
In short, Silicon Valley and other locales like it are populated by Wintours of a different kind, and who are maniacal in their view that the customer doesn’t have a faint clue about what he or she wants. While surely not as fashionable as Wintour, the entrepreneurs out in northern California possess her haughtiness in spades.
Which is a short way of not just appreciating Wintour’s long rein at the top of Vogue and fashion more broadly, but also the meaning of it. Wintour is a monument to business not as its taught in business schools and books about how “the customer is always right,” but to business as it’s done by the best of the best without whom progress would cease.
That the customer is always wrong lies at the heart of progress. Anna Wintour has shown us why that’s true for decades.
