That's why even the poster child for the E-commerce boom, Amazon.com, has evolved an icon that rivals any for its humble, simple, concrete qualities. And we're not talking about some book here.
The icon by which Amazon.com celebrates its soaring spirit is a simple desk handmade from a wooden door, angle brackets, and two-by-fours that founder Jeff Bezos brought back from Home Depot one day. The company was just starting out, and he had to have a desk fast and cheap. Today, flush with cash and capable of buying any number of highly expensive designer desks, Amazon.com insists that all employees use jury-rigged desks built from doors. Why? Because the desks recall the company's roots. Like any good icon, each desk invokes a spirit of higher purpose.
Of course, to create an icon, the story must be told. Every employee quickly learns about the frugal roots of the company that the door desk represents. When writer Joshua Quittner profiled Bezos as Time's 1999 Person of the Year, he took special note of the $60 desks. An icon works only if it's easy to recognize.
Even in the digital economy, low-tech icons stand in for a company's core values. That's because although businesses are being formed in whole new ways, the values their founders preach remain the same. Hard work. Humble roots. The rise from small to great.
But something is changing. The time it takes for such humble items to reach icon status is often telescoped in this crazy dot-com world. That is due to more than the speed at which trade happens in the digital age. It also reflects our insane hunger to make sense of a "new" economy. Whereas the HP garage has been part of company lore for 60-plus years, Amazon.com can lay claim to an icon of its own although the company wasn't even conceived of until May 1994. And the door desk has all the power of the garage, able in a single bound of the imagination to conjure up the concept of proud service without frills.
The digital economy also can put its own spin on distinctly analog icons. In 1977, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield heard about a $5 correspondence course in ice-cream making. The two friends split the tuition and took the course, which became the icon for the earthy roots of Ben & Jerry's, the ice-cream brand they later built from that modest investment. As a symbol, the course says worlds about the company and its culture: "We're just two guys trying to figure out what to do and do it well. And we don't want to waste a lot of money we don't have doing it."
How things change. Today you can go online to read about and register for that same Ice Cream Short Course, which has been offered by Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences since 1892. There's an optional closed-book test. The big news: the cost is now $915. Yet the course still has power as an icon. Icons are not about pragmatic reality. They're about evoking the themes that stir the human heart.
How to recognize an icon
We're now plunk in the middle of an economy that's been turned on its head. The thirst for quick payoffs undermines the classic notion of what business is all about: building value over the long term. In such an environment, what will be the icons of tomorrow? What can today's hot-start companies produce in terms of symbols of human aspiration? Those million-dollar checks that VCs are doling out to queued-up start-ups? Or some stack of stock options divvied among peach-fuzz-faced techno-entrepreneurs?
Not exactly suggestive of the best we have to offer. No, the icons of tomorrow won't likely involve any of the trappings of newfound wealth or high-tech flash. Instead we'll see a new rash of simple, substantial icons: more garages, flags, homemade desks, household appliances, beat-up trucks.
Company owners need icons to convince themselves that they're at work on something that's bigger than their own self-interest. Employees need them to get out of bed in the morning feeling as if their efforts contribute to a worthwhile enterprise. New icons will evolve, simply put, because we need them. Even though times change, even though the economy changes, the message behind a business icon holds steady. The values it represents -- human values -- remain dear.
How do you identify an icon? It's like knowing when you're in the presence of greatness. You just know.
Such values are often the difference between a simple business and something more. In their book Built to Last, Jim Collins and Jerry Porras write that the companies that had clear, consistent core values outperformed similar companies that didn't have them. For all that's different in the digital economy, what doesn't change is what inspires us. It's that inner need for doing something larger than ourselves that feeds on icons. Icons give us purpose.
So how do you identify an icon? How do you know when you're on sacred turf? There's no surefire way. It's like knowing when you're in the presence of greatness. You just know.
But here are a few clues: Icons are elegant in their dramatic simplicity. They're overpowering in the crystal-clear message they deliver. They tell you more about a company than any product ever will.
Icons become icons when they are larger than life. Who would have imagined when they finally set eyes on it that Sam Walton's beat-up old Ford truck would be far less beat up than expected and, after 13 years of use, would have a measly 65,627 miles on it? In a truck as legendary as this one is, wouldn't you think the odometer would have flipped over at least once?
About a month ago a business journalist long steeped in the HP story drove past 367 Addison Avenue to take a look at the garage where Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard started out. Later he admitted to being surprised by what he saw. "It's so small," he said.
What he meant was that the physical object was not imposing at all. It was merely life-size. Well, how could he have expected anything different? The HP garage has transcended the structure he saw. It has taken on epic proportions in the business world, well beyond its cement foundation and four walls.
And that's the thing about icons: They're huge. Just the way we like them.
Jeffrey L. Seglin, an editor-at-large at Inc. , is the author of The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart (John Wiley & Sons, 2000). He is also an assistant professor at Emerson College.
Marks of Greatness
Icons of our time:
- GATEWAY In 1985, Ted Waitt and a partner borrowed $10,000 and began Gateway in a small converted barn on his father's cattle ranch in Iowa.
- 3M In 1974, 3M chemical engineer Art Fry grew tired of having bookmarks fall out of his church hymnal. Thus the Post-it Note was born, later to become a symbol of 3M as the mother of inventiveness.
- IDG In the 1960s, IDG founder and chairman Pat McGovern began hand-delivering Christmas cards with bonus checks to each of his 14 employees. Today he takes off three weeks every holiday season so he can continue to do the same for the company's 5,000 U.S. employees.
- MARY KAY In the late 1960s, Mary Kay Cosmetics started rewarding its top directors with pink Cadillacs, and an icon was born.
- DELL COMPUTER In 1984, Dell Computer was launched when 19-year-old Michael Dell started selling computers he assembled in his dorm room at the University of Texas.
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