Bob London talks with a journalist who once loved proving waste management and supply chain weren't boring. He changed his mind. These industries move billions of dollars and touch every American's life. The word "unsexy" does real damage to the people who work in them and cover them.
When I was doing some discovery in working with you guys, I noticed that the media coverage would refer to your audience as, yeah, they cover industries that are unsexy, boring, or kind of overlooked, these B2B industries like waste management or supply chain. And of course, that's the farthest thing from the truth. I mean, those are all the industries you cover are important, obviously, otherwise it wouldn't be 11 million people paying attention. What happened after our work together and how do you think about those industries now?
I would sometimes run to those descriptions. I would allow people to say that and I would affirm them in a sense that I enjoy personally being the contrarian at times. I fuel myself a little bit by trying to prove people wrong that these industries go. And so I was okay with that on my personal level. But what I realized is that I was doing a disservice to those industries and to the people in my company who were covering them. There is nothing boring about the supply chain industry. There's nothing sleepy or unsexy about waste. Those are billions of dollars industries that are being disrupted by players that have mass amounts of money going through them and shape and impact every single American today. Right. So it was doing a disservice to the people to allow them to be called by names like unsexy. And so now I just won't tolerate it when we talk about it. But that's part of just showing what those industries are. It's part of giving credit to the people who work in those industries and what they're doing, as well as to our reporters who live and die and are wonky about them. They don't view them as unsexy, and I shouldn't allow people to say that they are.
