This is a fantastic story. There are a few ethical problems including Montañez plagiarizing parts of his presentation and having friends and family buy out the products in the test market, but overall he refused to accept imposed limits and accomplished something phenomenal.
One interesting thing is that Frito-Lay had no products targeting Latinos, and no one on the highly paid marketing team did anything about it. The janitor saw the problem immediately, but for some reason the entrenched interests were unable to see it. The CEO by contrast was humble enough to take Montañez’s call, let him give a presentation, and overlook that presentation’s weaknesses to see the good idea at the core.
Also interesting is the backlash he faced from those same executives, jealous that someone less qualified was being successful. As humans we hate to see others doing better than us and try to push them down. No wonder social mobility is so difficult.
I don't agree. He copied parts of it from examples in a book on marketing strategy. One writing a book with samples in it would expect someone to use those samples. It's the whole point.
Otherwise, it's a useless book describing things you can't use.
Yeah, if this was for a school assignment on marketing, that would be cheating. If it was something he was publishing under his own name, that would be plagiarism.
But if you're giving a presentation to your bosses, pretty much everything is fair game.
If my programming tasks--comprised of Github snippets and Stackoverflow answers--were graded by any University TA I'd certainly fail too. But I'm getting appraised by different standards in the workforce than in school. The workplace doesn't care what I've learned, they care what I've done. if I choose to spend 3x the effort writing a library from scratch instead of recycling work that has already been published I wouldn't last very long.
It depends. Eg if you’re copying GPL code in your company’s proprietary code base, the lawyers are going to insist that you spend 3x the effort writing a library from scratch.
Oh absolutely. there are definitely situations where you cannot take shortcuts. I'm just saying that most workplaces weigh productivity far higher than originality.
> having friends and family buy out the products in the test market
It is ethically wrong, however given the fact that he was facing an unfair fight within the organization (other executives trying to make him fail) I believe it was a fair way to combat that.
It might be less then that. If they are limited time products that the purchasers enjoy, they might just be front loading their consumption and eating the products over a period of time. I mean, corn chips last a long time before they go stale.
> One interesting thing is that Frito-Lay had no products targeting Latinos, and no one on the highly paid marketing team did anything about it. The janitor saw the problem immediately, but for some reason the entrenched interests were unable to see it.
In business, I think this is incredibly commonplace. People have a bad habit of looking at what the competition is doing and copying it.
That isn't a bad strategy if you're in an industry with big margins. For instance, Microsoft spent a lot of time telling people how SQL Server was competitive with Oracle. With their large margins, it made sense to go head-to-head with a similar product.
But if you're selling a commodity like potato chips? You gotta figure out some way to differentiate yourself from the competition, break out of the "commodity" mold.
(Note that I reductively throw around cultural class labels like "lower-middle class" in this comment for purposes of clarity: I don't mean to suggest that a person's social class is fixed, or well-defined, but it's just a brief way to get at the concept of different subcultures and their mannerisms, as well as the rough income bands that people tend to associate with them)
> Also interesting is the backlash he faced from those same executives, jealous that someone less qualified was being successful. As humans we hate to see others doing better than us and try to push them down. No wonder social mobility is so difficult.
This dynamic is far more dominant than most people realize. I grew up around lots of rich people, coming from a historically-wealthy family with little money[1] (yay scholarships!), so my default mannerisms signal upper-class pretty strongly. I've always been pretty disgusted with the notion of treating people differently based on their background, so I decided it wasn't a system I would personally participate in, and semi-consciously changed my diction and habits to be more déclassé over the course of my teen and college years (to my parents' minor annoyance).
Once I entered the professional and adult dating world, I noticed the degree to which even otherwise-decent people could't resist pre-judging you based on the class that your mannerisms signaled. Depressingly enough, I got by far the most friction from my lower-middle class friends for the mannerisms that I had retained from my childhood[2]. Note that I'm not talking about things like fussing over which salad fork to use (habits that I'm happy to have jettisoned when young), but often-minor differences in diction, habits, and manners (eg, when and how often I choose to thank you to service employees, how comfortable I am expressing how a piece of art or music makes me feel, etc).
After a certain amount of pushing against the tide, I eventually stopped trying to casualize my mannerisms, and over a fairly short period of time ended up reverting to communicating pretty much the way I used to when younger (adjusted for age, obviously). It's been simultaneously amusing and depressing to note the difference in how I've been treated, most notably with respect to female attention and my professional life. I won't even try to delve into the female attention side, but my best guess for the way the baseline of every professional conversation has shifted is that I went from "scrappy & unusually talented" to "bred for success". Again, I find this pretty repulsive, but it's been pretty hard to argue with results. The differences are often hard to articulate, but it's almost like I start every professional conversation from an implicit position of power that I didn't have before.
I'm not really sure what to do about this: my initial thought that trying to change society to treat individuals like humans instead of branded cattle needed first movers, and I was happy to be one of them. But discovering the degree to which class distinctions are subtly maintained by _even those who suffer the most from them_ was enormously dispiriting.
People are weird.
[1] by which I mean, I grew up in a historically-well-off family that had little money growing up due to some severe mental health issues in my immediate family
[2] oddly enough, it's been my experience that the most zealous enforcement of class segregation in social contexts is from the bottom-up; I've never had trouble bringing random lower-middle class friends to hang out with friends who grew up with upper-class mannerisms. It's a rather dejecting thought that class segregation in a social context has so many (implicit) enthusiastic supporters among those being hurt by it the most
It is a real thing. On the other side, I am a black female who grew up in middle class suburbia and has a typical Bay Area accent. This affords me a level of privilege because I can easily "class pass" as someone more affluent - even though it is generally assumed black people are lower class. This means I have the "right" mannerisms and speaking patterns for corporate jobs and other things and it is easier for me to be perceived as a good culture fit because I have the right class markers.
It also meant, particularly earlier in my career before social media, I would get some interviews and then the interviewer was shocked I was black when I showed up.
Yea I think everyone has some sense that this is still prevalent, but at least in my case, it was easy enough to wave away as only true in dramatic cases, like discrimination against AAVE. I was mostly shocked at how finely-tuned people's detection of this kind of thing was: I doubt my lower middle class friends (otherwise very similar to me in level of education, ethnic background, etc) were explicitly and intentionally enforcing class conformity, as opposed to unthinkingly enforcing a social script that they've absorbed.
>it's been my experience that the most zealous enforcement of class segregation in social contexts is from the bottom-up
You perceive subtle rejection a lot more strongly than you perceive someone else being subtly rejected. The effect you perceive could be explained by pointing out that all of the negative interactions involving you were "bottom-up," while the ones involving the "random lower-middle class friends," were top-down.
It's also possible that upper-class and lower-class rejection take different forms. Lower-class rejection can take the form of someone scolding you for acting like a toff. Upper-class rejection might take the form of no visible reaction, but later you don't realize that you weren't invited to a party.
One of those is a lot easier to observe than the other.
That's a very insightful point, but I'm not comparing the way my friends interact with me to the way I interact with them, but rather the way friends in a lower social class interacted with me vs the way those in a (sort of) higher social class interacted with me. I feel like not having much money meant that there were ways in which I was out of place among my childhood milieu too. And yet somehow, I don't recall ever being made to feel out of my place by anyone.
This is obviously partially attributable to the fact that everything about my parents' and my mannerisms fit in well, despite not actually having money. But I feel like the actual (significant) financial gap between me and my social circles provided plenty of opportunity for social friction, and I literally don't remember a single instance of it coming from that group.
More importantly, it would be predictable for people to enforce the advantages that a rigid class system affords them, but it's unexpected to me for those getting the short end of the stick to be enforcing the system more zealously (albeit in a limited context) than those benefiting from it.
(It really bugs me that my comments keep referring to class as if it's a real, important thing about someone's character, but I guess that's sort of the point of my comment: the perhaps-naive disillusionment that I felt upon realizing how insistent most are on enforcing it)
Class comes from behavior, which is I guess what you are saying - but it's real, as real as body language or your native language. This would also imply that if you talked enough about how art made you feel around your people, you would be exempt from getting rejected by your extended family. I'm not sure if there is a class in America higher than rich (Zuckerberg class?) but if there was, you would have to hang out around them to really test your theory.
> This would also imply that if you talked enough about how art made you feel around your people, you would be exempt from getting rejected by your extended family.
First off, this is a pretty bizarre interpretation of what I said: no one cares if you _don't_ talk about how art makes you feel. It's the rule that you _can't_ talk about it that gets enforced, in certain circles. I should also note that this isn't some esoteric desire: I've been on drugs with these friends enough times to hear them talking about how art makes them feel, but the difference is that, when sober, they not only feel too inhibited to do so but they feel like they have to mock others who do as "pretentious".
Secondly, I dont know what you mean by getting rejected by my extended family. That's certainly not something that's ever happened, either with my family or other people of the same class. The positive treatment I noticed from class signaling (unitentional or otherwise) was entirely from women or in a professional context.
I'm not sure that quite fits what I'm describing. AIUI, those phenomena describe tearing down someone perceived to be rising above his station, whereas I'm describing the subtle enforcement of segregation by class. Namely, these people werent punishing a member of their group with "pretensions" to a higher one (a disgusting enough impulse), they were trying to tear down someone who they already thought was of a different group (unintentionally imo: these were fairly close friends and there were many ways that they connected very deeply, which made these cases all the more noticeable).
Uh, pretty much my entire comment was about how I recognized my privilege as a child and spent pretty much my whole life deciding to push back against it. Appreciate the condescension though.
Steve Jobs told engineers to hardcode a full signal strength indicator on the iPhone for his launch presentation, because the actual phone couldn't maintain full bars.
In the real world, speed, timing and practicality matter. I can't get too worked up because a janitor didn't use APA citations for an internal business proposal.
One interesting thing is that Frito-Lay had no products targeting Latinos, and no one on the highly paid marketing team did anything about it. The janitor saw the problem immediately, but for some reason the entrenched interests were unable to see it. The CEO by contrast was humble enough to take Montañez’s call, let him give a presentation, and overlook that presentation’s weaknesses to see the good idea at the core.
Also interesting is the backlash he faced from those same executives, jealous that someone less qualified was being successful. As humans we hate to see others doing better than us and try to push them down. No wonder social mobility is so difficult.