Business magazines and fashion rags like Vogue have much in common. They both hype the Next New Thing to pump sales. They bounce back and forth, condemning today what they praised six months ago. Black is in, black is out. Skirts are short; skirts must be long and full. Cisco is the best: do what they do. The Cisco game plan is obsolete.
Fashion magazines can do this because they deal with frivolities. There is no factual reason why a little black dress is in or out. All that is required is a pronouncement and some lemmings who care.
Business reporting should be different. It deals with facts: success, failure, market share, and profit. Reality is messy. It does not lend itself to the simplistic dichotomies of in/out. Nonetheless, the biz rags soldier on. Being right is less important than selling a few more copies. Bold pronouncements sell more magazines than nuance.
Take this recent article in Fortune:
Tearing up the Jack Welch playbook
Having spent two decades praising Jack Welch, they now want to bury him. To do so, they have to distort what he actually said and did. Two quick examples:
1. At the end of his tenure at GE, Welch had moved away from the "#1 or #2" rule. It had served its purpose, so he looked for other metrics to focus his company on future growth. Welch even recognized how simple metrics can be gamed by smart executives. There is a highly interesting discussion of this evolution in his book Jack. But Fortune can' be bothered to address that.
2. Charisma vs. courage. Welch showed plenty of courage early on in his tenure at GE. He downsized, divested, acquired, and transformed. He persisted even though he was reviled as "Neutron Jack", destroyer of jobs. His most courageous decision might have been to his heavy investment in management education when he could have helped the short-term bottom-line by cutting out those expenditures. Maintaining long-term strategy in the face of short-term pressures is the sine qua non of CEO courage. Welch has it in spades.
Again, Fortune ignores that part of the Welch record so they can tout their flavor of the month.
More on Welch here and here.
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