Drug dealers could teach executives a thing or two

AT THE age of 12, he was a drug dealer; at 22, he had nine bullets shot into him at close range; at 23, he had a career change and became a rapper; by 30, he had diversified into clothes, vitamin mineral water and condoms and now, at 32, has pulled off something that Jack Welch didn't manage until he was 30 years older: 50 Cent is now a management guru, writes LUCY KELLAWAY

For the rapper, this latest career move has come early. But for the management guru industry, it is long overdue. Mountaineers, conductors and army generals have all stepped forward to offer their tips for success to managers. But as far as I know, 50, as his fans know him, is the first hustler to give a helping hand to executives on their way to the corner office.

Drug dealing has considerably more overlap with business than playing the violin or climbing a mountain. It’s a competitive, fast growing industry in which the successful have to be even sharper and more flexible than the most driven businessman.

To quote from 50's In Da Club: "I'm fully focused man, my money on my mind/Got a mil out the deal and I'm still on the grind."

In order to repackage this message for an audience who do not wear their trousers around their ankles, 50 has teamed up with the writer Robert Greene who has a fine pedigree in plundering management tips from such bad boys as Hannibal, Sun Tzu and Machiavelli.

The result of their collaboration is a book called The 50th Law, written by Greene but in which 50 is given the odd quote. "The greatest fear people have is of being themselves," he says. "You are running away from the one thing that you own – what makes you different."

This is both disappointingly unoriginal and plain wrong. I don’t know about 50, but being myself doesn’t even register on my list of big fears. These include getting knocked off my bicycle, failing badly at something, and of fish brushing against me when I’m swimming.

And while I’ve never lost a second’s sleep over being myself, it wouldn’t be a bad thing if I had. When I’m myself, I’m sloppy, bad-tempered, etc – fear might make me get my act together more.

When he was younger, 50 was taken to one side by a wise old hustler – charmingly named Truth – and told that the greatest danger a dealer faces is that his mind goes soft and his eye wanders from the streets. Truth never said a truer word. This is what appears to have happened to 50 himself: he’s gone soft. His management thesis seems to boil down to a plea for authenticity – which is an old idea, and a soppy one at that.

It is all such a missed opportunity. I have an acquaintance who for decades was a loyal customer of drug dealers in London and the US. In the process, he learnt a prodigious amount about the business; it is only a pity that he all but destroyed his life in the process.

He explained to me that drug dealers are the perfect gurus for a recession. They live permanently in a world of zero credit: if you are a hustler, you can’t go and see your bank manager and get a loan, so the best ones are virtuosos at managing cash flow.

The next thing they have to teach the CEO is ruthlessness. The drug dealer must not rip off his client – he must supply him with good product – but beyond that will show a total disregard for his welfare. Any CEO who has to make half the work force redundant needs to feel a similar detachment.

A third area of leadership is through jargon. The dealer goes beyond the CEO in inventing words from scratch ( “I’ve got the real peng”) but both groups share a keen interest in flouting the laws of grammar. CEOs like to make a noun a verb – as in “to action” – while drug dealers stray still further from the rule book and put words in the wrong order. “Soon come,” they say.

Neither group feels any need to make what they say true. Just as the CEO doesn’t mean it when he says “integrity is in our DNA”, the drug dealer who says “soon come” actually means the client will be left twiddling his thumbs on the street corner for a long time.

With cars, the dealers have also been trendsetters. For years they have favoured blacked-out windows; a trend slavishly copied last year by bankers as they raced to the treasury for secret appointments.

Self-respecting CEOs now change their vehicles almost as often as drug dealers and are also aping the hustler’s taste in bling – and in lawlessness. The conspicuous consumption that came out in the Dennis Kozlowski and Conrad Black trials would surely have made Truth and 50 quite proud.

A further similarity is that neither tends to consume the products they sell – although CEOs must pretend to do so or they get into trouble, as Gerald Ratner once did, when he said his jewellery was crap. However, in an emergency a drug dealer must be able to pop his product in his mouth and swallow it at a moment’s notice – whereas the CEO seldom finds call for such extreme action.

The final parallel between the two professions is the revolving door at the top – CEOs and hustlers tend to get found out – and both often end up with a bullet in the head. The only difference being that in the dealer’s case the bullet is the real peng. – (Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009)