This weekend two budding entrepreneurs will pitch their business ideas while more than 7 million viewers laugh at them. These two aspiring captains of industry are finalists on The Apprentice, a television show in its 13th season in the UK. It first aired in 2005, like Dragons’ Den – a show where entrepreneurs pitch business ideas to venture capitalists, and on to its 14th season.
Back then pitching was something only sales people did. Today almost everyone is expected to pitch. In an east London primary school, children were asked to compete in a Dragons’ Den-style competition to pitch on social enterprises to care for the elderly. In the US, prisoners pitch ideas to venture capitalists. Men’s magazines offer advice on an “elevator pitch” to capture a women’s attention on a date.
Pitching originated among sales people in the US. Slowly the idea found its way to Hollywood, Wall Street and Silicon Valley. Film-makers in search of funding were expected to pitch their ideas in concise, attention-grabbing and increasingly formulaic ways. Investment bankers had armies of junior employees labouring through the night to create lengthy “pitch books” used to back up sales presentations. Many tech entrepreneurs pitching to venture capitalists were rewarded with millions of dollars based on little more than a deck of PowerPoint slides.
Although most films pitched in Hollywood are never made, Wall Street deals fall apart, and tech businesses fail, the practice of pitching has gone from strength to strength. Today schools and universities around the world train millions of young people in the art of pitching. Scientists are expected to pitch for research funds. Journalists spend chunks of their days pitching story ideas. Politicians talk about their campaigns as “pitches”. Civil servants pitch ideas to improve public services. Unemployed people are trained to give an elevator pitch about themselves.
The spread of pitching might seem like the triumph of a meritocratic system where the best ideas win out. But this exciting veneer hides some more disturbing realities, which I started to see after reading a study, by my Cass Business School colleague Ruben van Werven, of entrepreneurs as they developed businesses. He observed that teams who focused on developing a sound business tended to do well. But teams who spent their time developing a good pitch tended to fail.
After reading this research, I wondered if our pitching obsession might be sending us in the wrong direction. As people spend more time pitching, they are spending less time actually doing things. A scientist at Cambridge University recently told me that his postdoctoral researchers spend more time pitching ideas for funding than actually doing scientific research.
When speaking with people in the cultural sector, I get the sense they spend more time pitching projects than doing them. It often takes years to pitch and develop a show or film, but just weeks to film it. The same is true of entrepreneurs who focus more of their energies on pitching to investors than building up a business.
As the pitch has spread, so has time-wasting. There is a real danger that public sector workers will devote more of their time to working up nice pitches and less time to actually serving the public. If the government simply redirected the resources it put into helping unemployed people develop the perfect personal elevator pitch, it would be possible to create thousands of jobs. If children were able to focus on their studies rather than innovative care solutions, maybe rates of numeracy and literacy might improve.
There are situations where pitching can be appropriate. But all too often it can end up being a waste of time, effort and money. This raises the question of how it is possible to sort good ideas from bad.
One solution is elitism. Instead of accepting pitches, you could simply rely on a small circle of trusted people to do the work. This has the advantage of letting skilled people get on with the job, and releasing others from the dangerous fantasy that they are one pitch away from global fame. But it has the disadvantage of limiting the talent pool and the voices that are heard.
A second option is to insist on pure equality. Instead of accepting pitches, you would accept anything as long as it fits minimal criteria. This is a model being tried in science with some success in online journals such as PLOS One.
A third option is random selection. You screen all proposals based on factors which have been proven to predict success in the past, then randomly select the ones you will go with. Mathematicians have found that random selection of candidates for jobs tends to generate outcomes which are better than traditional alternatives like interviewing.
The final option is to take inspiration from the DIY movement. Instead of pitching to authority figures, you should just use your energy to go out there and do it – and quickly find out what works and what doesn’t. You might also learn something more than how to polish PowerPoint slides along the way.