by G.D. Maxwell
The good news is we can head into next November’s election with a clean slate and an open field. The bad news is this most lacklustre three-year term of the mayor and council show will sputter to an end like a cheap candle, dripping wax all over our new tablecloth, not throwing off enough light to distinguish steak from gristle, not doing the job we hoped it would.
C’est la vie. It’s only our future we’re messin’ around with.
Since the mayor has chosen to throw us all a curve, I’ll toss one of my own back. Curves – of the graphical nature – can be easy ways to explain difficult concepts. My very favourite, the marginal cost-marginal revenue curve, can in fact explain just about every decision we make, even the mayor’s decision to chuck it all to sell condos in Hawaii. But that’s a different curve.
This week’s curve is the lifecycle curve. In form it looks a great deal like the learning curve, the new love curve, the useful life of the new employee curve or any of a number of useful concepts. It starts, as all things do, from nothing, gains altitude slowly at first than shoots up quite quickly. Eventually, like a plane, it runs out of power and levels off. What happens after that? One of three things.
But I’m running ahead of myself. Let’s illustrate the workings of the lifecycle curve with two real life examples: Whistler and women’s thong underwear. In the beginning, there was nothing. Well, in the case of Whistler there was an idea and a garbage dump. In the case of thongs, there were bikini briefs.
Whistler rose from the ground because a handful of people grabbed onto the idea of building a ski resort to host the Olympics and ski somewhere better than Grouse. Thongs emerged as the ultimate answer to the dreaded visible panty line.
It took Whistler a long time to get off its X axis. It was barely flying off the ground during the Creekside years and damn near crashed as the village was being built, Blackcomb was opening and interest rates soared above 20 per cent. The thong, on the other hand, languished for an indeterminate period as seductive, recreational underwear.
Whistler’s curve began to climb rapidly in the later 1980s as the village was more or less finished, both mountains competed against each other to upgrade their offering and the world began to take notice of the little resort that could. The climb steepened in the early 1990s as accolade after accolade was heaped on Whistler and condos sold like hotcakes.
As with most things fashionable, the thong’s rise in popularity was fuelled by fantasy and the beautiful people… and given a not insubstantial boost from "that woman" who flashed hers in the Oval office.
But gravity works. The higher you get, the harder it is to keep gaining altitude at the same rate. Think of poor Bill Gates. The first 50 billion was easy but now he seems to be struggling. Anyway, Whistler’s curve began to start flattening out half a dozen years ago and has even shown a disturbing downward trend the last couple of seasons. But let’s ignore that pesky downward thing for the moment.
Thongs too, or so I read in last weekend’s Globe and Mail, have fallen through the cracks so to speak. Sales are down dramatically as women, perhaps less fearful of VPLs or just tired of unrelenting cruel jokes or sexiness running headlong into skid marks, turn to other alternatives. Thongs will likely fall fast and hard and come out of their moment in the bum with ongoing sales slightly higher than they were before their brush with greatness.
Whistler?
This is where those three things that can happen when the curve reaches maturity come into play. A product or company, or even a person, once they’ve reached maturity and their curve flattens can, through great effort and no small amount of imagination, kickstart their curve into an upward trend again. They can reinvent themselves. Apple Computer, for example, did this once when they breathed new life into their aging Macintosh line and did it again with the iPod.
Whistler has attempted to pull off the same trick by rebranding itself as a four-season resort. No longer do we just compete with other ski hills. We see ourselves competing with many, many other forms of lifestyle adventure and travel, cruise ships, theme parks and the like.
The second alternative might be called the sustainable alternative if that word had any real meaning anymore. Not much growth, not much decline, just chugging along being what we are, keeping body and soul together, learning new tricks or applying new paint to keep the downward slide at bay. A good example might be the longevity of the internal combustion driven automobile.
The third alternative is the other side of the upward curve. Decline. The decline can be a retrenchment to a more sustainable size or an outright flat spin. The survivors of the tech bubble have, for the most part, re-emerged as smaller, more focused companies. Enron will suffice as the crash and burn poster child.
Progress along the lifecycle curve isn’t necessarily smooth. Whistler’s curve took a big hit in the 1980s. But progress along the curve is inevitable.
An important implication of the lifecycle curve is this: at each of the initiation, growth and maturity phases, a distinct set of management skills is required to move things along toward desired outcomes. In business, innovators and entrepreneurs often falter and their companies die during the growth stage because their personalities and management skills, suited to and focused on creation, aren’t the ones necessary to manage growth. Likewise, people who are tremendously skilled at managing the complex logistics of growth are at a loss as to how to successfully manage a mature company.
Which brings us to the now wide open mayoral race in Whistler.
While it is inarguable that our happy mountain home has taken some hits from what economists like to call exigent circumstances – 9/11 and the unpleasantness of air travel in its aftermath, etc., etc. – the response of social scientists to this would be, in academicspeak, tough noogies. Suck it up, rework your plans and get on with things.
More importantly to our considerations over the next few months, as candidates for the job seemingly pop out of the woodwork, is to consider the skills we need in a new mayor, something we have direct control over, and a new administrator, something we have considerably less control over.
Let’s think about that and be prepared to discuss it next week. Class dismissed.
