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Interview: Beck & Stone co-founder Andrew Beck
Last April, Andrew Beck wrote an article in First Things commemorating the 10-year anniversary of Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich's forced resignation from the company he co-founded.
Eich, the tech visionary behind JavaScript, was undone by his quiet support of Proposition 8, legislation opposing same-sex marriage in California. After opponents of Eich's appointment unearthed a series of small donations (totalling $3,100) he'd made years before, the online firestorm was sufficiently distracting that Eich stepped down after just eleven days.
So yeah, I want to be McKinsey, but I want be McKinsey from 1985, when the economy was awful.
Beck, working in the New York City tech scene at the time, remembers this moment as "a major escalation in the culture war," a warning that "ideological conformity to the top-down, programmatic transformation of the country that was rapidly taking place was all that mattered."
Indeed, in Eich's early "cancellation," the then-nascent progressive regime created a template for dealing with dissidents; it has since been used many times over.
But what interests Beck isn't the tediously familiar script employed against Eich but rather how Eich responded to that script.
Instead of protesting his unpersoning in the same rigged court of public opinion that enabled it, Eich put his head down and continued to do what he'd always done: developing technology in the service of human prosperity and freedom. His company released the popular, privacy-focused browser Brave in 2019.
As a devout Catholic, Eich can understand his work in terms of a transcendent good, bigger than both himself and his attackers. For Beck, it's the difference between a career and something more like a calling.
Beck doesn't mention it in the article, but Eich's resignation roughly coincides with another, more personal milestone: the day Beck and his partner, Austin Stone, founded the brand consultancy Beck & Stone in 2015.
Since then, Beck & Stone has built a successful business based on a rather countercultural conviction: Wisdom, beauty, and truth sell. In Eich, the company has found an example of how to persevere and even thrive in an environment hostile to such a philosophy.
"Finding work to do that makes you fearless will make you unstoppable," writes Beck. "Setbacks will become stepping stones to a more refined vision of one’s vocation. The wrongs done to you will become opportunities for cultivating wisdom necessary for your next iteration, making you stronger, more resilient, less fragile."
Fearless is hardly the first word that comes to mind when one thinks of the "creative services" industry. Brands often tend to be safeguarded by risk-averse courtiers, each with one eye on his or her own precarious status within the company. Companies that seek their business do well to take a similarly neurotic approach.
The kind of cloying, self-congratulatory language with which many agencies turn pushing a noxious influencer-branded "energy drink" into a feat of maverick shamanistic thought leadership is notably absent from the Beck & Stone website.
Instead, a series of elegantly written yet eminently practical case studies summarize the thoughtful, design-driven work the company has done for clients like First Things, the New Criterion, and Upward.
Beck himself embodies this pleasant mix of humility and ambition. And he really does have a vision, one compelling enough to attract high-level talent to the firm and genuinely disruptive enough to make enemies.
Even though Beck is suffering from a slight cold, his voice booms from my computer screen as he fluently and precisely diagnoses the current malaise afflicting American business and culture, while still conveying a measured but wholly uncynical optimism for the future.
The following are excerpts from our conversation. They have been condensed and edited for clarity.
On the return of competency
[Beck & Stone] is completely bootstrapped. People pay us money; we pay other people money. What we have left over is what the shareholders make. Capitalism simply doesn't work that way any more. It hasn't for a long time.
People understand the system. People are smarter than we give them credit for when it comes to smelling out where there is reward. And so I always talk about perverse incentives. And it's just perverse incentives all the way down at this point. It's seeping into every institution.
[But] the social engineering programs of the 21st century, which is this DEI stuff, they're starting to fall apart. Because now competency is the thing, right? The easy money is starting to run out. Now we gotta make the hard money. People want to see profits, actual on-paper profits.
Companies that have all the earmarks of the liberal worldview come to us because they say, "We can't trust a progressive firm to seek our best interest; they're ultimately trying to placate someone else."
[Progressive firms] haven't hired for competency. The reputation that McKinsey used to have, in the '80s, they would come in and they would tell you the hard truths. You know, a good consultant tells you what you need to hear because they're telling you the truth, and the truth will always hurt. So a consultant hurts you.
Now, it's "You need to tell me what I want to hear. You need to tell me that everything is good."
And look at the reports that have blown up in McKinsey's face, the DEI report, the ESG report. They made billions of dollars of capital move in that direction, whole corporations move in that direction. The whole green program, too — a complete disaster.
I mean, look, it can always get worse. You can become South Africa, where they just flat-out say white people can have jobs once the black people have [their jobs]. So technically it could get worse. But there is hope.
The real hope is that things become miserable enough before they become irreversible. Miserable enough so that liberals and people who enjoy nice things and who want to live in a relatively safe, peaceful, and prosperous society say, "I don't like this, something's wrong here, something's really wrong."
On the need for economic literacy
The more I've done this, the more I've realized [how crucial] economic literacy is. Looking at Instagram and seeing people talking about inflation or shrinkflation or these different things, and they repeat the lines that they hear from Elizabeth Warren, from Barack Obama, from Joe Biden.
All these people talking about how it's greed. It's just greed.
"See, all these [rich] people, they have money and they're not giving you that money. You know, that's the real problem here. If they just took less ..."
No. Do you want everything to go out of business? Do you want food? You're not a farmer. You're not a hunter. You live off of these plastic-wrapped goods. Do you want those plastic-wrapped goods to show up in your supermarket? You better start paying attention to how things like supply chains and how economic incentives work.
On rebuilding the American brand
The American brand needs to be rebuilt. It's been so damaged.
The most visited website on the planet is YouTube because people are isolated and they want to see what other people are doing. Much of what has driven a lot of mass migration — really these invasions of Western countries — is social media.
They look at their situation. Trump called it. Trump said, "These people live in sh**holes and we don't." And once you have that information, [your mentality] becomes: "Well, now I'm going to live there no matter what you say and no matter what you do, and you're going to help me."
Whereas before [the idea] was, "There is this greater land of opportunity, and I'm going to go and I'm going to make it work. And I'm going to prove to the people who are there that I'm worthy of being one of them." That's a completely different mindset [that] social media and the internet have done away with.
The American myth is dead, and that's the real danger: People can now see behind the curtain. [Now] the American ideal is if you go there, you will have a nicer, easier lifestyle than you ever thought possible. You can steal things; you won't go to jail. You can squat in houses. No one will kick you out.
On good propaganda
Really good propaganda seeps into the bloodstream of the ones who are being propagandized. So then they themselves create propaganda. That's what the internet, social media, and giving everyone a smartphone have done. It's created these contagions where now you can even have bots that replicate that behavior and spread it even more. So creating something that can act as the contagion is the goal, right?
[On the right], we're trying to centrally plan a propaganda campaign to change people's minds. We give too much credit to the propagandists and too little credit to the person [with a phone] in their hand. You're actually more susceptible to propaganda that's coming from your neighbor than you are propaganda that's coming from some central authority. That's what Black Lives Matter was.
War has been declared on us, basically. And what conservatives have done since [at least] Obama is try to build up these little fortresses where we can now defend against — first it was the liberals, then it was Obama, then it was the feds, now it's the woke, it just goes on and on and on.
We build fortresses for defense instead of building fortresses [the way] the Normans did — build fortresses in enemy territory and then use them for offense and to subjugate the enemy. Instead we think, "We can just hide in here with our little group of people and hopefully wait it out."
You're not gonna wait them out because you're ceding all the territories to them. You're ceding all the resources to them.
And how conservatives do that is through branding. "I'm conservative. I am a patriot American, MAGA, anti-woke." All the different words they say because they don't have much and they know it.
But there's this niche — growing, maybe, but it's still a niche — of people who will be very interested in this. So we capture them and we'll make sure we get our little fortress and those people [will] come to us. We have our fortress, and now I'm gonna be king of my little castle
It would be nice [for us] to realize how close we are to victory. I don't want to stifle competition, I don't want to stifle entrepreneurship, I don't want to stifle the will and the pioneering mindset that Americans should have.
You always have new companies popping up. I mean, look at Anduril and Palantir in defense and how they're challenging IBM and Boeing.
On being 'the McKinsey of the right'
I would love [Beck & Stone] to say, "We're here to take down McKinsey."
People call us the McKinsey of the right. And I say I just want to be McKinsey. I don't care if it's right-wing or not. I just want to be known as, "You're the killers who come in here and cause pain, but you cause pain because you're telling us the truth. You're going to work with us on resolving these pain points so that we can make money, so that we can grow, so that we can benefit."
These basic principles have been completely lost because people have been living in a fantasy world of easy money that is going away. And I can't wait.
I know, yes, we're a small team, we have 14 full-time employees and 10 or so freelancers who are rotating in and out. But McKinsey also used to be small. They just had very smart people who were able to go and were able to focus on something and work through those issues and then move on.
Now scaling out means that you're proposing broad strokes versus looking at individual situations. "Everyone needs to get on this ESG thing and you'll make money." It's all BS. It's all a pitch deck where they're giving you some thoughts and some bigger plans. ... That's not consulting.
The value proposition of consulting is that we will actually get our hands dirty. You have to be very diligent in terms of the tactical execution of what you are proposing. And then your reputation lives or dies based upon: Did your plan work? Was your diagnosis correct? Did you help resolve it?
This doesn't exist any more at a larger scale. [Companies like] Deloitte, McKinsey, IBM get a government contract [and it's all] soft deliverables: Fill out this form, write this email, copy and paste this from this column to that column. Horrendous waste, but people think that that's consulting.
So yeah, I want to be McKinsey, but I want be McKinsey from 1985, when the economy was awful. And when [clients] had to say, "We're going down, and we already had to cut 200 jobs. But all 2,000 of these people will lose their jobs unless we get some other minds in here and make a little investment so that we can turn this place around."
I gave this talk at this parallel economy conference. You know, people say, "Oh, this is the guy who hacked the parallel economy."
I succeeded in the parallel economy because I don't operate in the parallel economy. That's the whole point. You want to participate in the real thing. So you want to see it as the perpendicular economy where you're just coming at it from an oblique angle and you're trying to disrupt something that is all going in one direction. They're all doing the same bad things. And now you have to act differently in order to make your mark.
And that's risky. It's painful. It takes time. It means you have to be content to work for less. It means you have to be content to spend more time.
On building a company culture
It's incredibly difficult to find even 14 people who are very good. It is so hard.
Part of it is generational for sure, but much of it is also fighting through the perceptions. Okay, people think we're the right-wing McKinsey. They come in here and think that they don't have to work.
Everyone's working here, from the partners down to the interns. This is a brutal life. If you don't want to work, go not work somewhere else, right? Because we can't afford it. We will literally not be able to afford it.
However, it then means that for the people who do work here and who do put effort into it, we have a quarterly bonus structure. If you make us money, you will make money. You may have to work harder, you may have to start with less, but the rewards are going to be there for you taking ownership of the thing that I ultimately own. It's because the incentives have been corrected.
We have always had this mentality that client success is our success. Our success is tied to the client success.
You set up metrics the best you can. But you also need to be able to triangulate metrics and say, "I know what a vanity metric is versus a real metric."
If we were going to have two [most important] values, it would be quality of life and quality of work. And these feed off of each other. If you do quality work, you will have a quality life. If you have quality of life — if you can enjoy yourself working hard — you're actually gonna produce good work.
So these things have to work. If one of those things is broken, if I'm not seeing improvement for the client, I'm asking, "What's happening with the work? Is there some quality of life problem that someone is dealing with? Is it [because it's] remote? Are they lonely? Are they distracted? Do they need me to jump in here? Do they need help? Are they in over their heads?"
Because it's so difficult to work at Beck & Stone, the people who end up coming here want to impress us right away. And so they end up biting off more than they can chew and getting a lot of stress.
So we need to get them to relax. If you've proven yourself and you're in, you're in. You just need to focus on delivering. And talk to us. Communication, honest communication. And this is the bottom line: Tell the truth. Truth hurts, and truth also sets you free.
It may hurt to say, "Beck, this account is struggling. There isn't growth and I don't know what I'm doing wrong." But honest conversation between me and the person working creates an honest conversation between me and the client. Then we can figure things out together.
If there is no way forward, we will just tell the clients that there is no way forward. "This cannot and will not work. We don't want to take your money any more."
On healthy conflict in the workplace
I've been surprised at how often the original thesis has been validated, but it's not a thesis based on the type of client we want to attract — that we only want to work for conservative or libertarian or classically liberal intellectuals and think tanks or the people who have been influenced by those ideas.
Through our work, these ideas have become more commonplace. And I'm proud of what we were able to accomplish in getting some of these things into the bloodstream when we started out nine, 10 years ago. But we did not purposely try to make a firm that just talked about this stuff.
We wanted to make a firm based upon truth and based upon honesty. It starts with the partners. Austin Stone, he isn't as plugged in to the firm these days; he's more in an advisory role, both because of health issues and also just knowing where his true value is. But us having that honesty where could fight with each other [was essential].
Guys fighting with each other is actually normal. And many times it's good.
But having serious arguments with your co-workers is not allowed any more. It goes right to HR and then HR has to decide who's in the right, who's in the wrong, who's going to manage it. It turns out whoever can say whatever the company guideline is, whatever the HR mandate is, they win. And it has nothing to do with the actual task.
It's all open office now, of course. You can't fight with each other because no one has private offices. There's no privacy. Everything is under the watchful eye of the HR regime. And so everyone is frozen.
People make a huge deal about not being able to make jokes, but that's small potatoes compared to the actual work that is inhibited, the actual honesty and that comes through conflict.
I can remember [earlier in my career] pitching to Nasdaq, and I wanted to change the pitch. I said, "I think that this is off." Fortunately I was working on it with an old-school guy. We fought, he yelled at me, and I just didn't back down. And he storms out. He says, "All right, let me think about this."
And someone leaned over to me and said, "I can't believe that just happened and you're still here." But I didn't have that same fear because I was a contractor. They knew I had my own firm.
We're all equals here [at Beck & Stone]. I understand if someone's your boss, there needs to be a level of deference that you show. Just as if it's someone who is your employee, there's a degree of sensitivity you need to show because of the power imbalance.
But you should be able to fight things out without people taking it personally, which also means that people can't act personally either.
Having this pattern of being able to hash things out has created a culture where you are judged by your work and the quality of your ideas, not by your ability to navigate an HR regime.
On conservative journalism
It used to focus on business. It used to focus on people who are doing good work. You were being praised, you were being given honor. And what does honor mean? Honor means reward, okay? You're getting a reward for something that you've done. And business was a place where you could do that. There's nothing like that any more. Everything's about issues.
No more issues, okay? Just show us some people who are doing cool things. Tell us about cool technology. Tell us what's going on in the world that maybe we should be aware of that could impact business.
Everybody wants to make our brands based upon who we're not. And based upon how we're being attacked. After a while, that makes you look weak.
We need to be respected for the work that we do. We need to get out of the habit of jumping on whatever the hot topic is right now, [whether it's] trans or woke or whatever.
Commentary is oversaturated. Anybody can do commentary. What starts the commentary? That's what's becoming prized.
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