Business of Breaking Bad

As “Breaking Bad” winds down, the Economist suggests that the show offers as much insight into business as a Harvard MBA at a fraction of the cost.

What makes high-school-teacher-turned-meth-producer Walter White’s business successful? There are three ingredients: “The first is huge ambition. He is not in the ‘meth business’ or the ‘money business,” he says. He is in the ‘empire business.’ The second is product obsession. Other dealers might peddle ‘Mexican shoe-scrapings’ on the ground that addicts care little about quality. He produces the king of meth, so pure that it turns blue, and would rather destroy an entire batch than let an inferior product be traded under his brand. The third is partnerships and alliances. He spots talent in a former pupil turned drug-dealer, Jesse Pinkman, and forms a strong working relationship with him. He also contracts distribution to a succession of local gangs so that he can concentrate on the higher-value-added part of the business: cooking and quality control.”

Most of the lessons are cautionary tales about business failure:

“Mr White’s relationship with his partner falls apart. He is regularly in conflict with his distributors.” Worse, “he sucks at work-life balance. Being in the meth business gives a unique twist to all these problems. His relationship with his partner is shattered by his leaving one of Mr Pinkman’s girlfriends to die of an overdose and poisoning a subsequent girlfriend’s son. His relationship with his best distributor is undermined by the man’s scheme to engineer him out of the supply chain by learning his skills and killing him. His work-life balance is complicated by his reluctance to tell his wife he has become a meth dealer.”

In the end, “Mr White’s biggest failing is also a common one in business: hubris. The more successful he becomes, the more invulnerable he feels. The more rules he breaks, the more righteous he feels. And the more wealth he accumulates, the more he wants.”