Today’s guest columnists are Ted Leonsis, Founder & CEO of Monumental Sports & Entertainment, and Pat Butler, Founder and Principal at Patrick Butler Enterprises and former CEO of America’s Public Television Stations.
In the first volume of his masterful biography of Lyndon Johnson, Robert Caro paints a bleak portrait of life in the Texas Hill Country of LBJ’s youth: women carrying heavy buckets of water from the Pedernales River miles away, cooking meals on a wood stove, making their own soap from lye, driving a horse-drawn buckboard 23 miles to sell a dozen eggs for a dime, living in profound isolation as primitively as people had done a century earlier.
Electricity, made possible by building four hydro-electric dams on the Lower Colorado River—and that construction made possible by a 28-year-old Congressman Lyndon Johnson’s constant badgering of President Franklin D. Roosevelt—revolutionized life in the Hill Country. Long before he became famous for his Great Society’s war on poverty, Johnson’s local war on drudgery to improve the quality of life for women was so dramatic and successful that many mothers named their children “Lyndon” in his honor.
Relieving the tedium of daily life, especially for the women who endure it most, has been the powerful motivation for many of the most innovative businesses of the 20th and early 21st centuries. And as with LBJ and his Hill Country constituents, this mission has produced some colorful and ingenious heroes.
One such hero was Bette Nesmith, a single mother (of future Monkees guitarist and band leader Michael Nesmith) working as a secretary in a Texas bank and wondering if there were some way to end the tedium of typing and retyping documents until they were error-free. She also needed to create a side gig to generate additional dollars to support her family and household.
Typewriters, which ruled office technology market from the 1880s to the 1980s, had no self-correcting features. A single mis-spelled word meant retyping a whole page—an enormous drain on office productivity that persisted for nearly a century.
Enter Bette. Working in her kitchen and garage, she experimented with tempera paints and watercolor brushes until she had perfected “Mistake Out”—the first correction fluid that concealed typing errors so well that the boss was none the wiser.
With this one invention, millions of secretaries would soon be relieved of the drudgery of constant retyping, and the business office would have a boon in productivity almost as profound as the one the typewriter itself had ushered in long before. Mistake Out would soon be patented as Liquid Paper. At the height of its popularity, Bette’s company (she had long since left the bank) was selling 25 million bottles a year. And her son Michael, who started out filling up bottles for $1 an hour, would at the peak of his pop music fame make television commercials that moved the product at astonishing speed. New technology to a new audience via mass market promotion created a growth mindset and a new multi-trillion dollar set of industries to come.
Bette sold Liquid Paper to Gillette for about $50 million in 1979 (more than $233 million today) and gave half of it to philanthropies empowering women.
Eliminating bias against women was also the mission of Title IX of the Education Act of 1972, which prohibited discrimination based on gender in any educational institution receiving federal funding. Even a year later, when Ted enrolled at Georgetown University, women had only been attending the school for four years—and Georgetown itself was almost 200 years old.
Upon graduation in 1977, Ted went to work for Wang Laboratories, where another office revolution was already underway.
One of the attractions of working at Wang was that its headquarters were in Lowell, Mass., Ted’s hometown, where he could live rent-free with his parents. Ted’s dad was a waiter in a restaurant, and his mom was a “temp,” a part-time secretary, for Jonathan Bush, brother of future President George H. W. Bush.
As Bette Nesmith’s Liquid Paper had helped Ted’s mom improve the quality and productivity of her office work experience, Dr. An Wang and his talented team at Wang Laboratories were about to take office technology a giant step forward.
Dr. Wang had seen a way in the early 1970s to go Bette one better, leaving her analog invention – and the tyranny of the typewriter – behind and creating a digital word processor capable of typing, editing, printing, filing, storing and retrieving office documents. Wang was at its heart a software company making hardware—computers—useable and valuable
Dr. Wang asked us a revolutionary question: “Why can’t we have a word processor on every desk?” His market—Ted’s customer (as the first liberal arts major ever hired at Wang)—was the women who typed, filed and supported executives, not the men who bought mainframes, and his innovative business strategy led to a titanic battle between Wang and IBM.
Years before Apple’s famous ad broadcast during the 1984 Super Bowl, Wang produced an ad for the 1978 Super Bowl—with help from a very young Ridley Scott, who went on to an extraordinary career as a Hollywood director—that featured Wang as David and IBM as Goliath. Not subtle, but effective. Wang was the little company helping the people, almost all women, who made the office work. It was also the first computer company to do mass consumer advertising, and for a time it was the fastest growing company in the world—all in the service of relieving the drudgery of the office.
The story of Wang’s success was so compelling, the innovations so rapid and revolutionary, that Dr. Wang asked Ted to leave his post in customer service and create the company’s first public relations department. Soon, he became head of communications for this storied enterprise, before leaving to pursue his own entrepreneurial dreams.
Those dreams would lead him soon enough to Steve Case and a startup company called America Online, where the challenge was to get people who had grown up in an analog world of letter-writing, postage stamps and mailboxes to connect to the brave new digital world of online communications. “Welcome, you’ve got mail” became the memorable bridge between the analog and digital eras, the signal that one could now have their own self-contained, digitized word processor in their own home, giving them (and eventually, everyone on earth) the ability to send, receive and store personal communications instantaneously. AOL also invented instant messaging—Ted himself sent the first instant message, “I love you,” to his wife—long before Twitter came along.
But the company wasn’t finished. It wanted to make video part of the product and service offering, but the team couldn’t figure out how to produce a digital file that would make video work on a computer. Ted went to meet Bill Warner, an erstwhile product marketing manager at Apollo Computer who, despite being wheelchair-bound by a serious auto accident, was on the cusp of creating an industry-changing invention—another visionary inventing systems to relieve drudgery, this time for video editing professionals.
Though his surroundings were modest—with a couch that resembled, more than anything else, the back seat of a van—he had a religious fervor for technology. Bill told Ted, “what you did at Wang for word processing, I want to do for video editing.” Bill had taken the first 10 minutes of the original Top Gun movie, digitized it and put it in twenty 30-second electronic bins. “Here’s a mistake,” he said, “but we can fix it in no time. We can move this bin over here, and we’ve just shortened a scene. Do you remember Liquid Paper? This is that, for film.”
Bill was inventing the Avid/1 Media Composer, which revolutionized and digitized the laborious process of editing film (by cutting celluloid—the same way it had been done since Edison’s first moving picture in 1889), with inspiration from Bette Nesmith, the Monkees’s mother of invention. He would go on to win a Lifetime Academy Award for converting analog film into digital video and making movies infinitely easier to edit. The same principle would make interoffice email possible.
Within a remarkably few years, after investing $2.5 billion sending out discs, buying TV and print advertising, making content deals with everyone who could help them, AOL had 33 million households paying us $24.95 a month for its personal communications services, and became, for a time, the sixth-most valuable company in the world.
Other innovators would ultimately help consumers do more, better and cheaper, and AOL (like Wang and Liquid Paper) would give way to newer technologies and companies in the dynamism of the free market. That evolutionary and revolutionary process continues to this day, still in the service of relieving the drudgery of life—the goal that Lyndon Johnson, Bette Nesmith, An Wang, Bill Warner, Steve Case, myself and Ted (and many other disrupters of life as we know it) hold sacred and in common.
Ted Leonsis is an entrepreneur, philanthropist, and founder, chairman, and CEO of Monumental Sports & Entertainment. He is principal owner of the NHL’s Washington Capitals, NBA’s Washington Wizards, WNBA’s Washington Mystics, NBA G League’s Capital City Go-Go and NBA 2K League’s Wizards District Gaming. Pat Butler is the former president and CEO of America’s Public Television Stations. Prior to APTS, Butler held senior leadership roles at The Washington Post Company, where he founded Newsweek Productions. He has also served as a speechwriter for President Gerald Ford and advisor to Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker.
