Ready, Fire, Aim

The Beer in the Briefcase

Jim Koch was wearing a pin-striped suit and carrying six cold bottles of Samuel Adams when he walked into a Boston bar in 1984. He had three Harvard degrees — college, law school, business school — and not one of them had taught him what to do next. The bar manager spoke broken English. The bar back spoke none. So Koch did the thing every Harvard course had quietly suggested was beneath him. He poured a glass, slid it across the wood, and waited.

The manager ordered twenty-five cases on the spot.

That moment, retold by Michael Masterson in *Ready, Fire, Aim*, is the whole book in miniature. Koch had been shopping for a computer before he had a single customer. His uncle, a Goldman Sachs partner who was bankrolling him, had to call him up and bark a sentence that Masterson treats as scripture: he had seen a lot more businesses go broke from lack of sales than from lack of computers. Koch put down the keyboard catalog, picked up the bottles, and discovered the thing his MBA had hidden from him in plain sight — that selling is not what happens after you build a company. Selling is what builds the company.

That is the heart of what Masterson is arguing across roughly three hundred pages. The book's title is a deliberate corruption of the old shooting-range rule. Ready, aim, fire is what careful people do. Ready, fire, aim is what entrepreneurs do who actually finish the climb from zero to a hundred million dollars. The point is not to be reckless. The point is to recognize that the aiming you do before you pull the trigger is mostly theatre, and the real aiming — the only aiming that matters — happens after the bullet is already in the air.