How can you spot a pioneer?

When L.A.'s A. Jerrold Perenchio spurned Grupo Televisa a couple weeks ago and said he would sell his Univision Communications Inc. to a group headed by Haim Saban of Beverly Hills, much of the news coverage centered on Perenchio's tortured relationship with Grupo Televisa's Emilio Azcarraga Jean. And tightly so.

However, I couldn't help but think of another man with a distinctive name: Irvine O. Hockaday IV.

Hockaday was the president and chief executive of Hallmark Cards Inc. about 20 years ago. Out of nowhere, he bought a Spanish-language network and 10 affiliated television stations when they came up for sale. He renamed his new operation Univision.

Those of us in the business press lobbed questions at Hockaday, often some polite version of this: Just what are you doing, anyway?

After all, why would Hockaday put his soft-sided greeting-card maker into the sharp-edged coliseum of broadcasting? And in Spanish, no less.

But Hockaday, who had a reputation as being intellectual yet bold at turns, patiently explained that Spanish-speaking Americans were a fast-growing demographic. Many predicted then that in 10 years or so, Spanish would be side-by-side with English on many commercial signs. And Hockaday predicted that Univision could grow up to be a big network.

Of course, Hockaday was absolutely prescient. Spanish has become far more common in our society and Univision today is the country's fifth-largest network.

Alas, it took longer than many thought back then. It didn't turn out very well for Hockaday and Hallmark. Univision, saddled with junk bond debt, was unable to pay its way, and in 1992 Hallmark sold the network to the Perenchio group for $550 million, about the same amount Hockaday had paid years earlier to buy it. (Perenchio, by contrast, is now poised to sell Univision for $13.7 billion.)

What went wrong for Hockaday and Hallmark? Much of the failure resulted from what I call the pioneer problem. Put simply, he moved too soon. Pioneers, the visionaries who see trends and quickly move to capitalize on them, often execute their strategies too far ahead of everybody else and end up alone in the desert.

You see pioneers make belly flops all the time in business. Some are kind of funny, such as the Dodge La Femme, a 1950s car designed to appeal to women. The car had pink upholstery with matching raincoats and lipstick tubes. Dodge was on the right track-everyone now knows that women make most of the buying decisions in a typical household--but the automaker was too far ahead of the market. Not to mention that the execution--pink upholstery!--was insulting.

Some pioneers make spectacular pratfalls--just think of all those dot.com disasters. And some are painfully embarrassing, such as the leisure suit craze of the late 1970s that was ahead of the trend of casual attire, albeit well behind Americans' quest to avoid looking goofy.

Pioneers are often held out in the business press as savvy and bold visionaries, the ones who will lead us into a new and improved world. That's true in some cases, but pioneers need to have another trait-a good sense of timing--to make their vision work.

Otherwise, to coin a not-so-pioneering phrase, the pioneer may be the one with all those arrows sticking out of his back.

Charles Crumpley is the editor of the Business

Journal. He can be reached at [e-mail].