The other night, I heard a Columbia University professor bashing capitalists as greedy pigs the nation would be wise to banish from our shores.

Does he know they created the endowment that pay his salary? Does he care? Should we confuse him with the facts?

Last week, I read a New York Times story quoting a politician ranting about “the corporatists” in her party. That is code for “capitalists.”

Does she know these very capitalists employ the vast majority of Americans. That they produce the taxes that wind up in the pork she proudly displays in her district? Does she care? Should we invite her back down to earth?

Our US economy is divided into two major components: private and public. The former generates wealth; the latter squanders it on every half-assed boondoggle the human mind can possibly fathom.

The private sector is led by smart people with a dream and the guts to turn their dreams into reality. Whether their ventures are large or small, they employ people, provide fertile fields for minds to grow, invent things, drive progress, create funding for hospitals and universities and provide the tax dollars to fuel the greatest military in the world. The same military that protects those who think that the only thing worse than a business person is a soldier.

The public sector is led by whiners, frauds, takers, complainers whose primary mission in life is to point fingers at the “Corporatists” who fund their institutions, line their pockets and enrich their lifestyle.

The public sector is The Last Refuge for Losers.

Of course, there are exceptions–magnificent ones–but for the most part these entitled gnats run around pretending to save the world while looking down on it from the private jets the capitalists “buy” for them with stolen money euphemistically known as “taxes.”

The private sector has to work hard, work smart, dream, fail, pick itself up again, start over, stay at it relentlessly to achieve success against all odds.

The public sector simply raises the tax rate. Wow, that’s easy. Why don’t we all go into that business?

Well, thankfully, America was built on a cultural DNA that creates Ford’s and Googles and Smith’s General Stores. People who relish their independence, their freedom to create something, who want to give far more than they want to take, who expect nothing but the opportunity to take a chance.

Amazingly, this threatens the parasites who live off of us. In an act of blindness that has no equal, they want to bring every dollar into the public sector, the ”do nothing” sector, the handout sector, the entitlement sector. Then we can all sit around and sing Kumbaya while shaking 100’s from the money trees.

The Last Refuge for Losers wants your business.

The Last Refuge for Losers is a dangerous place.

Mark Stevens

CEO

Images courtesy: 1, 2.

In the thick of the triangular feud between Conan O’Brien, Jay Leno and NBC, one of the nighttime word warriors decided to cut to the chase and reveal what was going on behind the curtain.

What he said was no surprise to business people, but it provides a continuing lesson and a reminder of the rules of the jungle.

After his monologue, Jay Leno sat down alone on his stage–no jokes, no props–to reveal the set of events that led up to the mayhem on the broken, Keystone Cops network that broadcasts his show.

Essentially Jay said, when we move aside all of the rumors, whispers and ”he saids, she saids,” the entire highly entertaining tempest in a teapot boiled down to one word — one omnipresent fact of life: RATINGS.

Leno summed up the chain of events by admitting that neither he nor Conan had the ratings they needed to build a permanent home in their reshuffled time slots. The shows weren’t good enough, the people weren’t buying and in a free market that means the product gets recalled from the shelves.

All of us in business live with this. Whatever the names of our businesses, whatever we make or do, a silent but overwhelmingly powerful partner is always in the equation:  Charles Darwin.

What Leno was really saying in his tell-all revelation was that in TV land (and we know by extrapolation in ours too) success depends on the survival of the fittest.

No matter how long we have been in business, regardless of how powerful our brands have been, if we don’t remain at the top of our game, we cave to the competition and may ultimately fail to exist.

When I used to play tennis with Carl Icahn, he liked to say that we live in a corporate world of reverse Darwinism: “The CEO keeps hiring someone dumber than himself until, after time, we have a moron at the top.” Agree or not, complacency and incompetence enabled Icahn to pursue company after company, take them down like a Rhodesian Ridgeback felling a lion and amassing one of the world’s great fortunes in the process.

We cannot get by on hope or arrogance or smarts alone. We must find a way to break the code, and then break it again and again, so that our companies are fresh, inventive and ahead of the curve. We must do this because precisely like O’Brien and Leno, Darwin is our silent partner as well. If the ratings from our customers and clients slump, so do our sales and profits and the long-term prospects for our businesses.

It was refreshing for a TV star to talk candidly about the issues behind the firestorm, but when Leno gave us all a little lesson on ratings, one group of viewers already knew the power of that reality.

Business people. We simply call it by another name: Cash Flow.

Mark Stevens

CEO

Image courtesy: flickr

Tenure is a euphemism. A wonderfully intellectual way of saying that you can stay on the job, protected by the rules, even if your performance is as captivating as frozen pizza.

And yet we put so much of our lives into the hands of tenured slackers who use the power of their protective armor to shield them against the natural forces of life that would toss them aside in an instant.

When my sons were kids and under the thumb of dreadful teachers, I would press a case at the school, only to find that right and wrong has no place in the lexicon of tenure.

In recent months, I have tried to alert national security officials of terror threats that one of my firm’s clients – Safe Banking Systems -is uniquely capable of detecting. But as a New York Times reporter working the case with me has pointed out, “bureaucrats don’t want to know that others may know more than them.”

The truth has no place in the lexicon of tenure.

In the legislative branch of our federal government, a congressman in a “safe” district – extemely right or left – gains a form of tenure, runs committees, take bribes from leaders and lobbyists and does virtually whatever he wants to do whether the people like it or not.

Liberty has no place in the lexicon of tenure.

Companies large and small are saddled with parasite employees who spend much of their time smoking, lunching, coffee breaking and bitching about everything under the sun. They keep their place because of unions who don’t know how to spell the word “performance.”

Meritocracy has no place in the lexicon of tenure.

Every time a I meet a company for the first time, and management brags to me that no one has ever been fired for 30 years or so, I know TENURE is written on the walls and that third-rate hangers on soak up the payroll and sap the company of its vitality.

The truth is, except for the US Supreme Court, there is no place for tenure. People, ideas, products, services, romances, grudges, feuds and strategies all must earn their place in the sun or be swept away by the winds.

What comes in their place will always be better.

Mark Stevens

CEO

Image courtesy: flickr

It is interesting how love moves in a crazy arc: we meet a special person who suddenly appears before us from somewhere in the galaxy of exuberance.

In a nanosecond, the clocks mark time, the moon is full, we float in a champagne haze that is so intoxicating every moment is delicious.

This is love, we know, we hope, and we want to climb onto a rooftop on a windy night and howl it to the world. It is too amazing to keep tucked away as our own little secret.

At this moment of bliss, we rarely know the person we are mad about. It is an image, a profile, a promise that is all wonderfully hazy around the edges. It is beauty and smarts and laughter and the music we make as we stroll into bars and onto lush meadows.

And then a few months go by and there is the first disagreement or disappointment and we start to glimpse through the fog and see just who this object of desire is. And in most cases, the more we learn, the less brightly the wild torch burns.

As even more time goes by, as the dream person becomes an ever more imperfect reality, the wild blush of passion cools and the rationalizing begins. A different kind of love, we tell ourselves, must take the place of the narcotic rush that overwhelmed us when our paths first crossed.

But what is really happening is that the vast majority of what we call “loves” begins to fade in equal proportion to the knowledge we gain about the once and former mystery person.

We do fall in love blindly, hoping that the experience we give ourselves to will prove to be eternal. But the blindness is really so often a key to the passion. As the magic dust clears and the lover by our side becomes more visible, more human, we tend to fall out of love. In stages, most often, but out of love just the same.

A year after the sun stayed out all night, we wonder where the intoxication went.

The fact is, love dies in the light of day.

Usually.

When it lives on, when it grows in the realm of full disclosure and knowledge of the other person–when the more we know of the person whose hand we hold, the more we adore them – well, that is rare and wonderful and a force that defies the natural arc that begins with joy and ends with the pain of what might have been.

I believe that business is a metaphor for love. Our customers, our clients, must not like our companies, our products, they must adore them. And we must find a way to keep the love alive for years, for decades, forever.

The shooting star arc that kills romances does the same to businesses. I read today of a Broadway show that closed after two months, taking $8 million of investor capital with it. And I passed by a local restaurant that has shuttered its doors after five years, a victim of a similar failure that leads so many to wonder why relationships that once stood at the center of our lives, are now but distant memories.

Sooner, rather than later, everything must be subject to the scrutiny of the sunlight.

The question is, will it thrive or shrivel up before our eyes?

Mark Stevens

CEO

Images courtesy: 1, 2.

When we sleep, we can glide in any direction, slipping effortlessly into the past just as easily as into the future.

On our voyage back in time, we are free to rectify mistakes, wipe the slate clean, change decisions, mend broken hearts, place bets we failed to make, walk on water, recognize the genius we wrote off as weird, untie the knots that bound us up in our own deceit.

That magic is limited to the realm of sleep.

Or is it?

Nearly every day, people come into my office, standing in front of me as they dwell in the past. They talk of what might have been, of what went wrong, of why they must be anchored to yesterday. Not only can they go backwards in time, but so often, they appear to be hostage to it.

We talk about 2010, about their business goals, the challenges they will face and the odds they will overcome to achieve them. We talk. We talk.

But I see, at a moment in time, a flash, that it is an exercise in futility. They are sleep walking into the future, tethered to the past. To the failures that shook their confidence. To the losers who lied to them and told them the earth was flat. To the naysayers who took pleasure in demeaning them and whittling them down to size.

But as we head into this new year, perhaps the most important resolution we can make is to see the goblins of the past for what they are: figments of the imagination that have no place in the light of day.

Nothing great ever happens in yesterday.

Mark Stevens

CEO

Images courtesy: 1, 2.

One of the great ironies in life is that you have to be a famous person, often an icon, before you become an infamous failure.

The list of the once illustrious/now disgraced is long and their names are etched in our minds.

Think of the free fall:
OJ
Pete Rose
Tiger
Hitler
Jocko
DeLorean
Madoff

There is rarely such a thing as a prominent failure who was not once idolized for being on top of their game. The weird paradox is that to be truly infamous–the object of widespread hatred, disdain, disgust–you must first have achieved your life’s work at an exceptional level. In most cases, better than anyone else on earth.

There are no obscure devils of major proportions. No headline stealing slime
who have not, just moments before, charmed and even intimidated us with
their awesome displays of brains, brawn, leadership, insight.

To be truly infamous you must first have been blazingly famous. It appears
to be a social vindication of Newton’s law that every action has an equal
and opposite reaction. It is just that in these notorious cases, the role
reversal is played out in prime time.

Thinking back, it is hard to remember through the fog of car chases and
glove trials that OJ Simpson was once viewed as an example of human
perfection. That Madoff was viewed by the nation’s best and brightest as a
Wall Street miracle worker.

Similarly, if you look back at the once-stellar companies that topped the
early lists of Fortune 500 companies, many are now extinct or lost in
mergerland: Sperry, Douglas Aircraft, Sealed Air.

As we all seek to rise to the top, we should think for a moment of the
forces that bring the greats smashing back to earth.

Perhaps most telling and worth remembering, is that the 180 degree from fame to infamy is brought on by themselves.

Drunk with power is more than a cliche. It is a cautionary tale.

Mark Stevens
CEO

Images courtesy: 1, 2.

There is a concept in physics which holds that you cannot ever really get from one end of a room to the other because each step is infinitely divisible. As close as you get to the far wall, you always have further to go.

A rather intriguing concept but the fact is – in the real as opposed to the theoretical world – you do wind up at the end of the room, banging your face against the wall.

So much for the theory.

Similarly, we often believe we are “in the middle” of something: a project, our life span, a product life cycle, an agreement between two parties, a workday. And at other times, we sense that we are at the midpoint of something less tangible: a relationship, a friendship, a love affair, the creative force of our lives.

In both cases, we have absolutely no idea where we stand in the scheme of things. Just as we can truly cross a room and reach the other end, we can never have certainty that we are in the middle of anything.

Life does not allow anything so neat and predictable.

Until recently, one of my clients believed that she was in the middle of her managerial climb at a major company–a client of ours–when the business slammed into a brick wall of its own, igniting a management shakeup and leaving my client suddenly (but temporarily) jobless.

So often when we think we are in the middle, we are near the end. People drop dead, lose their companies to Walmarts that move next door, lose their lovers to others who come out of left field, find that their position as the world’s iconic golfer ends in an hour and discover that their business technology is suddenly obsolete and not marketable.

Life has no respect for the middle.

The truth is that we are always in a timeless flux that demands us to live, to reach, to dream, to excel, to work, to create as if we are at the starting gate with absolutely no idea of how long the race is and when it will end. Because we don’t.

So many of the people I meet are treading water, content that they can do so because they are surely in the middle of the middle. So they have time, they tell themselves, to turn up the heat later on and finish with a flurry. It is an excuse for mediocrity. Or simply a deception. In either case, it is a pretense that must be challenged so that the middle doesn’t turn out to be a brick wall in disguise.

Or if it does, you have beat it to the punch and run the race as if there is no such thing as the middle.

Because it never comes when you think it will.

Mark Stevens

CEO

Image courtesy: 1.

It’s not the velocity that amazes, generally, but the frequency that is astounding, how we drive headlong into each other and spin out of control into a speeding stranger who turns out to be a friend and collaborator only to make others envious and determined to drive a wedge between us before we inevitably do so ourselves and then split like atoms into random parts that make new connections that form businesses or babies or maybe both enroute to who knows what as the snows fall on the Rockies and the makeups and the brakeups keep on coming and spawning false prophets and momentary friends seeking something from the winnings or the ashes and there is never a shortage of pretenders who will stand by your side as long as the coffee is hot and the Benz is new and it all plays out in a zillion horoscopes written with flawless predictability because romance will come and success will fly in the window on the 19th or the 31st and lust will give way to anger and the reset button will clear the decks for the passions to be reborn and the jealousies, petty and miserable as they are, will rise like the Sphinx to put an end to what was once a college bond that mellowed through the years until one very human event or action brought the house down and the bodies, to say nothing of the souls, into violent collision as the Beatles played in the background and the former competitors lay down their swords to form an even greater enterprise than either could on their own and then the Yoko enters the scene and the harmony is spelled l-i-T-i-g-a-T-i-o-n and the new allies and enemies form to battle the evil but there is none just the rise of HR departments so that would be colleagues that condemn each other in the name of water cooler conspiracies manufactured by the captains of boredom and the endless human force that brings us together and rips us apart for no reason but ego as nations pretend to go to war over principles when it is the leaders tilting at each other as Steve runs commercials belittling Bill because there are no traffic lights on this highway called life just a few people who in the end are precious and loyal and beautiful to us and in the final chapter when the wrecks are brought in for repair perhaps the car crashes of the human kind just get all the attention.

Mark Stevens
CEO

Image Courtesy: 1.

All of us have dreams. Things we want to accomplish. Goals we would love to achieve. Successes we want to reach out and claim.

In my role as CEO of a marketing and management firm–one that helps people achieve their business goals (and often woven into this, their personal ambitions), I have a front row seat to the dreams daily. I watch them flower and, all too often, I see them wilt.

What causes the latter? Of course, many factors come into play, but none more important, more destructive, than FEAR.

What if it doesn’t work?
What if I lose money?
What if I fail?
What if people think less of me?

These are the walls, the obstacles, the bogeyman, real and imaginary, that stop dreams in their tracks somewhere along the continuum from conception to, ideally, realization.

I have seen it myself in my own entrepreneurial career. At the crossroads that inevitably appear, I have had to face the FEARS. They do serve a valuable role, acting as checks on impulsive behavior and forcing us to examine our actions so that we can do so with the highest level of knowledge and prudence.

But at the end of that rather antiseptic exercise, we are alone again. Naked. With no real answers that can light a torch to the guaranteed route. The sure fire decisions.

It all comes down, at some point in the discovery, to whether we cave to fear or act on the courage it always takes to move mountains. To build companies and careers, to take products to market, to drive ourselves BEYOND our skill sets, to fall face down in the mud, to empty the bank account and to summon our resolve and act not without fear, anyone can do that, but in the face of fear.

Once you have stress-tested your idea to the max, once you have confirmed to yourself that the goal you are pursuing is truly the one you MUST accomplish, you/we must cross the line in the sand where fear and courage meet and be willing to move into the great unknown.

It is where we meet ourselves. It is where we define ourselves. And it is where our ultimate fate resides.

Mark Stevens

CEO

Image courtesy: 1.