Everyone talks about growing a business. The question is, how to do it effectively, consistently, and expeditiously.

The “slow and steady wins the race” crowd will tell you that if you can pump up sales by ten percent a year, your company will double in size in slightly more than seven years.

That certainly is one road to take, but it’s not the one I’d choose. I’d identify an opportunity and go after it with all guns blazing. That’s because the slow but steady cliché often places you in an armchair, passively watching the winners race by.

I learned about the importance of going a different way growing up in Queens, New York. I loved basketball, and everyday after school my friends and I would gather on the blacktop behind the junior high and play until the janitor locked the gates at 6 PM. The problem was that even though we had played for hours, we didn’t’ want to quit at six.

One day as the janitor came out at 5:55 to begin shooing us away; I went up to him and said, “Look, lock us in. Don’t worry. We’ll get out when we’re done.”

He looked skeptical but agreed and put the padlock on the outside of the fence, locking us in on the playground. We thought that was the greatest thing ever and played until dusk.

When we finally couldn’t see anymore, it was time to go home, and my first thought was maybe telling the janitor to lock us in wasn’t the best idea. The fences surrounding the court were twenty feet high. The only way out was to climb the fence.

My friends and I learned an important lesson that night. Climbing up twenty feet is easy; it is getting down in the near dark that’s hard. Everyone ended up with ripped pants and bruised ribs, and there were a couple of sprained ankles.

I went home and realized we needed to do something differently. We could either leave by six, as everyone else did, or find a better alternative to risking our necks getting out of the place every night.

The next day, I came to school with wire cutters and a small can of green paint. With my friends shielding me from view. I cut a large-enough section out of the fence to make it easy for us to get out, and then we put it back in place and painted it over, so no one could tell what I had done.

From then on, we could come and go as we pleased. Safely. Much later, I realized that the way we went about ensuring more playing time could serve as a model for business success:

• Be imaginative
• Accept risk
• Assume challenges
• Find a new way to win

Mark Stevens
CEO

In business, we are always peering through a mirror of optimism. The next big thing. The game changer deal. The trophy client.

It is what makes us get up in the morning, race to the office, work through the nights when we could be reading the paper or watching a ball game. It is a narcotic of sorts, a passion cubed, a state of mind the clock watchers of the world could never understand.

I am a lover of this high, intoxicated life. And all of those who are members of The Club. But I know that while I am flirting with Beyonce, there are wheels turning around that I may be oblivious to. That we may be missing, blinded as we are by the beauty we are pursuing.

As Toyota discovered in what is the most costly oversight in corporate history. An otherwise highly disciplined and relentlessly demanding management team caught a glimpse of a ravishing beauty in the front view mirror. It’s name is market share. AKA Global leader. Humiliate GM.

In the lust of the prize, in the flirtation with Beyonce, Japan took its eye off of the people who were once at the center of its universe: its customers.

The people who trusted the company to build the best and safest cars in the world. In the race away from perfection and toward glorification, Toyota did what Detroit had tried to do unsuccessfully for years.

Made itself a third rate company, a traitor to the millions who prayed at its altar.

It is a business lesson we should all contemplate before the next crisis washes it out of the news cycle.

Mark Stevens

CEO

Images courtesy: 1, 2.

At one point in my life, I found myself locked in a form of living hell. I don’t really know how I wound up there, or why, but there I was, listening to music, drinking beer and trying to cope with the darkness of it all.

It happens to many of us. I recall asking a client who lost all of his money and went from the Forbes list to the minus column, how he dealt with the blow to his ego, the destruction of his family and his financial security.

He told me that he woke up every night at 1 AM in cold sweats, and couldn’t go back to sleep again until the dawn started to break. A friend who suffered a similar fate turned his back on the world, isolated himself, went to the movies every day, hardly ever watching what was going on on the screen. The real drama, the dark one, was playing out in his mind.

If you’re thinking this is a story of misfortune, it is not. It is one of discovery, of redemption, of learning, strength and ultimate joy.

Why? Because hell has a special kind of curriculum you can’t get anyplace else. It is a crucible like no other. In a twist on the Sinatra classic, “If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.”

In my living hell, I learned :

• How to be completely self sufficient.
• That life owed me nothing. Whatever I wanted, I had to make happen.
• Whining never does anyone any good
• If you accept your position when things are going wrong as inevitable, they will stay wrong. If you look for an exit, you will find one.
• Once you have been a resident of hell, nothing else scares you. If you engineer your escape, you can enjoy a kind of freedom that one can only experience on the rebound.

Perhaps we are meant to be tested. Or maybe it’s all just random. But when you prevail through the kind of torture McCain and Mandela experienced — two polar opposite men linked by the common knowledge of the ravages of hell — you exit far stronger than if you had never been to the dark side.

If you ever find yourself looking to the heavens and asking “why me,” comfort yourself in the knowledge that there is a way out. That the road to hell is a two way street. And that you always leave with a kind of Phd they don’t hand out in the Ivy League.

Mark Stevens

CEO

Image courtesy: 1.

In conversations over lunch, in media interviews, in discussions with so many with whom I come in contact over the course of a business day, I find myself–for the first time in my life– having to defend America.

I would expect this were I attending a conference overseas. The US has always been a lightning rod, an easy target, among those who resent our greatness, our exceptional history and even our un-rivaled charity. So it comes as no surprise to me when the French and the Germans take me on as an “American” as they did during my speech at Siemans global CEO conference in Berlin.

The slings and arrows are common to me now, so I brush them away with the same indifference I have for rude little brats whose parents let them run their mouths without fact or respect.

But the enemy within! Where did this come from? Why do I find myself defending America from Americans. Almost everyday and on nearly every front.

Calvin Coolidge’s statement that “The business of America is business,” has always captured me. Truthfully,  it was more than a statement, it was an observation. Americans have always been a nation of dreamers and tinkerers who turned ideas into one-person garage-based ventures and stunning global giants. The size of the enterprise never mattered nearly as much as the freedom to create it.

Yet today, I find myself having to defend capitalism. A key pillar of the American way.

And then I have to defend the American people.

The other day, a new acquaintance told me, out of the blue, that middle America is a land filled with people “as dumb as rocks.” These “dumb rocks” run farms that feed the world, build cars that now, compared to  their Japanese competitors, look like marvels of technical safety. These are the same middle Americans who  kiss their kids goodbye as they suit up to join the only military that has ever stood as a bulwark of global security. And that does the real work of saving Haitian lives while Hollywood flies in for 10 minute red carpet star turns.

I hear that America is mean, selfish, arrogant, misguided. I hear all of this from Americans. And when I do, I hum the tune and mouth the words from Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “This Ain’t My America.”

I believe totally in free and open discussion among all Americans of all opinions. That is another of the cornerstones of our nation that makes the US the oldest enduring republic in the world.

But I believe that the discussion should begin with a respect for, and an acknowledgment of, the fact that this nation is a miracle that has sustained every manner of vile and evil threat from the Third Reich to The World Trade Center’s destruction, with its liberty and its heart in tact.

But now, for the first time, it has an enemy within. An enemy that resents business, risk, entrepreneurialism, profit, success, free will, freedom and most of all free people guided by their aspirations without any want or need of “help” from an increasingly corrupt government that wants to trade dollars for liberty.

Suddenly, it is old fashioned and somehow subversive to love America. To be an entrepreneur, amidst entrepreneurs, pursing  the magic of the The American Dream and wanting to share it with all who want to join hands with me.

I have always believed that the best way to deal with enemies is to identify them from afar and move out to challenge them in the distance. Once they have moved into your kitchen, it is a different kind of battle. It is the enemy within.

How did we get here?

I am not quite sure but I do know that as a son of America, as a student of Jefferson, Lincoln, FDR, Ronald Reagan, JFK and Martin Luther King, I wake up every morning and wrap myself in the flag.

Mark Stevens

CEO

Image courtesy: 1.

Today’s Unconventional Thinking blog post is my 200th!

To commemorate this milestone, I’m giving away 2 signed copies of my Businessweek top 10 bestseller, “Your Marketing Sucks.”

To be automatically entered into the drawing, simply follow me on Twitter and retweet this post by clicking “retweet” on the blog page or my twitter page by midnight EST on Sunday, Feb 14th.

Two re-tweeters will be chosen at random to receive the autographed books! I’ll inform the winners via Direct Message on Twitter (requires that you are following me).

Good luck.
Mark Stevens
CEO

When I was a young man, I was asked to fight in Viet Nam. I wasn’t afraid and I didn’t have any life plans that would get in the way. But I didn’t believe in the war and so I was at a crossroads.

But I took the two subway tokens the Army sent me, reported to Ft. Hamilton in Brooklyn, went through my physical, prepared to fly into the war zone.

Why would I submit to a process I didn’t believe in? Why would I agree to go to a war I believed was not only contrary to my beloved country’s best interests, but was being “fought” in a half-baked way that could not result in victory?

There is no way I can defend any of this on moral grounds. I was 19 or so and hardly thought much about morality. I took the subway to the military because I didn’t want to run away from Saigon. (In the end, I didn’t have to go.)

One of the best things, perhaps THE best thing, my father taught me was not to run from anything. Life has taught me that he was right, for two major reasons:

1. Running becomes a habit. Those who run, run. Those who hold their ground, move ultimately, to a higher ground.

2. When you run in fear, you lose your perspective. You make poor decisions. You look only for the exit doors when, in fact, it may be wiser to seek out the entryway. You act in a form of panic. You are a leaf being blown about by the wind.

In business, I see many people with a rich tapestry of dreams for creating exceptional businesses from scratch. All delicious on paper. And because we never know at the start what a person is truly composed of–if their molecular structure is aligned with their dreams–we act on the faith that they really want to turn their vision into an iPod.

And then life happens and the true entrepreneurs forge ahead, moving through the screens of fear, doubt and risk en route to the goal line. The pretenders roll their eyes at the heavens, dragging out the risk calculations they learned in college.

From professors.

The truth is, you can never run away from Saigon. It will always be there, over your shoulder, daring you to recognize that running is the worst addiction of all.

Mark Stevens
CEO

Image courtesy: flickr

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.