Everyone knows Bernie Madoff is a putrid excuse for a human being.

But as we are hurling verbal stones at him, we should stop and see that what he did and how he did it, is ingenious.

More than anything else, Madoff was a marketing whiz. He wasn’t a financial engineer, he was a mastermind of perception.
And deception. And manipulation.

Of course, I am not advocating that we imitate the bastard, but there are interesting insights and epiphanies that we can gain from his modus operandi, and, if put in the hands of reputable and ethical business people, can work magic.

Consider the key components of Madoff Marketing:

• Never sell anything. Let other people do the selling for you. When that happens, you appear to be above commerce, a great man, who has no need for anyone to give him anything. People swoon over that kind of apparent independence.
• Don’t position your business as a business: hold it out as a club. Furthermore, a club that is closed to new members. If it makes an exception and finds the goodness to let you in, you will be forever grateful.

While Morgan Stanley was delighted to land fat cats as clients, fat cats were exhilerated that Madoff let them join his club.

(I first witnessed this kind of phenomenon at Studio 54. The once white hot New York disco insulted most of the people who waited on line for hours to get in, and the ruder they were, the longer the lines snaked around the city streets.).

• Establish a credential, let a disciple embellish it and let it take on an aura of its own without the main attraction–in this case Bernie the Swindler– not saying a word.

Madoff knew that other people can do a much better job of bragging about you than you can do on your own. Bernie built a network of a thousand third party endorsements. All he had to do was sit back, feign indifference and watch the machine do its magic.

• Aristotle Onassis once said to always have a tan, always borrow money and always pay it back on time. Madoff never borrowed, he stole, and of course he paid back just enough to keep his scam going.

But there is a part of the Onassis success plan Madoff understood: the tan. The aura of success. The importance of looking like a billion bucks. Bernie knew that success, or in his case the appearance thereof, draws crowds to you for the priviledge of touching your holy cloth.

They want a bit of the spoils to rub off on them.

In the classic film, “Being There,” Peter Sellers plays an ignorant gardner who is deemed to be a genius. Someone starts the myth, others swear to it, Sellers never says a word because he is oblivious to it all. The village idiot winds up in the Pantheon of greatness because the legions who want to believe, to believe in gods and icons and the kind of “greatness” that never visibly promotes itself, cannot be stopped from knighting him.

Madoff understood this strange alchemy. He brewed it all the way to a small cell and ultimately, a first row seat in hell.

Mark Stevens
CEO

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Image courtesy:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ari/

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A billion women came before Marilyn Monroe. A billion have come after.

But she has never shared the stage, the life stage, with anyone. She is a timeless beauty, an exotic wonder woman, a sexual shockwave, an object of universal lust. And an extraordinary business lesson.

No woman ever stood in a room with Marilyn and felt beautiful. No man ever shared her presence and felt sane. She stole the heart of the most heroic athlete of her time, Joe DiMaggio–himself an American icon. She captured the soul of the greatest American playwright, Arthur Miller. She married them both and then she moved on to Camelot and wrapped the Commander-In-Chief, JFK, around her finger.

Marilyn is of no distinct period in history. She is known to teenagers and seniors alike, urban and rural, Elton John (who sings beautifully about her) and Vladmir Putin, (who has watched her films). The world loves Marilyn. Even those who pretend they are too smart and sophisticated to admit they do.

Marilyn Monroe is irresistible.

I watched a news story this morning on CNBC reporting on crowds lining up in the wee hours to buy the newly discounted iPhone. Why would they do that? Why did thousands do the same when the product was first introduced. Why have so many millions bought them when they already had phones?

Because Steve Jobs has always understood Marilyn Monroe. He has spent his entire career making sure he wasn’t selling things people liked.

Like is a commodity. Love is a force and a barrier to entry. Great marketing always finds a way to transition a product, a company, from like to love. If the marketing fails to do that, the marketing is just a glorified way of going through the motions.

I want to live in a world surrounded only by people and things that intoxicate me. Unfortunately, there are no such pure plays, but I am bored to tears when I have to spend time in the land of like. So I search out the people and things I can be passionate about– and like a soldier carrying his girlfriends picture into battle–I think of them. Amazing how they cast a glow that makes everything more beautiful.

Every time you wonder how you can make your business better, resist the temptation to read a treatise from Harvard Business School.

Look at a picture of Marilyn Monroe.

Mark Stevens

CEO

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Somewhere, someplace, Henry Ford is crying.

It is truly an amazing story of how one man’s entrepreneurial vision and spirit led to the creation of one of the greatest companies in history. And how, in time, his successors came to destroy it.

Ford Motor may survive but it is a shadow of the industrial miracle it once was. And the reason is as common as the ones that fire a bullet into the hearts of thousands of lesser known companies, large and small, every year.

Put simply, they fall into the hands of people who don’t care. Left to the natural flow of things, the same will happen to your business or the department you are responsible for. Why? Because business is forever challenging, unpredictable, swirling and swirving like an Oklahoma twister. Rather than predict, analyze and outsmart the forces aligned against your business, many prefer to take the easy way out, running for cover until the storm passes.

Only leadership can prevent that. How? By keeping up the quality, the drive, the culture that refuses to take cover from anything and that is determined to keep raising the bar on performance regardless of the obstacles, the barriers that will always be part of the calculus of business.

Think about it this way: for decades, Ford executives coasted. They allowed their cars’ quality to deteriorate, they gave Toyota a pass to steal their customers, they turned their backs on Henry’s legacy, built an enormous bureaucracy, raised their pay as the company’s fortunes deteriorated, luxuriated in their Grosse Point country clubs and built lifestyles where power and ego where the badges of success. That they started to produce junk hardly matterred as long as payday came around every week and the checks grew fatter in an inverse relationship to the Ford bottom line.

This is the curse of business. It is not the competition: they can always be beaten or marginalized by the warriors who are determined to win. To keep thinking and dreaming and fighting to thrive in the glorious jungle that the marketplace always is.

No, the real curse of business is the cancer that grows unabetted from within. It is expressed by those who:

• Refuse to take chances
• Settle for mediocracy
• Bitch about everything in the company but never come armed with solutions nor the ambition to fix it
• Believe their positions in the company are entitlements.

At our firm, we see the scars of companies that have been ravaged from within. Where the genius and the hard work of those who built these enterprises is forgotten, squandered and turned into dust. Much of the work in getting once strong companies moving again, involves routing those who have decided, consciously or not, to hold it back.That would make Henry smile again.

Mark Stevens
CEO

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But I thought I knew. I believed everything I wanted to do I should do with reckless abandon because Mark Stevens was entitled to his manifest destiny.

The priests and the rabbis, the presidents and the captains of industry, the moral authorities and the editorial writers of the journalistic institutions–they were all clowns who had nothing to do with me. And their best course was to stay the hell out of my way. For many reasons, but mostly because Mark Stevens knew it all. He was convinced…..and he didn’t want to be confused with the facts.

I had zero plans. I made life changing decisions in a snap.

I had no goals, except that I was determined not to be ordinary. Who needed goals.? I had wisdom on my side. It’s amazing how well I could sell myself snake oil. How I loved my Cool-Aid……drank it with gusto.

I would go to sleep with a half-baked idea and in the morning swear it was genius. And in the afternoon, begin to pursue it. It didn’t matter that I didn’t think it through. Why should I? I knew everything.

I didn’t sleep more than three or four hours a night. Sleep, I pronounced, was for losers. While they are sleeping I would change the world.

I wasn’t going to grow up either. I didn’t have to. I could defy the natural course of life’s journey. If you disagreed with me, you were wrong.

I knew everything.

I built a business without an instruction sheet. Every time someone offered me one, I used it to light kindling in my fireplace. I made every mistake in the world and then some. And then I would drink a glass of Cool-Aid and tell myself I was right every time.

It was the world that was wrong.

I liked to say that there is no black and white. Just grey. No right and wrong. Just manifest destiny. Mark’s.

I have heard stories of people who have been struck by lightning only to have it change them for the good.

The lightning hit me. I don’t know exactly when. But when the flash came into my brain, I knew I know nothing.

There is black and white. There is right and wrong. There is a value in learning from those who have been through the mill. Who have won and lost and had their butts kicked and came back to fight and win another day.

It’s fun knowing that I know nothing. Now I have so much to learn. So much junk to reject. So much wisdom to absorb.

Life is a sleigh ride!
Mark Stevens
CEO

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I have sat for hours on tropic eves scanning the skies for shooting stars.

Suddenly they appear, flares that burst out of the black and dance across the constellations, a momentary magic act whose brilliance explodes and dies in nanno seconds.

Like so much in life, you want to pin your hopes on them, but they are not interested in commitments of any kind. What’s more, you can’t pin your hopes on anything in life, but yourself. In marketing, in management, in business, we witness shooting stars of all kinds. They are the people who dazzle us with their brilliance–in whom we perceive all manner of endless possibilities and breakthroughs — but in the end we are left with little more than the disappointed thoughts of what might have been.

Pinning your hopes on yourself is another matter altogether. It leaves no room for heroes or heroines, gods or role models, saints or statesman. In recent years, we pinned our hopes on Bear Stearns, Alan Greenspan, the great American home, Bernie Madoff, the power of leverage, the mighty Citigroup.

All failed us– but not nearly as much as we failed ourselves. By pinning our hopes on others.

When you pin your hopes on yourself, you are down to the naked truth. You must perform. There is no one to hide behind. You have to think big, stumble over your vision, rise again, be resilient and come back thinking and acting even bigger than before. Reinvent yourself. Remake your company. Take new risks. Learn new skills. Face down your limitations and defeat them.

I have met exceptional people who have achieved something extraordinary, amassed great wealth, pinned their hopes on shooting stars, went broke, lost themselves in hibernation, disappeared from the scene, reinvested in themselves and returned for second acts that blew the first ones away.

We all face this roller coaster. In the past year, millions of careers have been derailed, companies ruined, fortunes lost. In most cases because the victims pinned their hopes on shooting stars.

We scan the horizon for answers but we are truly wise only when we learn and admit that what we must count on is ourselves.

Mark Stevens
CEO

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America is the greatest nation in the world for a rich lode of reasons.

But none more powerful than the fact that we are, and always have been, a meritocracy. The best and the brightest, the toughest and the most determined, rise to the top of the zigguraut regardless of their family connections, lack of Ivy parchment or bank accounts to fuel their rise.

For the most part they are brutes, nerds, outcasts, loners, independents, mutts, crazos, absolutists: all determined to paint a stripe across the globe. It doesn’t matter to them if they are a threat to the privileged or those who want everyone to play ball on equal footing even if they are capable of spellbinding accomplishments: they just go ahead and do what we are all so fortunate to be able to do in the land of Ameritocracy.

They are Lincoln, Ford, Nixon, Truman, Feynman, Winfrey, Jobs, Ginsburg, Reagan. They are the meritocrats. I will trade you a bushel of technocrats, bureaucrats, aristocrats for just one of them.

In our country, there are those who now believe we should do away with valedictorians, wealthy entrepreneurs, rich compensation even if it is tied to performance. If everyone is more or less equal, they believe, everyone will be happy, more or less.

The problem–and I view this as a glorious “problem” to have– is that the meritocrats will never comply. They will be fired from their jobs for imprudence. They will be terminated for taking undue risk. They will be chastised for being dangerous minds.

I wish they would all work with me at MSCO.

The truth is, we don’t need upstarts daring to challenge conventional thinking. We don’t have to have restless spirits provoking the ire of middle (mis)management. We don’t have to have true business people challenging the snake oil salesmen on Capitol Hill.

But then again, perhaps we don’t need progress, economic might, cures for cancer, stem cell research, great companies for our bright grads to learn the lay of the land, small businesses that take the risks, pay the taxes and employ nearly everyone.

Perhaps we don’t need a meritocracy. But thankfully, under the stars and stripes, no one can make it go away. It is smarter and tougher and more decisive than all of the forces that may line up against it.

At the individual company level, it is and always has been the key to success. Once people work at a business because they feel entitled or are treated as such, once they seek to protect their interests as opposed to encouraging others to rethink what they do and how they do it, the business begins to falter.

It is a dead man walking. It will die, and sooner than the caretakers on top believe to be the case.

The fact is, meritocracy is not an option. It is a must. And once you make excuses that dance around that, you are on a slippery slope.

You must adopt and live by a Meritocracy Manifesto:

* No second class team members.
* No faith in the status quo
* No marketing that fails to produce a measureable ROI
* No excuses for your own failures or shortcomings.

It is one thing to be privileged to live and work in an Ameritocracy. It is another thing to live up to it.

Something we should remind ourselves every day.

Mark Stevens
CEO

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We all fall into this trap of deception, convincing ourselves that everything in business, everything in life, is so complex. So many facts to analyze, so many unknowns to deal with, so many variables to factor in. It is all so complicated that we can easily hide behind the illusion of complexity, using it as camouflage and to obfuscate the reality.

Which is that it is all so simple. Precisely as English logican William of Ockham posited in the 14 th century with Ockham’s razor.

In business, when we peel away all of the code, the rules, the myths, the jargon, the Harvard case studies, all we have to do is to find a code breaker: which is a single thing that if we do it over and over again, it will always be profitable. If we know the costs, the revenues, the margins and we can always do it in a way that delivers profit,we will have our own McDonald’s, Wal-Mart, Microsoft. Corporate giants, yes, but they started life as meager ventures that understood the code breaker concept, the power of less is more, the equation they needed to produce healthy ROI, and they stuck to it. Make a burger for 50 cents, sell it for a dollar, christen dozens of stores, go public, christen
thousands more.

It’s not complicated at all: break the code and the sky is the limit. Don’t look for complexty: pursue simplicity, for in its transparence, in its purity, extraordinary power is waiting to emerge.

The same is true in our personal lives. Another way to state Ockham’s razor is “The simplest explanation for a phenomenon is most likely the correct explanation.”

Clearly, life is a “phenomenon” that we as humans really don’t understand. And the more philosophical and introspective we get in seeking to define it, the more its complexity compounds and runs away from us.

From all we as mere mortals we can glean, the only code breaker in life is to enjoy the passage of time. However we find enjoyment, whatever our passions are, it is the goal and nothing more that counts. We will never understand death, sin, the after life, the before life, right and wrong, good and bad, morality and immorality.

We are here with this amazing gift, for a brief period of time, never static, always dynamic, moving inevitably to an end. To something else. We can rail against this condition or we can embrace it, relish it and find ways to enjoy its every moment as opposed to lamenting its end.

Today you will face a zillion issues on the job, in the home, for the moment and for the future that lies ahead. The only way you will make sense of it and dive into the heart of the matter, into the essence, so that you can build something amazing and enjoy the ride all the way, is to take our the razor and cut away all the flotsam that gets in your way.

Mark Stevens
CEO

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Everywhere I go, I see them. In the manufacturing plants, the retail stores, the HQ buildings and the boardrooms. People at all levels of the business hierarchy seeking one thing: Not profit. Not quallity. Not breakthroughs.

Just power. Raw power. Power for the sake of power. Power to have dominance over others. Power for stature. Power to have the vote to say “No” or “That won’t work” or to consider themselves free to do nothing of importance at all. To reject change. To endorse failure. To be advocates for it.

We can see this in the spotlight of the auto industry where CEOs were content to watch a once-great industry crumble in disgrace because they had the power to do so. When outsiders or underlings (i.e., those with less power) presented powerful new ideas, developed innovative thinking that would drive true progress, they were brushed aside. Not because their ideas were meritless, but because they did not come with the “authority” of others who had more power.

When a whistle blower in the SEC’s Boston outpost smelled out the Madoff scandal and stuck it in the faces of the bigger fish in the New York central command, he was dismissed repeatedly because he lacked the power of those who used that power to cover their ears and bury their heads in the sand.

Power is majestic and absolutely essential. The power to commit budgets to the development of life saving drugs, to mass armies against tyrants, to bestow personal fortunes in the battle against hunger, to marshall corporate resources in the quest to develop high-risk breakthrough products, to take chances on promising but unproven talent. To invest in people and ideas and the possibility of miracles.

But this same dazzling potient is also highly toxic and dangerous when it is used to accomplish little more than to build on itself, to place an exponent over its title, to build a mote around the holder of the power and to assure that it is left in grand and arrogant isolation.

Contrary to popular myth, entities bestow power on individuals rather easily. It comes from tenure, priviledge or a single successful initiative. And once that power is granted, it is rarely challenged and even less rarely withdrawn. In part because the holder of the power wields the sword they hold to protect their position and to perpetuate the status quo that is so often their firewall. Their safety net.

Who holds power in your organization? Who did you or others grant it to in error? What damaging impact does it have every day that you allow it to continue on the basis of entitlement as opposed to meritocracy?

Facing up to this issue is the primary difference between vibrant companies, alive to all of the market’s potential, and those that move inevitably to bureacracy and ultimate demise.

These are the companies, large and small, run throughout the ranks by kings whose only goal is to become emperors.

Mark Stevens
CEO

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On July 2, 1961, Ernest Hemingway took a rifle to his head and blew his brains out. He was a few weeks short of his 62nd birthday.

He was a Pulitzer Prize winner. He was awarded the Nobel prize. He was a tour de force in literature.

And still a relatively young man, he took his life on a quiet summer day in Ketchum, Idaho.

Why he resorted to suicide is the subject of considerable debate, but I have always belived he acted because he could no longer be Ernest Hemingway.

This was a creative powerhouse. This was a life force. This was a man who lived so large, who thrived on bullfights and Cuban fishing and Austrian skiiing and beautiful women and bottles of rum chased down by bottles of Vodka. As his health deteriorated due to accidents and illnesses and alcohol, his creativity and his mobility suffered. He could no longer play out his one-man opera on the world stage.

Worst of all, he could no longer create with the grace and ease of his youth. He could be Ernest Hemingway in name and legend alone. That was not acceptable to the lion the world called Papa.

When I was a a young man headed off to Paris to find my voice, to fall in love, a relative gave me a copy of one of Hemingway’s last works: A Moveable Feast. To Hemingway, living in Paris in your youth was a moveable feast, because the experience stays with you for life.

It did for me. I knew exactly what he meant.

I have never been a student of Hemingway and in fact, A Moveable Feast is the only one of his books I have ever really enjoyed. But Papa the man, that’s a different story. To me, Hemingway has been a lifelong figure of inspiration. Of the drive to break through the ordinary ways of doing your work and to enter new dimensions of insight and excellence. Never to give up. Never to accept mediocrity. And when you can’t do it at that level any longer, throw in the towel and walk away…..or find a way to reinvent yourself again.

I gave the commencement address at a local college last week and it was exhilerating. I advised the bright eyes before me not to be ordinary. Not to accept the rules of others. To take risks. To break through. To make a difference.

If you are living to occupy space, to get your job done and spend your money on things–if you have ended the pursuit of exceptionalism–you have accepted mediocrity. What a terrible compromise.

I live in a business of strategy and creativity. But so does every businessperson who wants to do more than be sure of having a paycheck and a place to hang their hat. We want to move the needle. We want to raise the bar.

As long as we can do that, we are blessed. Once we cannot–I should say if we cannot– we are terribly compromised.

Ernest knew that.

Mark Stevens
CEO

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Life is a delicious and dangerous paradox.

Allow me to put this in perspective. Of sorts.

Successful people generally want one or both: money and/or power. And they pursue them. Often both simulstaneously.

If life is good, and God smiles on them, they achieve both. In the vast majority of cases this is so because they are smart or talented or both. They do what they do through their gut and their DNA and the money follows. And when the money comes, the power almost always comes close behind. Or visa versa.

And then, wham, they hit The Wall. It’s called TIME. In the race, the continuum of life, the people who were never driven, never successful, never wealthy, never powerful, start to catch up to the stars.

Why? TIME.

Lions become aged lambs. Wealth withers or, and this is worse, there is suddenly no reason to have it. Peers die, competition wanes, toys become stupid diversions, and most miserable of all, the clock ticks. There is less time to make things happen and things lose the meaning they used to have.

Or do they? I met an old lion this week. Actually a young lioness with what society widely believes are too many zeroes after her age as opposed to her bank account. But who is “Society?” Do they show up at parties? At malls? In houses of worship?

Do they understand Power and Wealth? Perhaps. But time, ah, that’s another matter. Einstein changed the universe by redefining time, but it killed him too. No one escapes it. No matter how much power and money they have.

As human beings, we live within the goal posts of 100 years. Some much less. A few a bit more. But a century is the time frame we are locked in. In the early years, we are in a hunt for power and money- each to his or her own appetite for it, but all in the hunt. And we work feverishly to achieve the twin towers of success in the blind belief that we can achieve a certain place, a certain quantity, a certain stature and hold on to it.

But we are myopic to the great equalizer of time. It cares not a whit about bank accounts or corporate titles or business empires or Oscars or Grammys or Nobel medals. It takes you to another place and all that you have built and achieved goes with it.

We don’t want to think about this. It is not pleasant.

But it is there and it is vital because if we ponder it, we will put the actions we take on the way up in the perspective of what they will mean on the way down. I don’t say this because I believe life is a zero sum game. It may be, it likely is, but I prefer not to live with that philosophy, or lack of one.

Instead, I see great reason to pursue the twin towers in our business and our personal lives–and to pretend that the greatest force of all, time, does not exist. Does not matter. Does not level all that stands in its way.

We have only a limited set of mental and physical tools. And a small timeframe to put them to use. This is the deck we were handed. This the reality we cannot change.

The choice is to give up, knowing in the end it all comes to an obit in the local newspaper or to take time and do magnificant things with it even though it will prevail in the end.

The lioness showed me the majesty of that.

Mark Stevens
CEO

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