I am reading a NY Times story that zooms in on a question that has been waltzing around in my mind for weeks.

How did Citigroup get caught up to its eyeballs in subprime junk when one of the true wise men of the financial community, Robert Rubin, was embedded atop its management hierarchy? The same Rubin who attained Wonder Boy status at Goldman Sachs only years out of Harvard and Yale. The same Rubin who went on to rule at Goldman and top that by serving as the greatest Secretary of the Treasury since Alexander Hamilton. The same Rubin who has Mick Jagger status with government and financial leaders around the globe.

Well, the Times piece fudges on the issue at hand - why didn’t Rubin stop the bank from its collision course with stupidity - when his alma mater, Goldman Sachs, turned one of the worst fiscal disasters in US history into a gold mine for its partners and clients.

Rubin’s argument appears to be that because he didn’t have the official title of CEO (the fact is, he held even more power of influence at Citi than the CEO), it wasn’t his place to speak up.

Let’s put this in perspective. Years ago, someone once told me that there were thousands of people as smart as Einstein. They just didn’t voice their theories. They kept them to themselves. They didn’t speak up.

I felt then, as I do now, that there is no such thing as a silent genius.

Unless you have a novel idea and the skill, the guts, the determination to put it forward, to air it out, to toss it to the world and see what the world thinks of it, you are no Einstein. You are no smart person. You are no force. You are no change maker, catalyst, mover of the needle, raiser of the bar. You are a piston in the machine someone else built.

In the history of the world, there has been but one Einstein. He was a beautiful anomaly. So I am not talking about making ourselves heard at Albert’s level. I mean in everyday life. In our jobs, our friendships, our arts, our passions whatever they may be and wherever they may emerge, unless we have epiphanies and then share them with our worlds, we are silent figures moving aimlessly on a stage someone else erected for a show someone else wrote.

It is possible to hide in life. To lurk in the shadows and say not a word of true value. To glide from birthday to birthday without causing a ripple. To say that you care immensely about world peace, the environment, the cinema, the underprivileged, business success. And to be the silent genius who says not a single original thing about any of it.

But you are a legend in your own mind. The fact is, wise people are dummies when there mouths are shut. All Rubin had to do was say “No,” and Citi would have been spared the loss of its prestige and its treasury. All we have to do is to take the ideas we have had for moments or for years - the time of gestation is immaterial - and act on them. Bring them to light and let the chips fall where they may.

It is said that all great people stand on the shoulders of the giants who came before them. One of the true super novas, Isaac Newton, acknowledged that. The same is true for all of us mere mortals. A chain of thought, aired by others before us no matter what we do or where we live, provides a platform for our own thinking and the action that brings that thinking to life.

But I think the chain is more than a platform. I view it as an obligation.

As long as we are blessed with brains and the ability to express what floats around inside of them, we are obligated to make our own voices heard.

Mark Stevens

CEO

I hear it every day of my life.

“I am afraid.”

People tell me they are afraid of losing money. Of getting sick. Of being misunderstood. Of shooting too high. Of being misunderstood. Of shooting too low. Of breaking some kind of social code someone at Harvard invented. Of being disliked. Of taking a risk. Of doing what society frowns at.

What they are really saying in so many words is that they are afraid of life. And once this fear is allowed to fester, once it is left unchecked, once it qualifies for all manner of justification, it sucks its victims into a black hole.

The fear mushrooms and the life diminishes. It is a miserable syndrome. It is paralyzing. It leaves its marks frozen in a compromised place, hostage to what everyone else wants but detached from the experiences, the journey, they really want to take.

Fear makes millions, billions, their own worst enemy. Their heart says fly me away to this beautiful vision that stands before me. Let me take it by its outstretched hand and soar to a place I know will be exhilarating, magnificent, rewarding, challenging, intoxicating, delicious. The hand is honest and pure and true and loving and willing to reach out over and over again, but the coupling never occurs.

Fear strikes. Fear stops. Fear freezes the momentum in its tracks. The person who needs to be safe, to pass the acid test of acceptability imposed by anonymous crowds, to walk the beaten path, to do the traditional thing, to insure against failure, says “No” to the dangerous liaison, the high risk project, the change in direction, the road the priests of false morality seek to bar from passage (for all but themselves.)

Paradoxically, fear prevails when in truth there is nothing in life to fear. There is nothing in death to fear. Fear is the enemy of life. If one has faith, if one simply identifies the few genuine truths and passions in their lives and pursues them with zest and courage, well that is the definition of a life well lived.

The universal aspiration should be to replace fear with faith. There are so many rich things you can do with your life that have zero guarantee of success but which you must jump into like a child cannon balling into a summer pond.

Your career.
Your romance.
Your friendships.
Your time alone.
Your time with many.

All must be conducted with a determination to do it your way, to fully cultivate the gift of life, to take the chances, to embrace the risks, to put the standard setters, the paper prophets, back in their boxes and to busy themselves with others.

You will not fear. You will pick your goals, decide when to act, walk the high wire, care nothing at all when the fear mongers chasten you. You will go to that special place where people achieve and experience the exceptional.
You will never again look back and say I let it get away out of fear.

You will not fear. You see the black hole. It is not for you.

There is too much life to live.

Mark Stevens
CEO

So I think Counting Crows is one of the best bands of the past two decades. No Led Zep but who is or was? At their best, Counting Crows was genuinely good, original, and at times (Recovering The Satellites, Anna Begins) exceptional.

And then they lost the artistic magic or Adam got tired or who knows what but a devoted following sat in disgust listening to Hard Candy, the first Milk Dud by a group of guys who seemed incapable of sinking so low.

Ok, so they had a loser. Everyone is entitled to a bad day now and then and so the devoted waited for the recovery album. And waited. And waited. And nothing…..

Until late last month when the band on the run released Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.

It is a clunker. It is a once seamless band that made magic instinctively now trying too hard. You can hear the hard work. You can hear all the old riffs repeated here.

I think they knew it. I think they recognized this was January compared to August And Everything After.

So what do they do to breathe some life into a wounded bird? They try all kinds of traditional PR, which will drive some heightened anticipation for sure, but it’s sales they want. You can’t take anticipation to the bank.

They know a little secret about the Internet. You can listen to it. You can hear it. So they take the only hook song on the album, You Can’t Count On Me, create a landing page, give you a link to download and viola, digi does what print can’t even touch. (It’s not called a hook for nothing). It sells songs.

There is still a huge place for traditional PR in traditional media. And we should play it like it’s 1953. But with one hand, while the other is on the mouse. Because that “huge place” is relative and gets smaller every day.

And if you can’t hear the hook, you ain’t buying.

Think about it. The Web sings…..literally.

Mark Stevens

CEO

There are two kinds of people in this world. We’ll call them icebergs and palm trees. (Truth be told, there are likely thousands of types, but this is my blog and I’m in the mood to be simplistic. To make a point, of course.)

Anyway, back to my hypothesis, which I do believe in. In fact, which I think about all the time, some more than others, and when I do think about it, well, it opens up entire vistas of thought. Of insight. Of epiphanies.

Icebergs are impressive, but only from a distance. They can be beautiful in shape, pristine in color and composition, imposing in their steadfastness and they can be impervious to the elements that swirl around them. In human terms, they are stoic, silent, predictable. But get up close, scratch the surface, and it’s all just ice. It’s all rather cold. It’s all terribly inhuman. It doesn’t cry or think or change. It may melt, but that’s not the same thing as soaking in the moon and finding a way to chase it.

Palm trees give themselves up to the forces of the moment - the breezes, the gales, the tropical storms that emerge from nowhere and paint the day black - happy to twist and bend and make passionate love to the natural forces that rise up and make life so interesting, so compelling, so intriguing.

In my life, in all of the things I am so fortunate to experience at work and at play (which are really one and the same to me), I interact with and observe the icebergs and the palm trees. As I look for answers, adventures, innovations, collaborators, leaders, romantics, fighters, business builders, catalysts, friends, kindred spirits, inventors, new ways of growing MSCO, drivers of excellence for our clients and business partners, allies in my lust for life…..in all, it is the palm trees and only the palm trees that meet the test.

I need to be surrounded by palm trees.

It is only they who will not only accept the fates, the risks, the uncertainties, but will use the crazy quilt of life’s forces, of God’s forces, of the unknown, of the unpredictable, to continuously chase the moon, to reshape themselves, to give themselves with abandon to what they cannot see, or measure, or insure because they know, in most cases instinctively and subconsciously, that an iceberg is an inanimate object and a palm tree is a living thing.

The finest thing in life is to walk directly and confidently into the unknown. That is where success, in all of its forms, lies.

Mark Stevens
CEO

Today, I sat on a beach and watched two yellow seaplanes flirt with each other. They dipped and banked, flew in tandem, then apart, only to line up again and then diverge under the gorgeous sun.

The courtship in the sky went on for all to watch, but I think I was the only one enrapt in their maneuvers. To me, it was as if they were without pilots: winged lovers playing out a relationship, testing each other, searching their souls, wondering if they were meant to be. Or not.

In their aerial ballet, they were cognizant, consciously or not, of The Line. This is the line between like and love. It impacts everything we do in life. And business is no exception.

When we like, we dabble and move on. When we love, we change. Forever. A part of us never reverts to the way we were before we crossed the like to love line.

Some companies know how to make this happen in the world of commerce. When I started out in business, I happened to meet dozens of Price Waterhouse clients. They were clients for decades and could not be lured away by competitors, regardless of the offer. I was told it was because PW had been working on their books for years and it was just too complicated to leave.

And I believed that nonsense.

Now I know better. PW trained its team to deliver a level of elite professional service and to treat clients as the kings and queens of the business world. Do that and you will have relationships that cross The Line, relationships for life.

In its heyday, Xerox used to pride itself on having its salespeople fly first class. Why? They were told that as the company’s sales force, they were the princes of the business. Elevated this way, treated with this rare caliber of respect, as royalty, they in turn served their customers in truly memorable fashion. The business world didn’t buy from Xerox; they adored the company. They would buy from no one else. They were in love.

All of the world’s greatest business people have been romantics. They are often painted as technicians or financial engineers or scientists, but first and foremost they are romantics. They have to be. They see The Line. They understand its power. They know why the seaplanes flew apart. They know it is better that they did because they were not the real thing.

But, they know how to create the real thing and the thermonuclear force that is unleashed when they do.

They get this by:

* Thinking ahead of you.
* Delivering what you want before you even thought you could get it.
* Generating a constant state of excitement.
* Creating the element of surprise.

In life, there is nothing more powerful than The Line. Getting close but failing to cross means you are a zillion miles away.

When you sit together in silence and the music plays without a sound, you know there is a love no one has to work at. No one can replace. No one but a very few - perhaps no one else at all - can experience. It is yours. Everyone else can only look on in envy. It is The Music Of The Silences. And it is so much more powerful than the music of the orchestra. Of the exclamations. Of the boisterous proclamations. When nothing has to be said, and yet everything is as clear as can be, it is a masterpiece.This is the art of the subtle. Once in a lifetime it strikes from nowhere and must be treasured for the rarity it is. But we must also learn from it to enhance our careers, our businesses, our lives.

Every great love has a quiet confidence about it. Every great business person lets their accomplishments talk for themselves. Every great company delivers something exceptional and allows the silent referrals to build its base. People go to business school for years to learn how to make noise. To beat drums. To spend zillions on advertising. Caught up in the machine of conventional wisdom, they forget that yes, life imitates art but business imitates life as well.

Look around at your loves, your friends, your romances. All hold greater business lessons than a lifetime at Wharton. All of the passion, the pathos, the complexity in your personal life, has a mirror image on the business side of the ledger. Actually, there is no other side. It is but one ledger, one canvas, upon which we paint ourselves, our minds, our hearts, our brains. Everything you do in the dark-far from the office, removed from the Blackberry-has implications, has learnings, has analogies, for everything you do in the neon of the boardroom.

If we can look through the Berlin Wall of our imagination and look from east to west, personal to business, business to personal, without obstruction, knowing the lessons apply in both realms because in reality there is only one realm, LIFE, we are infinitely smarter than if we allow only the Harvard Business Review to guide us. We learn more from love than we can from an MBA. More about business. About how to deliver greatness. How to respect and adore. How to drive for the exceptional. How to identify the good and the great and how to accept nothing but the latter.

A champion diver lands in the water without making a splash. If you have ever been privileged to hear The Music Of The Silences, you have the greatest education, and the most magnificent gift, anyone can provide.

Sometimes you can look at things in life, in business, and your visual acuity is perfect.

You look at a spreadsheet and you see a spreadsheet. You look at a new product you designed from scratch and there it is, just what the prototype envisioned. You may be pleased with the way it turned out and you may be disappointed, but you can see it with such extraordinary clarity that the decision to proceed to wholesale manufacturing or not is based on quantitative projections. Will it sell is the issue, not does it look like I wanted it to look.

Difficult as this decision may be, it is cake compared to the decisions you have to make when you really cannot see what you are dealing with. When you work, in a labor of exceptional love, to build something truly special, and when you try to take it all in, to truly soak up the magnificence of what you thought you helped to create, you cannot because for some inexplicable reason, you can’t see it clearly.

In the thousand and one complex issues that sweep through every major business issue, every product development, every client relationship, the black and white it all started as turns to grey. And you have to judge what you have with the opposite of visual acuity.

You have to peer through a fog and try to determine if what you have helped to create is real, deserves investment or is a figment of your imagination. And because there is no reliable book for the really difficult things in life, you have to go by instinct. Will it sell? Will it be a hit? Or is it something you should write off, go back to the drawing board and try again?

If you believe in what you have created - a product, a campaign, a formula - you stick with it because, fog or not, you see the beauty of it. Your mind can do that work for you. So you find a way to proceed and you move ahead even though it would be so much easier to scratch it all than to make the dream come to life. You don’t like the easy way. You prefer the hard, the true, the tough, the magnificent and if that means you do so without visual acuity, you do it because you want what you helped to create to make a difference and you believe it can.

The easiest thing in life is to walk away. But easy and exceptional are rarely paired. So regardless of what the critics say, what the press says, what the whole damn universe thinks, you are determined to make your butterfly, fly. That’s the story of every great achiever in history. Every Van Gogh now hanging proudly on every otherwise ordinary wall made magnificent by its presence.

This is the stubborn quality we must bring to our most important works. We have to find a way to believe. We have to insist that Starry Night is a masterpiece even if no one would give the artist a penny for it in his time.

And then the fog can settle so deep and thick that it becomes invisible and against your better judgment, you think it’s best to move on because it appears, for all of the grandeur of what you helped to create, you’re the only one who wants it to endure.

The world won’t buy it. And you have only one option. It’s called Next. It may not be as great as the Now, but there’s a life to be lived. A career to be built.

The great thing about the future is that it brings another opportunity to make the pure dream a reality.

It comes to us from truth tellers who invent The Rules of Life and package it for us as the gospel. And then we drink the Kool Aid and the longer it’s out there on the shelves, the more we accept it as Divine. Inarguable. Bullet proof.

To me, it’s all a joke. Who has the right to create rules? Who tests their validity? Who starts dutifully following them and then passes the virus on to others? And who needs them. Life is best when we face the issues with a blank page and write the rules, our rules, as we go along. Any other way is an extended stay in hostageville.

Let’s take The Rules Of Business:

• A low turnover rate among employees is a sign of a healthy company. (Whenever I find businesses where almost no one ever leaves or is dismissed, I usually find a lazy culture that rewards mediocrity. I think they call it the Post Office.).
• It is always best to promote from within. (But what if a person more qualified for the job is at another company? Make due with second best? Why?)
• Seniority should be a key component of the formula for calculating compensation and authority within a company. (So if the greatest contributor to revenues and profitability is far younger than the oldest slacker in the office, the star should make less? Are you kidding Rule Maker?)
• Great companies arrive at decisions through consensus. (Actually, consensus building is a miserable excuse for inaction. Have you ever attended the UN? It will make you run for your life every time you hear the word consensus.)
• Don’t embark on a new initiative until research shows you it will succeed. (For the most part, research is for cowards and college
• Professors. Oh, I know it’s good to test the waters and crunch some numbers, but business is like war. All the plans and assumptions change when the first shot is fired. Trying to figure out a perfect path to success before you launch an enterprise, means you will be paralyzed in planning while the real entrepreneurs go out and make it happen, taking their lumps and making mid course corrections along the way.)

Liberation Day. You are free to ignore The Truth, recognizing that it is just a feel good myth Homer Simpson created in his basement. Mark Stevens
CEO

One day a few years ago as I was being wheeled down to the Operating Room for major surgery, a nurse asked me to name my favorite prayer. With less than a second of thought, I said the 23rd psalm and in an instant we were reciting it together. “The Lord is my shepherd….”

It is the masterpiece of prayers. Brief, gorgeous and inspiring. It puts life in the perfect perspective.

Note I said “life.” For all intents and purposes, the 23rd is supposed to be about death. “In the valley of the shadow of death…” But I prefer to see it as about life.

The psalm extols the values of faith and confidence.

Of living, and someday dying, without fear. With belief that we must live fully while we are alive on earth and let go with courage and dignity when the time has come to do that. When the time has come to rely on true faith. On God.

Continuing on this theme, a reader of this blog sent along a message suggesting that we should all contemplate what we would do on a given day if we knew it was the last 24 hours of our lives. Immediately, the mind whirls off to silly clichés filled with images of sky diving and bar hopping and wild spending sprees.

And then a lovely spirit I asked the question to, said, “Just what I am doing now. Enjoying a blue sky moment with a true friend in a little corner of the world that feels like heaven.” Nothing Hollywood would make a movie about. Just a friend and the sky and the sun and the warmth and the trust and the freedom and the absolute thrill of human chemistry when it is liberated to achieve and dream and love and sprint to places it has never gone before.

We all live in the valley of the shadow of life. This is our gift. This is our blessing. There is none better. Forget about the valley of the shadow of death. You have no control over that. Zero.

When you wake tomorrow, recommit yourself to life and;

• To risk.
• To courage.
• Rebuild your company.
• Quit your job.
• Invent something.
• Let go of an obligation.
• Kiss a friend.
• Make the impossible possible.
• Dredge up one of your failures of the past and make it work this time.
• Challenge your top three assumptions.
• Tell every judgmental person you know to look in the mirror before they speak another word.
• Admit your own worst trait and change it.

You live in the valley of the shadow of life. You are the luckiest person in the world.

Mark Stevens,
CEO

Tell me what you are going to do

tomorrow to live in the Valley of the Shadow of Life?

Many of us are dream chasers, like kites floating through the Western sky, the dreams captivate and drive us. Running after them, feeling the wind in our face, we are exhilarated. Intoxicated. If we can only catch the kite, grab hold of the dream, we will pass through to another dimension. We will understand the mysteries. It will be our Rosetta Stone.

The Rosetta Stone, the dream, will be our prism. Through it we will see the truth. So we run into the wind and chase the kite. Such is the life of a dream chaser.

I am happy to live that life. I would have it no other way. But I know that this is a lie wrapped in a lovely and deceptive package. The kite is simply an illusion dancing in the blue. You can love it but you cannot rely on it. Not to reveal the truth about anything but your own limitless and invaluable imagination.

The real truth is delivered in the hard boiled experiences of the street. Of the nights alone in a laboratory or in front of a blank computer screen, searching for the words or the formulas that don’t come easily. They are embedded in Edison’s revelation that genius is 99% sweat and 1% kites.

The great among us know how to look past the lies we tell ourselves in the midst of our romantic delusions and how the focus on the tedious work of experimenting with compounds delivers the first antibiotic. Ask Alexander Fleming. And how the refusal to accept the lies about vaccines, led to the cure for polio. Look up Jonas Salk. And that the great bulwarks of media could be torn down and humiliated. Ask Rupert Murdoch.

When the lies are pipe dreams we refuse to see through, they are stop signs that thwart our personal achievement. But when they are soaring kites that prompt us to chase the horizon, to look beyond it, to enter states of thought and wonderment that place all of the lies in their proper light and turn them into catalysts for discovering the truth, they are divine. Divine.

Einstein liked to say that his intelligence was a wonderful asset but his sense of imagination enabled him to encircle the globe. It is so interesting to realize that in the right hands, our hands if we allow it, if we adore the kites but see them for what they are, we recognize they are something so strange and so sweet.

They are lies that open windows to the truth.

Mark Stevens
CEO