Everyone Hates Conrad Black……Except Conrad Black

Black is a Canadian media mogul now behind bars after his conviction on charges of mail and wire fraud by US courts.

To the world he is rich, imperious, unethical: a walking, talking symbol of greed in the raw.

And he may be just that. The media hates him, many former employees hate him, shareholders too, as well as the man and woman on the street. They all hate him…..and perhaps for good reason.

It’s a hate fest. Everyone, it seems, has piled on. Except, well, except Conrad Black.

I just read a jailhouse interview with “the devil” himself and I was stunned by it. I will paraphrase some of the highlights:

* Black says prison is quite civilized, he has adapted to it and met a number of interesting people.

* He proclaims his innocence but is not bitter, holds that he can take anything life throws at him and treat it as a learning experience.

* The accomodations are not what he was used to in the splendor of his pre-incarceration days, but it’s all just fine for now.

I don’t know the precise nature of Black’s crimes and given my faith in the legal system, I assume he belongs where he is. But there is an important subtext here. All of us are, at times, on the outside of mainstream thinking. Or we are viewed as being wrong or negligent or stupid or selfish. Black is viewed as worse, as a criminal and a Robber Baron, but the subtext remains the same:

You must always have faith in yourself.

You must always know how to adapt.

You must remain flexible in a life that constantly changes.

You must be tough enough to take the curve balls, without whining, and find a way to toss them back at the fates.

You must look at failure with naked eyes- bankruptcy, red ink, failed plans, loss of a job, death of a marriage, removal from an executive position – and like Black, right or wrong as he may have been in business, find a way to view it as a path to redemption. To future success.

We can never, ever abandon ourselves. It is true that no matter how much we are loved by others, we are born alone and we die alone. If we are to make major changes in business, politics, science, art – we will do it against the wind. Alone. Ask Van Gogh. Ask Copernicus. Ask Lincoln.

When Jonas Salk created his cure for polio, jealousy in the scientific community denied him of a Nobel prize. The man saved millions of children from lives of misery and he was treated like a villain. But he went on, presiding over the Salk Institute and working toward a cure for AIDS.

Salk and Black are in vastly different categories. Salk is a hero of mankind. Black is just another seeker of wealth. But both had to dip into that well of self confidence, that reservoir of personal faith, that failure to abandon themselves.

Next time you are in the cross hairs, remember you always have yourself. And that is your most powerful ally and most potent weapon.

Mark Stevens
CEO

Watching JFK, From A School Bus

It was the late fall of 1960 and John Fitzgerald Kennedy was about to be anointed by the American people as President of the United States.

I was a kid on a school bus, too young and preoccupied with an out of control family, academia and a budding fascination with girls to care a whit about politics. Yes, I had watched Ike talk on TV from the Oval Office now and then, and pretended to listen dutifully in front of my father, but the Supreme Allied Commander and all of his peers could hardly hold a candle to the strains of rock and roll starting to blast through the windows of the older kids’ Corvettes.

And then, in a second, my world changed in a way I would never forget. Through that school bus window I caught a glimpse of JFK on television, through the window of a tiny Queens cape in Bayside, New York.

Somehow, the soon-to-be president and rock and roll were suddenly one and the same. There was an epiphany, a lesson that applies to this day; that still resonates!

Some people, some select few, are not merely people. They are magic in a bottle. Canned heat. Fire and ice. We can’t try to be like this; we are either born with it or not, but we can learn from it.

Last year, I spoke at the annual Siemens’ CEO conference, Ascent, in Berlin. When I would talk to Berliners — cab drivers, executives, waiters, anyone of every age–they spoke with pride of JFK’s glorious Berlin speech.

This year, when Barack Obama needed a rocket power boost for his primary run against Hillary, Caroline Kennedy evoked the name of The Rocket Man, her father, our JFK, and Obama’s trajectory shot skyward.

God makes very few JFK’s. But he makes millions who can study him and Thatcher and the handful of men and women who set the bar.

So many of us fall short because we make excuses. Families to tend to; no money to start with; illnesses to overcome; lovers to appease. But it’s all noise. I was asked to talk about the Oprah\Palin mini-bout by Fox News the other day. And as I prepared my thoughts, it struck me how both had much more in common than that which divides them.

* Both fought like hell for success.

* Both rejected the standard excuses.

* Both would not settle for mediocre.

* Both are making a mark on the world.

* Both reject conventional thinking as “crowd control” designed to keep them in place by threatened also – rans.

When you see greatness from a bus, refuse to get off when it stops. Take the wheel and drive yourself to the finish line. No one else will.

Mark Stevens
CEO

6 Techniques I’ve Used To Challenge Conventional Thinking

by guest blogger Regis Hadiaris

Throughout his life, my Dad taught me that I truly could be whatever I decided to be. His confidence in me gave me the strength to believe in my ideas, challenge conventional thinking, and take risks.

Below are 6 techniques I’ve used to successfully challenge conventional thinking in my life.Unconventional Thinking:

1. Identify and ignore “noise” in your life.
Noise is the unnecessary stuff that distracts your attention and limits your effectiveness: naysayers, gossip, opinions of news media, fear, etc. If you are determined to challenge conventional thinking, you have to train yourself to ignore noise.

I work for Quicken Loans, one of the nation’s largest direct mortgage lenders, in arguably the most challenging time for the financial industry in 20 years. If I listened to all the noise about how bad the mortgage crisis is, I would become paralyzed by negativity and fear. Instead of focusing on the constraints around me, I consciously look for opportunities. Don’t let yourself become a product of your environment; let your environment become a product of you!

2. Don’t recreate the wheel.
I’ve seen companies launch huge new initiatives without ever stopping to ask themselves: “has someone done this already?” Be curious! Instead of blindly jumping into a project, take a step back and think “someone must have run into this situation before, what did they do?”

We recently decided to focus on a particular marketing strategy at Quicken Loans. Instead of starting from scratch, we flew several key people to another, non-competitive company to discuss our plan. Because that company had already executed this strategy really well, the day we spent with them saved us months of trial-and-error.

“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.”

- Albert Einstein

3. Take a stand.
A couple of years ago, I was leading a project that a senior executive didn’t agree with. He didn’t think the project could make an impact on the business. I believed that it would. We compromised, and he gave me 90 days to prove it. I did, and the executive was proud of the accomplishment.

It can be hard to challenge consensus. But if you truly believe in what you are doing, you can’t be afraid to voice an opinion or do things that others don’t understand. Remember: the thinking that got you where you are will seldom get you where you want to go.

4. Get excited when people tell you “no.”
So many people let others dictate what they can and cannot do. Before they know it, they have lost the ability to be effective. When people tell me “no, we can’t do that,” I immediately think “how can we?”

Every day, I have conversations about ideas that are too hard to do, solutions that are too complicated, and costs that are too expensive. If you attack these situations by creatively brainstorming alternatives, you can inevitably find ways to turn these “no’s” into “yes’s.”

5. Keep it simple like Forrest Gump.
“When I got tired, I slept. When I got hungry, I ate. When I had to go… you know… I went.” Forrest kept life simple. Do you?

At Quicken Loans, we have a “no big projects” rule. Why? Big projects usually mean lots of over-complicated ideas that simply aren’t needed to solve the problem at hand. You can have big visions but still execute them in small chunks. Doing this encourages constant improvement, and helps prevent marketing projects that are out of sync with current business needs.

6. Be effective, not busy.
My team completed over 1,100 internet marketing projects last year alone. While that’s an impressive accomplishment, I’m most proud of the impact those projects made. Every single thing we do has a legitimate business reason, or we don’t do it. And every morning we meet to discuss the thing we can do that day to be the most effective.

Every person on my team has (literally) hundreds of things on their to-do list. Our concern is not getting them all done. Instead, we ask ourselves, are we working on the right things, right now? Once we focus on being effective, instead of being busy, we automatically get into
a mental mode of challenging conventional wisdom.

Try one of these techniques, and you can take an ordinary day and make it great! Try them all, and you will hone your ability to challenge conventional thinking.

Regis Hadiaris is a marketer, blogger, speaker and innovator known for unconventional ideas and impressive results. He is the “Leader of Leaders and Pursuer of WOW!” on the marketing team at Quicken Loans, the nation’s largest online mortgage lender. His blog, Dot Connector, is a popular destination for ideas on being more successful at work.

The Case For Accidental Companies…..And The People Who Run Them

When I was a young man, I met ice cream impresario Tom Carvel: widely credited as the entrepreneur who created big league franchising.

What struck me most about our conversation was that Tom’s first store was an accident: when his truck broke down on a road in Westchester, NY, and he lacked the funds to repair it, he started selling ice cream from the spot where he was stranded. He was smart and flexible enough to recognize that his original business plan wasn’t as good as the accident he had stumbled on to …..and he let the latter drive his success.

Levi Straus. Nike. Gatorade. Craig’s List. All more or less accidents
or experiments that turned out to be major enterprises. There is such a convoluted irony, a staggering twist of fate, in a guy who decides to create a superior running shoe with a waffle iron, succeeding at it and then turning that track meet tinkering into a global business.

There is a profound life lesson embedded in this syndrome. Sometimes, many times, more often than we give credit for it because to do so would toss out the rules and violate the convention that empowers so many of the guardians of the status quo – the lack of planning, of wrapping everything up in a ribbon, is the true driver of exceptional success.

Instead of holding life close to us and seeking to pull all of the levers in perfect synchronicity, sometimes we are better off -more successful and exhilerated-letting life run away from us and seeing where the jet steam can and will take us. Like a kid on a beach watching our kite do the kind of aerial acrobatics we could never engineer on our own, we need to let the wind do its magic and marvel and learn from it.

The other day, I observed the absolute worst salesperson I have ever had the painful experience of watching, try to make a sale. She came to the scene of the crime with a carefully scripted pitch in mind and as much as she saw that it was the wrong pitch for the wrong prospects, she refused to listen, to stumble on to an opportunity to sell her product in a different way, to have an accidental success, to watch her kite waltz through the afternoon sky.

She was opposed to accidents. Immune to them. Determined to stick to the script. She advised us that she was a Harvard MBA, that we were the equivalent of poorly informed misfits and she wasn’t going to find a way to sell her ice cream from a broken truck, thank you, no matter how much we were cheering her on to do just that.

We wanted to buy her product. We wanted it to work for us. But she refused to help us fall in love with what she was selling. She was a Harvard MBA. She didn’t deal in love.

History is replete with accidents that evolve into epics. When Abraham Lincoln was running for President, he was an accident of a candidate running against pillars of the nation raised by writers of the rules, of the conventions, to win high office and preside over the nation.

When Lincoln and his adversaries arrived at the Republican Convention, it was the accident who walked away with the prize and the same accident who would construct an administration of men he could not easily control, so that he could watch them invent solutions for a plagued nation. Men of soaring ambition and substantial intellect. Men who might rush past him in the jet stream.

Precisely what Lincoln prayed for. Abe knew he needed a plan to save the Union. And an accident.

As you construct your companies and departments, as you help to guide their evolution, as you preside over your life, welcome the accidents everyone tells you to beware of.

Mark Stevens
CEO

The Importance Of Being A Verb…..And The Curse Of Being A Noun

In life, it appears we have a myriad of choices as to what we are or will be.

But there are really only two choices : you can be a noun or a verb.

Let’s look at some of the nouns:

* Middle Manager
* Control Freak
* Nice Person
* Smoker
* Boyfriend
* Girlfriend

Do any appeal to you? Describe you? I hope not, because, conventional wisdom aside, this is so passive and so one dimensional, it is like being an inanimate object. And worse yet, it is how the world wants you to be. Safe and easy to define.

“She’s my middle manager for call center operations.”

“He’s my dry but safe boyfriend.”

Do you want to be safe and easy to define? I don’t think so. I hope not. I talked about this with a friend today. And it hit me big time.

A famous axiom says, “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.” I will add to that by saying, “A noun is a terrible thing to be.”

Let’s contrast the nouns with some verbs:

* Thinking
* Loving
* Romancing
* Inventing
* Challenging

It really boils down to those who watch and those who do. Those who observe and those who act. The passive and the active. The active and the passive.

This is your choice. This is your life.

In physics, there are the applied type and the theoretical breed. The latter think they are superior. They opine. They postulate. Some add value. Most just secure tenure.

Twice in the world, physicists were the kings. When Einstein brought forth E=MC2 and when a group of theorists APPLIED their genius to The Manhattan Project and saved democracy.

They transitioned from nouns, “physicists” to verbs, “Savers Of The Free World.”

That is more than a word. More than grammar. More than an intellectual exercise. It is the difference between living life and not.

Mark Stevens
CEO