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

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 had lunch with two people I had never met before and it was one of those unusual encounters where the conversation zipped through a nanno second of small talk and zoomed into the heart of things. Into what’s this crazy thing called life all about and how do we leverage it to the hilt.

And I found myself ripping into one of my riffs about the two kinds of people on the planet. So now I’ll do it again to you. (At this point you may want to hit delete because this may be the musing of an overly philosophical mad man?).
So, the two kinds of people:

* Those in the “life protection” business.
* The tiny minority in the “live life like a reckless adventure” business.

The former want to be safe. To protect themselves from life’s curve balls.
To avoid risk. To be middle managers. To wear sunscreen. To drink wine spritzers. To do business as usual on the job because, well, it’s safe. To follow the rules. Anyone’s rules. Oh God, those rules are comfort food for the life protectors.

The latter say, I can’t protect against the vagaries of life. I can only wander out into the great blue unknown and revel in it. And if the sands shift or the plates slide or the bets come up bad or the curve balls come flying one after another, so what the hell. What the hell. What the flying hell. I will find a way to deal with it. I will see it as reason to think harder and smarter and cagier and to find a way to reinvent the wheel or to paint a gorgeous picture worthy of the Museum of Modern Art. I will walk right up to the safe middle managers so smug about their blemish-free performance record (never wandered from the straight and narrow, never made a single mistake) and I would break a rule right before their eyes. A sacred company rule. And then I would know how Picasso felt when he started turning French women into African masks. And when he made love in the middle of the day with a paint brush in one hand and a bottle of Bordeaux in the other.

Life needs livers. Risk takers. Dangerous minds. Total crazos. Lindberg.
Disney. Lauder. Houdini. Bezos. Jobs.

And we might as well all join category two. Because the life protection business doesn’t work. In the end, we all end, but the space from the beginning to the end is where the action is. And the action belongs to those who laugh at risk. Who jump into the water without a life preserver, swim the English Channel, stare down the sharks, best the world’s speed record, invent a novel category of software, put their chips on the line, fight to make it work and do it all again the next day.

That’s the arena. Everything else is like watching a concert atop Yankee stadium. Now that’s scary!
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

We are deep in the midst of the holiday season and a lovely time of year it can be.

But I have a question: Isn’t every day a holy day? Do holy days have a season or is life a string of holy days?

Actually, I firmly believe the latter is true. Is there ever a day of our lives that is not a wonder? That we are not blessed by God in the most extraordinary way?

The problem is, so many of our words have lost their meaning. Holidays are no longer thought of as holy days. They are viewed as turkey days and gift buying days. And that is the polar opposite of the original purpose and the true meaning embedded in the words.

This is endemic throughout our society. What do the words trust, faith, love, honor, commitment really mean? Timeless and enduring qualities, of course, but when these words are used without thought, when the holy is buried in holiday, when the thanks in Thanksgiving is simply six letters tacked on to six more, we lose something so rich and deep that can make all of life that more precious.

We lose the honesty that makes things genuine. And by “things,” I mean relationships… The bonds between family members, friends and lovers. Unless these unions are knitted together with words and actions ripe with true meaning, they are mere pretenses. Hollow games people play to try and camouflage the truth. But the truth insists on revealing itself.

All of this is true in business as it is in the ways of the heart. Do we tell our clients and customers we care about them and then treat them as just another set of numbers locked in a server? The answer is almost a universal “yes.” So much so that when a company, a manager, an entrepreneur is determined to treat the people in their world with genuine care, with words that have meaning, then we witness right before our eyes that the holy is the beacon in holiday and we are astounded by it.

It is a mistake to think we live in Balkanized worlds: the personal, the business, the religious. The walls we often think clearly divide these realms are mythical.

When we purchase something from an automobile company or a pharmacy, we no longer believe we are initiating a relationship. We think we are buying something…engaging in a cold and common transaction. So when a company or a pharmacy gives back more than a product but a set of human values along with it, we are touched in a way that makes us customers for life. The business, like the lover, like the friend, that demonstrates that the bonds that bind are true and generous and genuine, are of immense value to all of us. We hold them far above the heads of the pretenders.

There is but one world. The same one where the personal, the business and the religious intersect. This is the crossroads of greatness. Not marked by physical strength or wealth or intellectual power, but more by being the kind of person, the kind of business, that adds meaning to our existence. Do you value anything more? Is there a greater goal?

Happy holy days. Everyday.

Mark Stevens
CEO

It is ironic that from the earliest days of our cognizant lives, we are programmed to fear its end. Especially, the last five minutes.

This entire notion, this ripe fear and in many cases dread, is preposterous. We have no idea where we came from, and why we arrived in the world, but we are certain that in death we are leaving it. That it represents an end. Finality.

How is it that we admit to looking backwards to our arrival on earth with no knowledge but look forward to our departure with great certainty? A certainty that has no basis. No founding. It is mindful of our predecessors who were convinced that if they sailed into the horizon, they would fall off the face of the earth.

Little did they know that the truth was the polar opposite: that they could sail into the horizon for eternity.

The fact is we are preoccupied with living a long life when life as we know it is never long. If we live 100 years, it is but a blip. And to complicate matters, but to introduce an essential reality. Whose life was longer, Mozart’s or Jane Smith, who died at 98 after a 60-year career as an insurance actuary. And who hated her work from the moment she left college and took a seat in her cubicle at Homestead Life Insurance Co.?

We have a monumental choice before us all: to be in the life fulfillment business-meaning we live every day without concern for when it ends, if it does, or to be in the life protection business-meaning we spend nearly every day seeking to postpone or circumvent the inevitable.

All too many people do the latter. And in the process, they waste so much of the joy of being alive on this earth. They seek safety. They run from risk. They make sure not to work too hard. They are sticklers about having balance in their lives, whatever that means. They look askance at those who burn the candles at both ends, walk the high wire without a safety net. Start companies with their life savings. Quit “good” jobs for careers that bring them joy. Abdicate the throne to marry a lover.

The only way to truly live, to achieve success as a manager, artist, factory worker, actor, CEO, mother, father, friend-is to do it with abandon. Without fear of when it will end. The more you try to control the ending, the less control you have over it. It won’t ask for your permission. It won’t ask for your timetable. It will just end. Nothing you can do will stop it.

And that’s the good news. You can let go. It’s out of your hands. And even better, the last five minutes here may be the countdown to forever.

Mark Stevens
CEO

How do you live your life before your five minutes are up?

Guest Blogger Lewis Green from Biz Solutions Plus

-Excerpted from Lead With Your Heart by Lewis Green

Happiness is the driving force behind everything Americans do. It is the key to determining their wants, needs and desires. It is the essence of the American Dream and is as important as the air you breathe. Even our Declaration of Independence calls for the pursuit of happiness. And yet a 2006 study by the Pew Research Center found that only 34 percent of Americans consider themselves “very happy,” 50 percent “pretty happy,” and fifteen percent report that they are “not too happy.”

One of the most popular courses at Harvard University teaches happiness and creating “a fulfilling and flourishing life.” In fact, the course on “Positive Psychology” outdraws “Introductory Economics.” That scares me. Have we have gone so far down the road of work, power, and greed that we need to be taught about happiness?

I believe these examples point to an overactive, overachieving, over-stressed population chasing after broken dreams. On the other hand, this information points to an untapped market your business can penetrate. The savvy businessperson will do everything possible to ensure that his or her business is people-centered and not primarily focused on the bottom line. My belief is that if you do good, your business will do well. Here’s one reason why:

From the various reports I’ve read, it seems that at least 65 percent of all Americans want great business experiences that will help make them happy. Even the “very happy” folks can be moved to a higher happiness level, creating even greater customer-conversion opportunities for business.

Research also tells us that happy people are more productive and they live longer lives. One study on a Catholic religious community concluded that nuns who had a positive outlook in their 20s lived as much as 10 years longer than those who are less positive. Another research project focused on a group of people who kept a daily diary for six months recording only those things that went well on any given day. The conclusion was that these participants were happier and healthier than those participants who did not focus on positive thinking. Both studies imply that businesses could increase productivity and work attendance by focusing on happiness in the work place.

I do not suggest that happiness waits just around the corner and it is easily within our grasp. Happiness defined in the Lead With Your Heart business model looks like this:

• Business is people-centered. People come before profit in every instance.
• Its values talk to making the world a better place to live and work.
• Business understands the wants, needs, and desires of it employees and its customers.
• It creates products, services, value, prices, and most important, experiences that meet or exceed people’s wants, needs, and desires.

Only a blind, dumb, and extremely arrogant business community would ignore the data and the business potential inherent in making people happier—and not just consumers. In fact, I argue, as have a few others before me, that your employees must first feel as sense of happiness about the company they work for and the work they do if a business’s customers and clients are to experience levels of happiness that keep them coming back.

Lewis Green
Founder of L&G Business Solutions

What Are You Doing to Ensure Happiness in Your Business Community?

There is a moment in time that is paradoxically, timeless and fleeting. It is finite and infinite. Like so much of our existence, it is a Rorshach test of sorts, open to whatever we impose upon it. We can view it as the end of the night. We can see it as the dawn of a new day. Or we can treat it as a magical time, a virginal moment, that is a blank page, allowing us to paint our thoughts and dreams on it once we have gone through the night and before we grapple with the day.

For those who crave black and white, this is too much to deal with. It is too poorly defined. It is not about sleeping. It is not about waking. It is, instead, about cultivating the endless possibilities God puts before us and that are so rarely harvested.

All of the great, the astounding ideas in the history of the earth, have come from the “mindless” moments we are free to walk down the street, sit under a tree, lie in a hammock and think freely.

I have always loved the story of Edwin Land walking around Cambridge with his young daughter when she asked “Why does it take so long to see a picture after you photograph it daddy.” Land was about to answer within the confines of current technology when he caught himself and, like the exceptionally intelligent and gifted man he was, asked himself the same question. “Why indeed?” Thus was born Polaroid. And ditto for nearly every extraordinary enterprise and artistic masterpiece through the ages. They are born not when the mind focuses, as conventional wisdom would have you believe, but instead when it floats.

In life, we have but two great possibilities: love and achievement. All else is TV, fast food and cigarettes. If you value the first two, the wondrous two, the divine two, you need to push all else out to sea. And you need to fight for them.

Often, people who don’t know me ask, “What do you do in your free time.” Please tell me what they mean. What is “free time?” Every second carries an opportunity cost. If I don’t spend it well, toward love and achievement, it evaporates forever. Hard on myself? I will accept the charge, admit to it and keep on relishing every moment.

I thought about John Locke today for the first time in many years. When did he first have the epiphany that we are all born with blank sheets of paper, absent of ideas? I know.

When he was alone. When his mind could drift. In the time he chose not to be free.

Before the morning becomes the day.

Mark Stevens
CEO

What are you writing on your sheets of paper?

Everyone wants to go to Hollywood. To make a movie, be a star or tell a story. To get rich and famous and change the world.

Instead, only a handful of people we write off as wanna-bees, unless they actually make it, wind up going anywhere near Sunset and Vine.

No, we just talk and dream of the what if’s and reject the high risk and walk instead to the ticket booth to sit down and watch George Clooney play Michael Clayton. George actually went to Hollywood before he was George Clooney. He doesn’t buy tickets; he sells ideas.

It all boils down to the roles we will all play in the film of our lives, which is being shot right now. Will we be extras, passives, unknowns carried by the script or will we be activists who write and direct and star? Will we be popcorn chomping spectators or the royalty we are watching from the dark of our seats? Will we read John Krakauers’ book, “Into the Wild” and place it back on the library shelf or “Sean Penn” it into a tour de force of a young man who sets out to poke a stick in every life assumption handed to us as gospel?

For every Sean Penn, there are a million passives. For every George Clooney, there are legion of dreamers.

All of my life, I have heard people say “I want to write a children’s book.” “I want to start a business.” “I wish I went to business school.” “I am sorry I never learned to play the drums.” “I want to run a division in my company.”

I used to say, “Why don’t you? What’s in your way?” But I don’t say a word now. I know the answer.

They have a path they ride. They get in their cars, turn on the Sirius, listen to Mayer, Madonna, Matchbox and watch the streets go buy. Alone, driving along, they think of what was and what will be from point A to point B and back again. This is good. This is safe. This is what the people who paint by numbers want us to do.

It is so neat; it is an insult to God.

The map of my life looks like a toddler finger-painted it. It drips all over the floor. It takes detours to Paris. It writes odes to God. But it is always that of an activist, with a gun at my own head, reminding me to find what no one has yet discovered. And once I do that, or fail at it, to search for something else, for another treasure.

Tomorrow, when I cruise down the road, I will look for the sign that reads “Last Exit To Hollywood” I will turn the wheel.

And I will disappear there.

Mark Stevens
CEO

What role do you play in your life?