I know. I know. Your brain is dizzy just thinking of all the stuff you have to do managing your career, running your business. It’s like doing everything in an amusement park all at once; ride the ferris wheel, gobble down the cotton candy, ride the roller coaster and the Himalaya, all in 10 minutes.

And that’s how we really do behave at the parks, and on vacation sight seeing. You arrive in Rome and see it all - all the must sees - as soon as the plane touches the ground. But the problem is, you are so consumed by racing through it all, that your brain is disengaged. You never really see anything. You simply react to the stimuli. The neon lights. The electric movement. A Coney Island State of mind!

Too often business is the same. Actually, more than the same, it’s Coney Island squared. You are so busy doing all the must-dos that you forget there are NO must-dos. Success, the true-genuine-eclipse of the sun success, requires you get out of a Coney Island State of Mind to a Blank Canvas State of Mind. This makes things possible. This frees you to be an artist. This liberates you to be an innovator.

There is nothing you HAVE to do. There are no must-dos. It is all want-to-dos. All passion.

Passion breeds ideation, and exceptionalness; a life well lived; an extraordinary career. And it’s all due to one reason, just one– you accepted no one’s rules. You made your own. And you had the confidence to live by them. The hell with convention. Or even the false positive of the Coney Island State of Mind.

You become the Picasso, the Spielberg, the Newton, the Lennon, the Oprah who turned a Blank Mind into a rainbow.

Can you do it? Or are you a prisoner of someone else’s philosophy? Tell me about it and be honest.

Mark Stevens
CEO

I drink, on average, eight a day– Diet Cokes, that is. Talk about a breakfast with voltage! Nothing comes close. I worship the gunk.

As do we all. Even Britney Spears has been rumored to drink 24 Cokes a day! We are not Americans. We are, technically speaking, “descendants of Pilgrims who are addicted to brown carbonated dish water with legal overdoses of sugar.” That’s our beloved Coca Cola. A nation of Coke addicts– that would be us.

In my life, no other company, not one, has remained as solid as Mt. Rushmore and so steadfastly successful. Oh sure, there was the new coke, old coke marketing idiocy, but the only ones who made a federal case out of that were the losers in the business schools who call themselves “professors”– a euphemism for “what the hell is going on?”
How has Coke made us not customers, but addicts? Otherwise disciplined people craving the stuff? Well actually, by practicing the oft discussed but rarely practiced, majesty of execution.

Sure, Coke, the national drug company, advertises and holds events and other junk to move the gunk, but mostly they do nothing but the really “hard stuff” that is at the core of every business:

1. Distribution: Coke is everywhere. That is no accident. Forget the advertising agency that dreams up stupid taglines. The wholesalers deserve more credit. Ever walk into a food store and want a Coke and walk away empty handed. No! That’s execution!

2. Ever have a bad Coke? A stale one? One that tastes somehow not like a Coke? No. Quality control is King and when you serve a billion a day and never screw one up. Wow!

3. The drug of choice is always, always cool. To rappers and hip hoppers and investment bankers and accountants. Yes, accountants, (actuaries are still stuck on milk, but who wants to satisfy actuaries?)

Coke is NOT a creature of marketing. It is a success story of execution. A national addiction. And when you need a drug, and it’s there, you are addicted for life! What a life. What a country.

Mark Stevens
CEO

Tell me what your success story of execution is.

Janis Joplin, the wild woman who downed Southern Comfort like it was Poland Spring burst on the drug-soaked rock scene in the 60’s and became its most electric diva. The girl was wired. She screamed her own brand of blues like she had ten minutes to get it all out before she died disappearing as fast as she arrived. But her legacy remains. The music, sure, but even more potent than that, the nuclear passion that fueled it.

In a real sense, Joplin was a mini industry, selling records and concert dates and Janis stuff. I think about how she ran her company, her life, as I walk down the halls of so many corporate offices.

Passion? There’s not a trace. Electricity? It’s like all the wires were cut. Dreams? What do dreams have to do with business?

No, the typical office is a virtual graveyard. Quiet, predictable, passionless. And that’s what leads to Buick’s and Campbell’s Soup and Ann Taylor clothing. Management there takes the Joplin’s of the world out in the shed and shoots them for lunch.

Every year (this summer will be no different) bright and jet fueled kids will stream out of colleges across America and dive in what they believe will be exciting companies because they have cool brands. And they will find, in an awful flash, that they are locked into hardened bunkers that demand adherence to the way it is, as opposed to suggesting how it should be.

The kids lose but not nearly as much as the companies that hire them. They put a lid on the creativity, the raw power, the dangerous thinking that is the real secret weapon of the Google’s and the Pixar’s of the world. They institutionalize mediocrity.

How can you prevent this postal mentality from turning your company into a motor vehicle bureau? Only by declaring war. With passion. The way Janis would do it:

• Seniority no longer counts for anything. Even the most junior of juniors can bring ideas to the CEO.
• A chief innovator is engaged and empowered to challenge and discard every tired practice that is clogging up the company’s arteries.
• The company’s biggest critic-from the media, the trade, etc-is brought on board and given a real platform for change.
• Management answers the questions that has been gnawing at it for years: How come it’s no longer fun to work here? And why don’t our records sell like they used to?

Mark Stevens
CEO

You can easily buy a pair of stylish shoes in China for 10 bucks.

And you can buy a pair of stylish shoes in Rome for $500.

Often they are the same shoes, from the same factory, the same leather and identical designer– not a whit of difference.

So China, for all its emerging economic power (I have been there and it’s real), makes $1 and the Romans make $250. It’s not hard to do the math. And it’s ugly for China.

Why? Not because of the “inequity.” As a Republican, I don’t dwell on that. I prefer to focus on the fix. It’s ugly because China has a clear marketing fix.

China is a dictatorship. They can do something in a NY minute. So, and here comes the raw power of marketing, tomorrow you can have the power of branding and the equity that goes with it; from eyeglasses to suits, all you you have to say in China is: “Made In Italy.”

In one fell swoop, China becomes the most important economy in the world. Case closed!

Mark Stevens
CEO

So what do you think about “Made in Italy, China?”

Sometimes, a question is infinitely superior to an answer. Often because the so-called answers are simply camouflaged and subterfuge. In this spirit, let me ask ten business questions and invite your answers.

1. Why don’t companies have Chief Customer Officers?

2. Why do managers complain for years about slackers under their command but allow them to continue collecting paychecks?

3. Why is it near impossible to have a customer service hot-line where a human answers the phone when you call and provides service?

4. Why do companies allow their advertising agencies to vie for creative awards as opposed to driving sales?

5. Why have you never had a female CEO?

6. When is the last time you invented something new?

7. Why do you fear Wal-Mart?

8. Why do you have a diversity policy? Why doesn’t it just happen?

9. Why don’t your managers ever go out and sell your product/service themselves? Ever?

10. Why do you lose customers?

Mark Stevens
CEO

How do you get to be known by your initials? Famous for them? A permanent stamp in history?

JFK and FDR are memorialized this way. To complicate matters, JFK and FDR were worlds apart. The former was a male model, the latter was a world leader, both with earth-moving wives as different as black and white.

Both had brands— three letter brands that were loved in their heyday for what they represented. People knew what they stood for. Soaring figures that, in FDR’s case could change the world, and at JFK’s end, that shifted the perception spectrum to appear he could. One sold substance and hope, the other sold hope alone, but there is always a big market for both.

Think about it. Both men created three-letter brands that camouflaged their weak points and glorified their strengths. FDR was in a wheelchair and JFK was a pain based drug addict (and Marilyn addict). Both captured the imagination of the public and ruled in great measure because they lived up to their brands.

Do you? Does your business? Do you have a name alone? A true brand? Do you use dozens or hundreds of words to tell your story when three letters will do? Consider the following:

1. When it comes to branding, less is more. If you need time to tell your story, forget it. No one has the patience to listen. Look at your story today and cut it in half. And then cut it in half again.

2. Branding has almost nothing to do with logos and color systems. Worrying about this finger painting is the nonsense of business dilettantes. The myth that Nike has endured as a great company because of the swoosh is moronic. It has become an empire because it does a hundred things right from design to R&D to distribution. And because the driven animal who founded the company made sure it always lived up to its brand’s promise. You don’t need a sentence to describe Nike. In this case four letters do it all. Next time someone wants to polish up your logo, ask yourself if your product or service is as good as it can be before you spend a dime on art.

3. Ask yourself if the brand you have still has resonance. Still has meaning? What does Kraft stand for? Macy’s? Buick? Revlon? What does yours stand for?

If it’s time to go back to the drawing board remember the two men and six letters no one will ever forget.

Mark Stevens
CEO

Pick your poison, are you Electric or Acoustic?
Click your choice above to listen to with this blog.

So this was a convoluted romance, as they all are. George loved Pattie but Pattie loved Eric and (Eric) Clapton was George’s best friend, and on and on. To complicate matters, Pattie was the most attractive woman on earth and Eric and George were kings.

Layla is a classic, a perennial top five— maybe the best ever. But this is not about a song, or about a woman. It is about gravity. Great things bring people back time after time. Endlessly.

Does your business bring people back? Does it have the power of Layla? Likely not. We are talking about the stuff magic is made of. How do you get people to adore your business the way George adored Pattie? The way Eric swooned over Layla?

1. Surprise the hell out of your customers. Really surprise them.
2. Take the bullets first, every business faces adversities. True leaders demonstrate they can take it and move forward as winners.
3. If your business is not great. What will you do to make it an object of love?

Mark Stevens
CEO

Tell me what are you doing to make your customers love your business?

How is it that a band, a playwright, or a novelist creates a masterpiece, a gift to the world, and then nothing- silence?

Where does the genius go?

Unless a company or individual continuously refreshes their thinking, their creativity, they will disappear from the radar.

A generation ago, IBM created one of the only tag lines that meant something- something of importance to the whole organization: THINK. But then the company stopped thinking, traded on past glories, and as a result nearly collapsed. In many ways, it already is a one hit wonder.

A company doesn’t have to be deceased to be dead. IBM is the living dead, and one of the most interesting of all “one hit” wonders. Add to that list, Microsoft. When’s the last time Bill changed the world?

Microsoft vs. Apple
Steve Jobs is changing the world left and right- a multi-hit wonder, if you will. So he might be a nasty, imperious guy; who cares? He is a non-stop success machine. He thinks.

Do you know how easy it would have been for Apple to be remembered as that crazy “fruit company”? Jobs would never allow it. Would you? Do you?

Any manager at any level can earn their stripes by declaring war on themselves. They stand against the tide, against the ebb and flow, and demand greatness.

Change. Discover. Experiment. Challenge. Think.

Be great.

Let your success resonate, and whatever you do don’t let yourself or your company become a one hit wonder.

Mark Stevens
CEO