There was a time …yes there was… When great business people created extraordinary companies not on numbers or Wall Street green lights or the promise of personal wealth…

but instead on the power of love.
What?

We are so removed from this ideal now, that this seems like a fantasy. A dream, actually, like nonsense. But hold on cowboys and cowgirls, it’s true. Not in movies or novels but the cold reality of day.

Walt Disney was not a businessman first, he was a lover. Of ideas. Same for Henry Ford, and Ralph Lauren, Richard Branson, Thomas Edison, And Mary Kay.

Miracle men and women such as these fell in intoxification with ideas and then acted to bring their ideas to life. Did they become wealthy in the process? Absolutely. But did they do it for the money? Absolutely not. They did it for the love of the idea. For the realization that life is short and the spoils go to those who dream, love and take risks for the sake of their romance. Disney wanted to create a world of imagination. A world humanity could get lost in. Was it a sure shot then? The raving lover that he was didn’t give a damn.

Neither should you. Or I. Great companies, spiritual companies, dreaming companies, genius companies, world changing companies are not founded and grown by MBAs. They are cultivated like desert flowers by lovers.

Throw away your spread sheets for a moment and fall in love. Take a chance. Risk failure. But be driven by love. Sooner or later you will find excellence. The speed bumps along the way are simply the price all lovers pay.

Mark Stevens
CEO

Tell us how love has changed your business,
Leave a comment below.

Snow Patrol’s “Chasing Cars” is one of those lightning rod songs that flies out of the magic of the creator’s mind and blows everyone away the first time they hear it. Like Halley’s Comet or a meteor shower. Zoom, the music enters your brain and you are in love.

What makes the song zing is the passionate and profound fusion of dreamy lyrics and music. It’s all about calling a time out in life and allowing the mind to free float. To draw cartoons. To imagine the impossible. To embrace the romance of life. To do nothing and in the process to do the most powerful thing in existence. To think with no rules. No preconceptions. No limitations.

This is the most powerful, liberating and exhilarating thing in the universe. It was a founding principle at the once great IBM. And the once great Microsoft. And the greater every day Google.

So why has it been wiped off the agenda at virtually every company on the planet? Why is hardly anyone ever told;

“stay home today and just think,”

or“sit under a tree and chase cars”?

So there is no doubt that Toyota is the premier auto maker in the world. It’s quality numbers are in the stratosphere and its sales juggernaut is number two to GM only because, for political reasons, it wants to impose a slow death on the fat, dying cow from Detroit.

So in the midst of all of this Christmas dream of a success story, what does Toyota’s 64-year old CEO Katsuaki Watanabe think of this his global domination machine?

Well… that it SUCKS.

Extraordinary quality isn’t good enough.

Exceptional productivity is just not acceptable.

Amazing sales are a yawn.

Crazy? Polar opposite? Watanabe is doing the only thing that truly distinguishes the elite, top gun business people from the impostors. He is declaring war on his business not when it is faltering but precisely when it is riding a top of the world crest and virtually everyone else would sit back and marvel at the amazing thing called Toyota.

The factis this guy is an ass kicker. I talk in my book Your Management Sucks about the importance of having Combat Eyes and Serial Skepticism. Do you know how much more valuable this is than a zillion feel good bonding fests?

When we all look at the businesses or departments we run, we have to know that some part or parts of it are in need of war.
Who is your role model:Katsuaki Watanabe or Bill Ford?
Mark Stevens
CEO

What do you think? Leave a comment…

This article was originally published in the MSCO Newsletter Unconventional Thinking in March of 2005. We have reprinted it here along with other newsletter articles by popular demand and to make it available to our blog recipients.

1. Advertising and marketing are the same.
To hell, they are. Advertising means buying space or time to relay a message. It can be important to marketing or irrelevant, depending on the company and its goals. We told one of our retail clients to stop advertising and sales went up.

2. The best marketing presents a company and/or its products as beautiful or creative or sexy.
Who says? I’ll tell you: the ego driven creators of beautiful/creative and sexy marketing. What they won’t tell you is that they don’t care a whit about your company’s Return on Investment from its marketing dollars. They just want to be told what creative geniuses they are. Sometimes the least “creative” marketing is the most effective. Wal-Mart’s marketing will never win a prize for aesthetics but it has built the best brand in the world.

3. Salespeople aren’t really part of the marketing process.
Nonsense. They are the centerpieces. Yes, there is a difference between selling and marketing, but if the marketing process leads to a sales team empowered to close, and the salespeople are not closers, sales will be few and far between.

4. With the right training, you can turn non-closers into closers.
Forgetaboutit! You can’t train non-salespeople to sell and you can’t stop salespeople from selling. Find the latter and pay them well.

5. Great marketing agencies are the ones that win lots of awards. So choose them.
Okay, if you want to borrow awards to place on your mantel then do so. But if you want sales to grow, go for the award-less agencies that live by the credo: the best marketing is the product of the least expense that results in the highest ROI. My marketing firm, MSCO, Inc., has won a few awards, I am embarrassed to say. The only one I am proud of, we received from Forbes for creating an ad that motivated more readers to act than any other ad.

6. Good marketing is based on rules.
You should spend x percent of your revenues on marketing. Great direct mail generates an x percent response rate. Hogwash to it all. Every company, every product and service is different: so how can there be universal rules? Rules are for schools. Results are for business people! If you are told that the best return you can get on direct mail is 1 percent, seek to generate 10 percent! Great marketing, inspired marketing, can be the most powerful force in growing companies large and small. The great marketers - Bill Gates, Mary Kaye, Tom Watson, Ray Krock, Sam Walton - avoided the myths, avoided marketing that sucks and drove their companies to the mount. You can do the same.

So why the hell do I write a blog? Well, I received this message from the “cool world” that blogging was “the thing.” And hell, what more could I want?

So I joined 3 trillion other people and starting writing this blog. And before I go further, given the fact that I am a marketing guy and think about how things are presented, “blog” is an awful word. And, maybe more important and maybe not, for the near universe of idiots like me who got caught up in the fashionista of blogging, it doesn’t do a damn thing for them. Think of it as talking to yourself. Not on the “world wide weborama” but to yourself, because except for Paris Hilton’s sexcapades and a few other examples of real entertainment, no one reads blogs but the idiots, like me, who write them.

Is writing a blog “marketing?” No. But what is marketing? It’s growing a business. And all I can tell you is that Sam Walton would have fired anyone at Wal-Mart who wrote one. Yes, it’s fashionable to knock Sam now, but try to do what he did and then, knock him. And by the way, Starbucks, you’re next.

The man who used near flawless salesmanship as the most potent force in his marketing arsenal to become President and and stay popular after eight years of dangerous failure, was not the loser on Sunday. [Fox News Sunday, Chris Wallace interviewed President Clinton]

That distinction belongs to Chris Wallace. Here is a highly placed journalist who is obligated to market himself as a strong figure well suited to represent the public’s interest. Instead, he wimps out like a grade schooler scolded by a berserk teacher. And he will never again be seen the same.

Wallace’s mistake: he allowed Billy Boy the cushion of Presidential privilege after the former President relinquished that privilege by personally attacking Wallace. Once Clinton lost it and accused Wallace of smirking, Chris was in a schoolyard fight, not journalistic discovery. And he had every right, in fact an obligation, to take off the gloves and ask the salesman for a cigar.

A major TV personality like Wallace is in the marketing business. Ask Walters, O’Reilly and Katie: they will tell you. On Sunday, Clinton embarrassed himself but Wallace lost the fight. The salesman wins again. (Chris: ask your dad for his opinion.).

Bill and Hillary Clinton are a married couple (of sorts). Man and wife. But they also represent the difference between marketing and sales.

The former President is a salesman extraordinaire. Whatever he does or doesn’t do, the world loves Bill. The former First Lady couldn’t sell water in the desert. She relies on marketing (I.e. Messaging, Madison Avenue, everything they use to move Cool Aid off the shelves.

Now those folks on Mad Ave will tell you that marketing is far more important than sales….to their way of thinking (because they never sold anything to anyone), anyone can be a salesman.

Wrong. Bill sold his way into the White House and stayed popular even though he turned the Oval Office into a porn palace. Bill can sell anything. Great salesmanship is the most powerful engine in business.

Here’s where the ruber hits the road: Bill was Commander In Chief…..Hillary will never have that title. She can market, yes, that’s how she got to be Senator in a state that was never her own. But she can’t sell. And that’s why she will never be President.

There is a metaphor here for business. Find a company that can market and sell, and that fails to see one as more important than the other, and viola, you have Virgin. And Apple. And Google.
At this point, the wisest thing Hillary can do is get a gene transplant from her so-called husband. And Ford can do the same from Microsoft.

Imagine if Kofi Annan was a product. Would he sell? Well, he doesn’t do anything of value. Zero. I mean a total wastoid.

But wait, this guy whose performance sucks, is a marketing magician. I mean there is turmoil in the world requiring solutions to complex issues and this paper thin pathetic excuse for a leader gets quoted as a voice of authority. On what? The buying of extravagant suits? The dining at haute cuisine restaurants? Well, he does those things well. But a voice on real world issues? Don’t make me sick.

If you want proof that marketing can make miracles happen, and that the UN is a marketing machine par excellence-and nothing else-remind yourself that monsieur Annon runs the asylum. And then pray!

Interested in hiring Mr. Annan? Read his résumé

Mark Stevens

CEO

Starbucks vs Ford: A Morality Tale

Right now, in the year 2006, Starbucks is the smartest business in the world – Ford the dumbest. Think about it: Starbucks sells a powerful fusion of three things we have become addicted to – colored water, foam and a chair in a virtual community. Yes, we can “rent” a seat in a Starbucks and think or people watch or daydream or create or do nothing at all. It is a sanctuary ……a joy to shape our time in that space any way we like. No rules. No time limits. No production quotas. No boss. Just a blank palette: buy the colored water, lick the foam and paint on it.

What does this have to do with Ford? Well, when it comes to knowing your customers, marketing successfully to them and managing the juggernaut business that can create, it has everything to do with Ford. Because the House That Henry Built is now the polar opposite of Starbucks. Miserable cars and even more miserable marketing. Ford’s latest slight of hand designed to take our eyes off the junk and spur sales is a moronic campaign built around the tag line “Bold Moves.” What the hell is bold about Ford? That they are willing to put a befuddled man in the CEO’s office just because his last name is strikingly similar to the founder’s? Is that bold? Or is that incredibly stupid arrogance? Do you think Toyota, the Starbucks of the auto industry, thinks Ford is bold? I can hear the sounds of hysterical laughing all over Tokyo. And a great sense of relief that Starbucks is not getting into the car business.

Mark Stevens

CEO

Ok. The most obnoxious business person in the world, is the best marketer in the world. Bar none numero uno.

And that is? The Trumpster. Oh sure, millions think he is crass and loud and garish and egotistical. And the same millions, and millions more, hang on his every word, buy his books, watch his TV show, buy his real estate, license his brand, humiliate themselves on national TV to work for him…..it goes on and on.

Trump may be a real estate genius but he definitely, absolutely, without a doubt is a marketing wizard. No one else comes close. Well, maybe Oprah, but DT wins hands down.

And why? For the same reasons so many millions SAY they detest him: he is crass and loud, garish and egotistical. But you know what? It works! A lot better than being demure and polite and politically correct.

Trump’s marketing is ingenious because it makes certain he never let’s you forget he is out there. And in your face. And setting trends. And if you think that sucks, ask DT to tutor you. You need it.

Mark Stevens

CEO