We live our lives believing there are sharply defined and crystal clear moments of truth. Moments when we are struck with an epiphany and have to change something in our worlds. And myth has it that these earth shattering slices of time prompt us to dramatically change who and what we are.

But the fact is, we tend to camouflage the epiphanies, tuck them away in the recesses of our minds, and even deny their veracity or their very existence.

We convince ourselves that all will be fine. And so often we do nothing, turning the moments of truth into moments of lies. We do this in our business lives, our personal lives and the lives that are a fusion of both because:

• What was once good, was so good, we don’t want to admit that it no longer holds that high ground. So we just don’t face it.
• The strategy we created before taking a new product to market seemed so brilliant on the drawing board but failed in the real world. But, we say, something may change tomorrow. Magic may happen. The strategy was too ingenious to fail. But in the fleeting moment of truth, it did fail. And in the moment of lies, we just don’t face it.
• The investments we make in anything- a marketing campaign, a new technology, a sister company- may look like a sure thing at the outset. A slam-dunk. And then the champagne goes flat and the losses accumulate and it’s that moment of truth time to take our hit and sell, but we just don’t face it. Moment of truth to moment of lies.
• We haven’t had a new idea in years, and our company or our career trajectory reflects this. So it’s time to think and dream and come up with that new insight that will effect real change. Unless we do, we are hopelessly sliding down the arc of a has been. Painful moment of truth. But, hey, I still have my job and people still buy from my company, so…I’ll get to it. Moment of lies.

There are no paint by numbers instructions to living a great life. To making a difference. The whole chain of neutrons and protons is too complex for that. But, we can make a difference by keeping the moments of truth from turning to the moments of lies:

• Recognize that these moments of truth are pathways to change.
• Don’t fear change. It will happen to you no matter how much you seek to avoid it. It is simply whether you control the agenda or you blow in the wind.
• Use the change you engage in to exceed anything you have ever done before. To be wiser and tougher and more creative.

James Taylor wrote, “The secret to life is enjoying the passage of time.” And learning from it. And turning the learning into action.

Mark Stevens
CEO

How have you kept your moments of truth from turning into moments of lies?

I watched an interview with former world figure skating Dorothy Hamill, who I remember so well for her electric style and breezy great looks on the ice, now revealing the unknown story of a life pocked with depression. Yesterday, I watched old men sob, remembering vicious battlefields and the horrendous loss of buddies, all 19 years old, in The War in the Pacific, more than a half century ago. A week ago I read of Owen Wilson’s near suicide.

Dorothy said she would cry for hours at a time. Wail out loud. And then it turned worse when Dino Martin, the love of her life, walked out the door, no rhyme or reason. There never is in love.

The gray soldiers admitted they’ve never been really happy since their pre-War youth, poisoned as they’ve been by nightmare visions.

And Wilson had everyone fooled but himself. The joy free persona; the aching heart.

At times Hamill, the boys in uniform and the Wedding Crasher experienced heaven. The gold medals, the swimming holes, the first box office hits. And when the hellish times set in, the view of heaven played games with their brains. How had they have fallen? How could they climb back?

You don’t have to be famous to experience these poles of life. We all do, every single one of us. I was mentoring a young man today, one struggling with some of the barbed wire of adolescence. And I was telling him of my time in hell and how I called on the memories of heaven as a ladder to pull myself out. And he understood. He understood.

Today, thousands of people lost their jobs. An equal number or more lost their businesses. And still more lost sales they were working on for months or years, or were demoted in a Management shuffle or walked away from a house, from an American dream, they could no longer afford.

For all it felt like hell. And it was truly miserable. But if you remember that time you had in heaven, or the mere glimpse of it, it is the fuel you can use to soar back to the place you want to be.

In business, in life, there is always, thank God, the opportunity for redemption. Every great career, every great life, has moved through the heaven to hell to heaven journey. Through courage and determination and a stubborn refusal to remain on the dark side of the moon.

Just how you respond when you look into the abyss is the true measure of who you are as a person. That snapshot of heaven you carry around in your pocket is the best assurance that you will walk through the gates again.

Hamill found her center and has a beautiful daughter. The boys of war came home and found jobs and love. And Wilson will walk on stage to win an Academy Award one day. He will.

Because the view of heaven is always best from hell.

Mark Stevens
CEO

How was your climb from Hell to Heaven?

When people are proud of themselves, it is often for their minds. Those complex calculating machines that sit on our shoulders and turn everything in life into decision trees.

Is this good? Is it right? Is it fair?

Will it be good and right and fair months from now? Years? Days? The decision machine, the mind, keeps analyzing the variables. Looking for the perfect answer…in an imperfect world. How absurd. How naive and self-defeating: looking for the perfect in an imperfect world.

The heart, at the other side of the spectrum, keeps pumping out passion. Like a child untainted by rules of the system, it reacts to what it sees as good in life and what it wants to embrace, without a single caveat: it is true, spontaneous and alive. Unchecked, unfettered and unplugged.

This is the titanic struggle in life, in business, in love. As business people, we must all beware of this. And we must wonder as we approach our prospects, our markets, what will prevail: the mind or the heart. Will people like your products or services and buy them or will their minds squash the deal with concerns on price and practicality. Do I really need this? Is this priced well? I already have black shoes, what right do I have to buy more? Is that good use of my money? Am I being a responsible person? What will others think?

The Mind, you see, has no heart and in the worst cases, zillions of cases, it holds the heart hostage. And the prospect will not buy. Will not indulge in its dreams and will succumb to the “what if’s.”

But there is a way to reverse this and empower the heart to prevail. To buy what the prospect sees and likes and wants even though the heartless calculator of the mind finds endless reasons why this is not good or right or fair. That is how to transition prospects from like to love. In cases where the prospect, the customer, falls in love with what you are selling and how you are selling it, the heart will take over and the sale will be made regardless of the million and one reasons the mind will invent to deprive the soul of the joy of the expensive, the impractical, the unacceptable, the inappropriate. Standing in front of a beautiful new car that is slightly out of your reach, ignites the mind/heart battle. If the design and packaging makes you fall in love, you will buy and find a way to keep it. And love it. And live your life your way, with a wonderful sense of abandon.

People divide into these camps: those who lead with the heart and the others who are paralyzed by the mind. As a businessperson, your mission is to melt the mind and light the heart. If you don’t, they will walk away empty-handed. A sure sign that they liked but never loved. And as in human relations, a sure sign that they are deprived of each other. The mind thought the desire to death and killed it. No one buys jewelry, Prada, iPhones, vacations to St. Barts with their minds. They buy with their hearts. Find a way to show them the love when there is no glamour-the rustic appeal of LL Bean boots, the quiet charm of most anything that carries the Martha Stewart brand-and you will make the critical transition from like to love.

From the mind to the heart. And in those cases where you can’t walk away, there are prospects of passion just across the street.

Mark Stevens
CEO

The great trick in business is to

turn
ugly math into lovely math.

Here’s what I mean: one of our clients has 3,000 salespeople producing an average of $1 million in sales annually. Management’s dream is to double the production to $2 million per rep. It’s a nice thought, but impossible to achieve. Impossible? Why? Because that means there would be 3,000 superb salespeople in the company and there isn’t a business in the world that comes close. Even the best companies are so far off that mark it would be laughable if it wasn’t so ugly.

Think of it as ugly math. The number of super stars in any organization can be measured with your fingers. Great talent, stars, true innovators and forces of growth are truly rare. You can’t manufacture them. You can’t transform the average salesperson, the average manager, the average anything, into a supernova by shipping them off to a seminar or to be doused in Cool Aid by a motivational speaker. But you can make them better performers. Not by orders of magnitude, not exponentially, but incrementally. And surprisingly perhaps, that’s where the lovely math lies.

Back to our client. Instead of trying to turn the also-rans into top producers, we advised helping them to do the possible (what a novel idea), i.e., mentoring and teaching them to grow their production by 20% each. Not enough? Well first of all that’s all your going to get (and it will take a Herculean effort at that) and second, it will add $360 million to the company’s top line without adding a single rep. Lovely math.

When Microsoft was a pip squeak of a start up, Ballmer told Gates they needed to hire 12 more great people. Bill said find one and then we’ll look for the next. He knew all about ugly math. And on the product side-if the world’s population of PCs went from a relative handful to zillions-he would own the world. Lovely math.

As you manage your business, think about:

• Making your team members 20% better…yourself too
• Selling your customers 20% more

Play the math. Think of what it does for Vegas.

Mark Stevens
CEO

Posted in Business, Entrepreneur, Management, Sales, Small Business, Unconventional Thinking | 3 Comments »

Christler: Will It Rise From The Dead?

Monday, May 21st, 2007

2,000 years ago, Christ rose from the dead. On a much less profound level, but in our minds today, will Chrysler do the same? The question is, will it be “Christ-ler?”

No it will not. The guys who bought the scrap heap of a company have zero interest in cars. The guys who sold it live for cars and they couldn’t wait to dump it. They said it was hopeless. And the Wall Streeter’s know that so well. They hate steel and unions and dealers and billion dollar ad budgets. And they know the Chinese are coming out with $5,000 cars.

So why did they buy? To sell. To sell the brand on everything but cars. To sell the real estate. To sell the parts division. To sell whatever the hell they can possibly sell.

More than anyone else, they know that Chrysler will not be “Christ-ler”. It is done. And it should be. Because it is not Toyota. It is a disgusting waste of a company, selling lies on wheels.

Is there a Chrysler in your business? A product or service that is dying and will never rise again? That is alive, if you can call it that, because you want it go on but have no idea how to make it worth buying? Or no drive to do it? Ask yourself:

• Where is the Chrysler in my company? When should I kill it or sell it off?
• Where is the “Christ-ler” in my business? What should I do to bring it back from the dead?
• Why do I think things will turn around without me taking the hard actions to drive change?

Mark Stevens
CEO

Posted in Business, Management, Sales, Small Business, Unconventional Thinking | 2 Comments »

The Case Against Wal-Mart is a Sham

Monday, May 14th, 2007

Imagine this: a company arrives in town and offers the good people who live there jobs. No one is forced to take one. No one holds a gun to their head. The same company then has the temerity to say, “If you work hard and serve our customers well, we will promote you from within.” Horrors.

Now let’s look at the other side. A company arrives in town and offers the good people who live there just about anything they want for less money. The bastards actually save people money. Money they can use for nest eggs and college tuitions. Why doesn’t the National Guard march in and close down a company like this?

Hearing Wal-Mart’s detractors you would believe the company is a disgrace. Instead it is a national treasure. Sam Walton started with an idea, and with drive and determination he built a wonderful business. Isn’t this the essence of capitalism? Oh, but wait a minute, do the Wal-Mart whiners want capitalism?

Oh, I know the school of hatred that says Wal-Mart arrives in towns and crushes the local merchants. The ones who charge you more? Who lived off the fat of little or lazy competition at your expense? Here’s what I say to that: Wal-Mart is great for competition. I have competitors. I lose business to them. When? When they are smarter or cheaper than my company. And it makes me think:

• How can we raise the bar on our work?
• How can we be as efficient as possible?
• Do we do enough to promote from within?

Walk the streets around any Wal-Mart in the world. What will you find? A mass of small businesses that found a way to survive, to thrive, precisely because they understand business is a jungle and that they can’t rely on the whiners to protect them. If any of these small businesses become the next Starbucks, the whiners will want to punish them for their success in a heartbeat. Blame global warming on them. Toss them in the prison for the rich and throw away the key.

And by the way, on those same Wal-Mart streets you also find a Target, which became an exponentially better business competing with the house that Sam built.

If you don’t have a Wal-Mart on turf, pretend you do. Go to sleep concerned. Never settle for how your business currently performs. Declare war on every aspect. Leave no rocks to hide under.

And Wal-Mart stop wasting good shareholder dollars on PR to silence the whiners, because you can’t. This is their sex.

Mark Stevens
CEO

Posted in Advertising, Business, Management, Marketing, Public Relations, Sales, Small Business, Unconventional Thinking | 17 Comments »

Janis Joplin, Inc.

Tuesday, April 17th, 2007

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

Posted in Advertising, Business, Entrepreneur, Management, Marketing, Sales, Small Business, Unconventional Thinking | 9 Comments »

China Is The Dumbest Country In The World

Friday, April 13th, 2007

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?”

Posted in Branding, Business, Management, Marketing, Sales, Unconventional Thinking | 4 Comments »

Why Is The Sky Blue Mommy?

Tuesday, April 3rd, 2007

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

Posted in Advertising, Business, Entrepreneur, Management, Marketing, Sales, Small Business, Unconventional Thinking | 5 Comments »

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