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

So I think Counting Crows is one of the best bands of the past two decades. No Led Zep but who is or was? At their best, Counting Crows was genuinely good, original, and at times (Recovering The Satellites, Anna Begins) exceptional.

And then they lost the artistic magic or Adam got tired or who knows what but a devoted following sat in disgust listening to Hard Candy, the first Milk Dud by a group of guys who seemed incapable of sinking so low.

Ok, so they had a loser. Everyone is entitled to a bad day now and then and so the devoted waited for the recovery album. And waited. And waited. And nothing…..

Until late last month when the band on the run released Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.

It is a clunker. It is a once seamless band that made magic instinctively now trying too hard. You can hear the hard work. You can hear all the old riffs repeated here.

I think they knew it. I think they recognized this was January compared to August And Everything After.

So what do they do to breathe some life into a wounded bird? They try all kinds of traditional PR, which will drive some heightened anticipation for sure, but it’s sales they want. You can’t take anticipation to the bank.

They know a little secret about the Internet. You can listen to it. You can hear it. So they take the only hook song on the album, You Can’t Count On Me, create a landing page, give you a link to download and viola, digi does what print can’t even touch. (It’s not called a hook for nothing). It sells songs.

There is still a huge place for traditional PR in traditional media. And we should play it like it’s 1953. But with one hand, while the other is on the mouse. Because that “huge place” is relative and gets smaller every day.

And if you can’t hear the hook, you ain’t buying.

Think about it. The Web sings…..literally.

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

A few days ago, I was bestowed with a charming and old-fashioned gesture: A wish to “Have a Wonderful Weekend.” The problem is, the gesture was plastic. Literally. It was stamped on a bag of band-aids and toothpaste I’d purchased in a local pharmacy. Perhaps I am a cold-hearted SOB, but I don’t get the warm and fuzzies when a bag whispers sweet nothings in my ears. In fact I wanted to, and ultimately did, tell the pharmacy they would be advised to replace the weekend “love note” with one that reads: Whatever You Need, Whenever You Need It. Just call us at xxx or visit us at pleasingyoumakesushappy.com.

Why wasn’t this done at the outset? Why won’t they do it ever? Because what used to be one-on-one customer service that came from a culture that truly respected and appreciated customers as the soul and the lifeblood of a business has been reduced to a series of monotonous and superficial scripts that come from nowhere near the heart:

Have a nice day.

Please hold, we’ll be right with you.

If you would like to talk to a live person, press the pound key.

Well actually, I would prefer to talk to a dead person-or even a plastic bag- than push ten more buttons until I find someone totally annoyed that they have to DEAL with a customer. What’s really happening is that businesses are so focused on consummating transactions that they spend no time building enduring relationships. Plastic bags can’t do it. A “Thank You For Your Patronage ” note stamped on an invoice can’t do it. The only way it can be done is if Management develops a culture that truly embraces customers.

The classic customer service survey asks people:

1. Do you like our products/services?

2. Would you buy them again?

3. Would you recommend them to a friend?

What they don’t ask goes to the core of great business, of extraordinary companies:

Do you have faith in our company? Do you think we are committed to you?

They don’t go beneath the surface, the superficial, the scripts because they don’t want to know the answers. They don’t care. The DNA of true customer service, of businesses built on relationships as opposed to transactions, has virtually disappeared. Sadly, today’s managers think it’s all in the plastic bags.

Today, I sat on a beach and watched two yellow seaplanes flirt with each other. They dipped and banked, flew in tandem, then apart, only to line up again and then diverge under the gorgeous sun.

The courtship in the sky went on for all to watch, but I think I was the only one enrapt in their maneuvers. To me, it was as if they were without pilots: winged lovers playing out a relationship, testing each other, searching their souls, wondering if they were meant to be. Or not.

In their aerial ballet, they were cognizant, consciously or not, of The Line. This is the line between like and love. It impacts everything we do in life. And business is no exception.

When we like, we dabble and move on. When we love, we change. Forever. A part of us never reverts to the way we were before we crossed the like to love line.

Some companies know how to make this happen in the world of commerce. When I started out in business, I happened to meet dozens of Price Waterhouse clients. They were clients for decades and could not be lured away by competitors, regardless of the offer. I was told it was because PW had been working on their books for years and it was just too complicated to leave.

And I believed that nonsense.

Now I know better. PW trained its team to deliver a level of elite professional service and to treat clients as the kings and queens of the business world. Do that and you will have relationships that cross The Line, relationships for life.

In its heyday, Xerox used to pride itself on having its salespeople fly first class. Why? They were told that as the company’s sales force, they were the princes of the business. Elevated this way, treated with this rare caliber of respect, as royalty, they in turn served their customers in truly memorable fashion. The business world didn’t buy from Xerox; they adored the company. They would buy from no one else. They were in love.

All of the world’s greatest business people have been romantics. They are often painted as technicians or financial engineers or scientists, but first and foremost they are romantics. They have to be. They see The Line. They understand its power. They know why the seaplanes flew apart. They know it is better that they did because they were not the real thing.

But, they know how to create the real thing and the thermonuclear force that is unleashed when they do.

They get this by:

* Thinking ahead of you.
* Delivering what you want before you even thought you could get it.
* Generating a constant state of excitement.
* Creating the element of surprise.

In life, there is nothing more powerful than The Line. Getting close but failing to cross means you are a zillion miles away.

Sometimes you can look at things in life, in business, and your visual acuity is perfect.

You look at a spreadsheet and you see a spreadsheet. You look at a new product you designed from scratch and there it is, just what the prototype envisioned. You may be pleased with the way it turned out and you may be disappointed, but you can see it with such extraordinary clarity that the decision to proceed to wholesale manufacturing or not is based on quantitative projections. Will it sell is the issue, not does it look like I wanted it to look.

Difficult as this decision may be, it is cake compared to the decisions you have to make when you really cannot see what you are dealing with. When you work, in a labor of exceptional love, to build something truly special, and when you try to take it all in, to truly soak up the magnificence of what you thought you helped to create, you cannot because for some inexplicable reason, you can’t see it clearly.

In the thousand and one complex issues that sweep through every major business issue, every product development, every client relationship, the black and white it all started as turns to grey. And you have to judge what you have with the opposite of visual acuity.

You have to peer through a fog and try to determine if what you have helped to create is real, deserves investment or is a figment of your imagination. And because there is no reliable book for the really difficult things in life, you have to go by instinct. Will it sell? Will it be a hit? Or is it something you should write off, go back to the drawing board and try again?

If you believe in what you have created - a product, a campaign, a formula - you stick with it because, fog or not, you see the beauty of it. Your mind can do that work for you. So you find a way to proceed and you move ahead even though it would be so much easier to scratch it all than to make the dream come to life. You don’t like the easy way. You prefer the hard, the true, the tough, the magnificent and if that means you do so without visual acuity, you do it because you want what you helped to create to make a difference and you believe it can.

The easiest thing in life is to walk away. But easy and exceptional are rarely paired. So regardless of what the critics say, what the press says, what the whole damn universe thinks, you are determined to make your butterfly, fly. That’s the story of every great achiever in history. Every Van Gogh now hanging proudly on every otherwise ordinary wall made magnificent by its presence.

This is the stubborn quality we must bring to our most important works. We have to find a way to believe. We have to insist that Starry Night is a masterpiece even if no one would give the artist a penny for it in his time.

And then the fog can settle so deep and thick that it becomes invisible and against your better judgment, you think it’s best to move on because it appears, for all of the grandeur of what you helped to create, you’re the only one who wants it to endure.

The world won’t buy it. And you have only one option. It’s called Next. It may not be as great as the Now, but there’s a life to be lived. A career to be built.

The great thing about the future is that it brings another opportunity to make the pure dream a reality.

It comes to us from truth tellers who invent The Rules of Life and package it for us as the gospel. And then we drink the Kool Aid and the longer it’s out there on the shelves, the more we accept it as Divine. Inarguable. Bullet proof.

To me, it’s all a joke. Who has the right to create rules? Who tests their validity? Who starts dutifully following them and then passes the virus on to others? And who needs them. Life is best when we face the issues with a blank page and write the rules, our rules, as we go along. Any other way is an extended stay in hostageville.

Let’s take The Rules Of Business:

• A low turnover rate among employees is a sign of a healthy company. (Whenever I find businesses where almost no one ever leaves or is dismissed, I usually find a lazy culture that rewards mediocrity. I think they call it the Post Office.).
• It is always best to promote from within. (But what if a person more qualified for the job is at another company? Make due with second best? Why?)
• Seniority should be a key component of the formula for calculating compensation and authority within a company. (So if the greatest contributor to revenues and profitability is far younger than the oldest slacker in the office, the star should make less? Are you kidding Rule Maker?)
• Great companies arrive at decisions through consensus. (Actually, consensus building is a miserable excuse for inaction. Have you ever attended the UN? It will make you run for your life every time you hear the word consensus.)
• Don’t embark on a new initiative until research shows you it will succeed. (For the most part, research is for cowards and college
• Professors. Oh, I know it’s good to test the waters and crunch some numbers, but business is like war. All the plans and assumptions change when the first shot is fired. Trying to figure out a perfect path to success before you launch an enterprise, means you will be paralyzed in planning while the real entrepreneurs go out and make it happen, taking their lumps and making mid course corrections along the way.)

Liberation Day. You are free to ignore The Truth, recognizing that it is just a feel good myth Homer Simpson created in his basement. 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?

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