Imagine you are walking down the street and you see a restaurant going out of business.

The proprietor is at the front door, looking inside the space that was once his company. You wind up engaged in a conversation. He tells you he has been forced to close up because, “Well, I’m not very good at running a business.
Everything I touch turns to junk.”

You are about to wish him well and walk on when he makes you an offer:

“If you like, I can open a restaurant for you. Just give me a million dollars and I’ll give it a whirl.”

Surprised, even shocked, you say:

“But you said you’re not very good at running a business. Won’t handing you a million, respectfully, be like pouring a million down the drain?”

To which he replies, “Of course. But I will be able to give five people jobs for the six months or so until the million holds out.”

If you think this anecdote is fiction, you have been living in a bubble. It is precisely the conversation America’s so called car markers are having with America’s so-called government leaders. Including our President-elect.

A clan of frauds thinks we are a nation of fools. And the clique of leaders may validate this disgusting assumption. Or embarrassing fact.

It is plausible that the golf club junkies running Detroit should get financial aid-our economy is too fragile to take the hit of an auto implosion-but only if their resignation is part of the package. They must leave. They must hide their heads in shame. They must never run a lemonade stand.

In all of life, we must invest our money, our time, our hopes, our dreams in the form of doers. Not the hangers-on who take orders, collect a check, go home for the 6 o’ clock news, live for the weekend. They are the civil servants, by mind if not title, and God bless them and I wish them well, but I don’t want them running anything.

There is such a thing as “American exceptionalism.” And to maintain it, we need driven, street smart capitalists who make the wheel turn. Let the Rick Wagoners of the world work for the post office or some other government
agency that pays people for breathing. But if we are going to give Detroit a vault of money, we must insist that an Icahn or a Trump or some other egotist who gets things done is the guardian of the dough and of our national destiny and once the shop is in order, they can pick successors.

In the meantime, let’s be a nation of geniuses dealing with a cabal of frauds. And in our personal and business lives, let’s recognize that we learn nothing and experience zero growth from those who are in the all too common business
of paying it safe!

Mark Stevens
CEO

We are living in a tumultuous time. A new President. An earmark crazed, lobbyist driven Congress. Two wars. An economic meltdown. Global terrorism. The end of GM and Ford as viable private corporations. And the list goes on.

Or does it? I mean are we really facing a host of perplexing issues…..or just one? I say the latter.

Allow me to put this in perspective. We used to have people to believe in. Proven leaders whose words and the actions to back them up, gave us insight and confidence. Because they knew how business worked, because they knew how government worked, because they knew how the world worked– or so we thought–we could go about our daily lives, with the peace of mind that we were in good hands.

But it turns out that the heroes were not really heroes at all. Think of the once-exalted icons who are now recognized to be human beings, mere mortals, who knew nothing more than we did. In fact, maybe less. And while we went about our daily lives with hardly an impact on others, they were busy ruining ours.

Alan Greenspan was the God of economics. Robert Rubin was the greatest financial engineer since Alexander Hamilton. Dick Fuld was the gutsy genius of Wall Street. Bill Clinton was the human bridge between black and white America. And this list of monumental disappointments goes on too.

All have been stripped of their Superman suits. All have proven they have nothing smart to say. All have demonstrated that those we viewed as leaders were clowns in disguise.

Which brings us back to the one problem that truly plagues us: we are leaderless. Yes, we all hope that the new President changes that but for now he is un-tested. He is a promise. And so far, promises have left us with crushing unemployment, a free-falling Dow, the imminent nationalization of our automobile industry, the near demise of Wall Street.

And just when that seems overwhelming, I say bravo. We don’t need leaders to live full and meaningful lives. In fact, they are an addiction, a mirage, that prompts us to take our eyes off the ball. To relax, thinking we can cede our responsibilities to some power hungry, egotistical suit who pretends to care for us.

Sure there are glorious exceptions. I honor Lincoln, FDR, Kennedy, Reagan, Churchill, King. But we can’t sit around waiting for the next one. And we can recognize that in our families, our careers, our companies, we can and should be the true leaders.

We can and should rely on ourselves.

Mark Stevens
CEO

Every day, we talk to others and they talk to us. Subtract the casual encounters and the acquaintances. I am talking about the people who are truly important in our lives. The dear friends and lovers. The partners and collaborators.

As we talk with and to each other, there is a tendency to believe that the direct communications between us - the questions and answers, the stories we tell and the information we share - is where the relationship resides. That this discourse reveals the core, the heart, the essence of the relationships.

But in fact, it is only the visible……and the invisible is so often more profound. It is often a more accurate reflection of what is really going on between the people engaged in conversation. In negotiations. In brainstorming. Even in love making.

In all such encounters, there are the silences, the nuances, the unspoken, the facts of life that linger like a fog and are fully recognized but rarely admitted or revealed. It is too uncomfortable. It is too painful. It is too private to bring into the sunlight. And if we do, it will disappear, as does a fog in the late morning sun.

It is the subtext to our relationships. It is the spaces between. It looks like nothing but it is everything.

To every union of one sort or another, we bring history and baggage and opinions, bias, expectations, trust, distrust, loves gained and loves lost, deals made and deals broken, faith abused and faith restored. And as we talk to each other in the here and now, as we plan, discuss, collaborate, question, share, kiss, embrace, challenge: we play it all against the subtext, against the history, against the great body of experience we bring to this moment in time. And this powerful centrifical force pulls us into our own orbit even as we appear, to ourselves and all others, to be tightly aligned.

It is said that we come into life alone and depart the same way. During our years, we can have extraordinary pairings, magical partnerships, sweeping romances, but as tight as we appear to be over time or at any moment in time, the spaces between are dividing lines, markers of our individuality, the personal universes that envelope us even as we work passionately together on building new products or embrace in the silence of the midnight. In the best of circumstances, we are together. But we are always, in part, in our own worlds, colored by the rich patterns of thought and emotion only we know. And that make us unique.

Paradoxically, the spaces between are the glue of the best and most enduring relationships. Respected and preserved, even if invisible and poorly understood, they are the havens for our individuality and our independence. Without this, we are simply words and smiles and handshakes and kisses. All melting into one another. All substanceless.

The spaces between are where we nourish ourselves and develop the essence that makes us so much more intelligent, insightful and compelling when we are woven together in work and love, as if there is nothing in the world dividing us.

Mark Stevens
CEO

Oliver Wendell Holmes made the astute observation that “History is one damned thing after another.” War, tsunamis, recessions, assasinations, plagues, insurgencies……and on and on.

Right now, we are watching in disbelief as the world’s financial system collapses as if it were a high school science project gone awry. All of the former geniuses, the one-time Masters Of The Universe, are walking around like deer caught in the headlights. The pillars of finance and fiscal policy we once believed in are now empty suits, wondering, like the rest of us, what the hell is going on.

We can’t believe in Greenspan. We can’t believe in Rubin. We can’t believe in Paulson. When it comes to this wrenching meltdown, we can’t believe in anyone.

Or can we? I say yes, but hold on a moment.

Out of the blue, we are now staring down the barrel of a possible Depression. At best, at the most optimistic best, it may only be a long and aching recession, but the spectre of the 1930’s is still on the table, a very real possibility. We were all taught over the years that a Depression could never again rear its ugly head, but here we are in 2008, learning once again — lest we forget — that EVERYTHING repeats itself and that history is “one damn thing after another.”

Or is it? I don’t think so, but hold on, I’ll get to my point.

Barack Obama is about to be elected President of the United States. Election eve will be a triumphant, historic and glorious time for this new Man Of The World. As will the following weeks as he prepares to occupy the White House, the Oval Office, the most elegant and extraordinary position in the world’s most enduring republic.

And then the fanfare will subside, Putin will terrorize another former Soviet satelite, Israel will attack Iran, Pakistan will fire on American troops, unemployent will continue to surge, there will be no way to cut or raise anyone’s taxes, nor will there be funds or votes for a quarter of the promises either Presidential candidate has made.

That’s when Barack will wake up in the President’s residence, the glow of victory long extinguished, whipsawed and made twenty years older by the ordeal of “one damn thing after another.”

But, as I have said, it doesn’t have to be that way. It shouldn’t be that way. As all of us mere mortals view the threat of a Depression, as the new Commander-in-Chief is tested by the dangers of a complex world, as history does its war, plague, revolution waltz, it is up to us to find a place to put it all in perspective, to have confidence not in the icons of finance, science or government — all of whom care zero for us and inevitably let us down — but instead to invest in ourselves.

Find a way to:

* See that on the days when the headlines are painted with gloom, babies are still born, men and women meet at airports and fall in love and a zillion stars light the Milky Way.

* Recognize that we have the abilities to find inner peace and success even at times when the world appears to be on the verge of a nervous beakdown.
During The Great Depression, parents took children to amusement parks, poets wrote sonnets of great romantic emotion, chemists were breaking the code on preventing human disease, lovers embraced under trees, shutting out the rest of the world in their precious and perfect cocoons.

Barack Obama’s true test as a leader will be in his ability (or lack of it) to relish the Office in spite of the waves of assault Oliver Wendell Holmes warned of.

But isn’t that our test as well? A few weeks ago, at the outset of the derivatives driven meltdown, I was watching the great theater of the stock market begin a rocky path to a possible Depression.

On a sofa, cup of coffee in hand, I observed this dramatic episode in the drama of life. And I felt strong and comfortable and at peace. I don’t need Greenspan, Rubin or Paulson for the answers.

I have myself. The world isn’t ending. It never does. It’s just one damn thing after another.

And one beautiful possibility and endless string of glorious adventures after another. What I do with them is up to me.

Most of all, I am going to enjoy the ride. Real life always happens below the noise of the headlines. The real trick is have your own compass, and the state of mind, to make life “one grand experience after another.”

Mark Stevens
CEO

On these luminous full-moon autumn nights, I look up at the lunar surface and I am happy to know that an American flag is planted there.

Sometimes I wonder why this gives me a sense of pride. It is 240,000 miles away, no one sees it, no one salutes it. It is as if it isn’t there. But my heart and my mind tell me differently. Sometimes you don’t have to see something for it to move you.

As I think about it, old glory on the moon is a symbol, an icon, all of us can learn from. A symbol of vision, creativity, determination, drive, bravado, courage–all rolled up into the meteor of human achievement. It is a metaphor for how magnificent achievements are accomplished not only in space but in business, science, the arts and in our personal lives if we are driven to make a difference.

1. John Kennedy came out of nowhere and pledged to put a man on the moon in a decade. He didn’t take a poll on whether it was wise or not, popular or viewed as a waste of money. He simply trumpeted it to the world. And he didn’t say we would get it done in a reasonable amount of time or any other kind of equivocation. He said a decade. Period.

This is leadership. This is the opposite of the followership, and the focus on consensus building I often see posing as leadership. There is no room for second guesssing, naysaying or stalling. The leader called for an American flag on the moon within a decade.
And it would be done.

2. The smartest minds in the world went about addressing the most complex challenge mankind had ever assumed. They put aside their personal agendas and their traditional rivalries. They acted in concert around a profound and exhilerating goal.

I walk into companies around the world and find them wracked by animosities, politics, second guessing, even saboutage. Every new idea is greeted with fear, disdain and resistance. The vast amount of energy generated by the human beings at work in the company is directed at blocking and frustating each other as opposed to finding and leveraging opportunities in the marketplace.

This is the kiss of death for innovation. For genuine achievement.

3. A new breed of people, astronauts, raised their hands and strode gallantly and fearlessly into the unkown. They wanted nothing more than to be strapped into new and untested technology and blasted, all alone, into the depths of space.

A leader set out the vision of a magnificent goal, a team of geniuses figured out how to make the dream a reality and a cadre of brave hearts enlisted for the mission.

This is how wonderful things get done in life. It doesn’t have to be as grand in scope and sweeping in drama as the national drive that placed an American flag on the moon. It is how companies, small and large, take ideas and turn them into wonderful successes, both small and large. It’s not the size that
matters but the drive to achieve that is the winning syndrome.

Last week, I saw the film Flash Of Genius. An inventor has an ephipany that drives him to create what has become known as the intermittant automobile wiper blade. Against all odds he created something the entire auto industry was seeking to build. He fought the Ford Motor Company for stealing his idea. He went to court, defending himself against the auto giant and the greatest litigators in corporate America. He refused to take millions of dollars to walk away in silence, allowing others to take credit for his work. He lost his friends, his wife, his money…..everything.

Until a jury heard his case, recognized the beauty of his human achievement, honored him as the inventor and forced Detroit to pay him the treasure his guts and brains deserved.

For the rest of his life, he saw his flag on the moon: millions of automobiles, cruising down the highways, the wiper blades dancing to the electronic rhythms he created.

Mark Stevens
CEO

I remember the most disappointing day of my life.

It had nothing to do with SAT scores or job rejections or romances that went up in smoke.

It was the day I had a head-on collision with the fact that there is no such thing as Santa Claus. I was a Santa Freak. I waited for him all year. Dreamed about him. Wished on stars for a ride with Rudolph. Made him coffee and cookies every Chritmas eve.

The idea of this kind and lovely spirit, this giver of gifts, this maker of dreams come true, flying through the midnight skies, dressed in red, ringing bells-well, it was all just so captivating to me.

And then the world told me it was time to grow up. Santa was a lie. I was pole-axed.

This morning I walked past a home with a Halloween figure- some kind of fairlyland version of a ghost- propped up on the front porch. Immediately, I thought, “A child lives here.”

You may say, “Of course. Halloween is for kids.” But I see it in a different way. Halloween, Santa and all of the charming fantasies in life are the preserve of kids because the adults move on. And we think this is healthy and natural but it embodies a true loss: we abandon the imagination in our lives.

We become pragmatic machines. We live by the rules of empirical evidence. If scientists can’t prove it, we don’t believe in it. We work and shop and invest and plan and strategize–but we don’t fantasize. And I believe when that happens we don’t grow. In fact, we shrink. We live in an ever-smaller space.

Einstein said that his intelligence was important but that it paled in comparison to his imagination. This latter skill, this blessing, he said, enabled him to encircle the globe. The greatest scientist who ever lived liked to begin his thinking with a fantasy and then work backwards to reality. Most of us are trained not to do that. It is childish, we are told. It also led to relativity and to Picasso’s cubism. And to Apple and Google and Disneyland and frozen Milky Ways.

What happens when you meet someone whose eyes are on fire? Who dreams of the impossible, is in love with the strawberry moon, lives dangerously, eschews “the rules,” walks without their feet touching the ground. Dances to a different drummer. Refuses to abandon childhood.

We fall in love. We admire. We want to join the journey. We want to toss away the bric a brac of our so very proper adult lives and stand on our heads and see the world upside down. That’s a great way to gain a dramatically different perspective for life, work, career, love-oh, it’s all just one big fluffy mass of the same thing.

We all know the axiom that holds there is a child in all of us. Not true. In the vast majority of people I know and have known, the child has been extinguished. There is not an original idea. Not a single crazy thought. Not one flight, one fantasy. Just spreadsheets, credit cards and a wild night at the supermarket.

The child that may still be left in YOU is THE lifeforce. The only one. Let her believe in Santa again. Once you let the genie of the impossible out of the bottle, you will have an exponent over your name. Over your life.

Mark Stevens
CEO

In all of our lives, there is a silent force at work. Every day, in almost every way, it distorts the truth and oddly, gives us pleasure in the process.

That force is the need to assign blame to others. To insist that they caused this or that, made us look bad, held us back, interfered with our would-be success, left us alone, prevented us from being alone, made our companies fail, drove us to bankruptcy, denied us of love, loved us too much. It goes on and on. The music of blame. The perpetual motion machine that saves us from fault, from sin, from responsibility.

From everything we don’t want to face in ourselves.

From the fact that what we pretend is black and white - I’m right, they’re wrong- is always grey. Worse than that:

It is always our fault. Mine. Yours. Not the other person’s. Not the competing firm. Not the SOB who beat us to market or landed the promotion we wanted. Just us. Naked us. If we accept this, if we forego the urge to affix blame elsewhere, we have to stand alone, suck it up and move on.

Imagine a day when no one blamed anyone for anything. What a joyous, cleansing dose of self-reliance that would be. The blame game just sucks us into the black hole of escapism that absolves us from actually facing up to and dealing with our own shortcomings.

And it gets so absurd. In the Palin/Biden debate, the two people seeking to be a heartbeat away from the nuclear codes, were assigning blame for global warming. Biden on mankind. Palin on the cycles of nature. If there is a threat from global warming, what the hell is the good of holding a Salem witch hunt to find the imaginary culprits.

Similarly, a paralyzed and completely immoral Congress is about to go on a rampage of “Don’t blame us” hearings on who caused the financial meltdown. Having someone to blame will feel so good because no one who actually caused the disaster will have to look in the mirror and admit, much less feel, responsibility. We all know life is lived in the grey area, but we revel in the fairy tale of black and white. When we fail, suddenly it all becomes so clear. They did it. It’s his fault. She made it happen.

I’m innocent.

It may feel good to engage in this fantasy, but it is a charade that keeps us locked in a pattern of limitations that stunts our intellectual and spiritual growth.

There is one way to change this and it is a difficult pill to swallow. Admit that no one else is at fault. It is our doing. And our responsibility, our opportunity, our freedom to make it right.

Frightening as this may be, there is no greater form of liberation.

Mark Stevens
CEO

1. It says one should lead a balanced life. Who defines that balance? And what the hell does it mean?

2. It is not wisdom. It is just convention. And convention often boils down to doing things the way they have always been done simply because they are done that way.

3. It is a set of quasi rules established by anonymous people. One of the “rule makers” established the idea that “it is not healthy to be a workaholic.” Well, what is a workaholic? What if I find work to be one of my great passions? Should I cut it off in midstream at a certain appointed hour because someone else believes I should leave time in my life for sitcoms?

4. It says adults should “act our age.” But it’s often far more fun and creative and insightful to act like a child. So you act your age and I’ll follow my own drummer.

5. It says we should care what other people think of us. Why? If I worry about them, I am living by their compass not my own. Madison Avenue hates me for writing Your Marketing Sucks. For suggesting that ROI is more important than aesthetics. Should I have the books burned and drop my work on a sequel? I don’t think so. But conventional thinking does.

6. It believes in the value of consensus. But that’s just another word for “committee.” And committees are where people with few ideas and zero guts to carry things out, hide. (Think U.N.)

7. It says greed is bad. But everyone is greedy. Some are just better at getting what they want. Is the guy hoping to get the state lottery to pay him $10 million any less greedy than Bill Gates, who made it and is now giving it all away?

8. It says that everyone should get a college education. I believe education is exhilerating but some of the wisest people in the world are college drop-outs. For the most part, schools teach you to memorize. Life, work, mentors: if you watch and listen, they teach you how things really work.

9. It says all people are created equal. Nonsense. Everyone deserves respect and the opportunity to excel to their highest capability, but born equal no. Some are driven, others are passive. Some are brilliant, others are not even close. Some are physically beautiful, others can radiate enough electricity to light a stadium and others …..well they’re just others. God bless them all but let’s not pretend they’re equal.

10. It says everyone deserves a steady job and a comfortable retirement. But some of us want neither. We want adventure, risk and the right to drop dead trying to create some form of magic.

Mark Stevens
CEO

Black is a Canadian media mogul now behind bars after his conviction on charges of mail and wire fraud by US courts.

To the world he is rich, imperious, unethical: a walking, talking symbol of greed in the raw.

And he may be just that. The media hates him, many former employees hate him, shareholders too, as well as the man and woman on the street. They all hate him…..and perhaps for good reason.

It’s a hate fest. Everyone, it seems, has piled on. Except, well, except Conrad Black.

I just read a jailhouse interview with “the devil” himself and I was stunned by it. I will paraphrase some of the highlights:

* Black says prison is quite civilized, he has adapted to it and met a number of interesting people.

* He proclaims his innocence but is not bitter, holds that he can take anything life throws at him and treat it as a learning experience.

* The accomodations are not what he was used to in the splendor of his pre-incarceration days, but it’s all just fine for now.

I don’t know the precise nature of Black’s crimes and given my faith in the legal system, I assume he belongs where he is. But there is an important subtext here. All of us are, at times, on the outside of mainstream thinking. Or we are viewed as being wrong or negligent or stupid or selfish. Black is viewed as worse, as a criminal and a Robber Baron, but the subtext remains the same:

You must always have faith in yourself.

You must always know how to adapt.

You must remain flexible in a life that constantly changes.

You must be tough enough to take the curve balls, without whining, and find a way to toss them back at the fates.

You must look at failure with naked eyes- bankruptcy, red ink, failed plans, loss of a job, death of a marriage, removal from an executive position - and like Black, right or wrong as he may have been in business, find a way to view it as a path to redemption. To future success.

We can never, ever abandon ourselves. It is true that no matter how much we are loved by others, we are born alone and we die alone. If we are to make major changes in business, politics, science, art - we will do it against the wind. Alone. Ask Van Gogh. Ask Copernicus. Ask Lincoln.

When Jonas Salk created his cure for polio, jealousy in the scientific community denied him of a Nobel prize. The man saved millions of children from lives of misery and he was treated like a villain. But he went on, presiding over the Salk Institute and working toward a cure for AIDS.

Salk and Black are in vastly different categories. Salk is a hero of mankind. Black is just another seeker of wealth. But both had to dip into that well of self confidence, that reservoir of personal faith, that failure to abandon themselves.

Next time you are in the cross hairs, remember you always have yourself. And that is your most powerful ally and most potent weapon.

Mark Stevens
CEO

It was the late fall of 1960 and John Fitzgerald Kennedy was about to be anointed by the American people as President of the United States.

I was a kid on a school bus, too young and preoccupied with an out of control family, academia and a budding fascination with girls to care a whit about politics. Yes, I had watched Ike talk on TV from the Oval Office now and then, and pretended to listen dutifully in front of my father, but the Supreme Allied Commander and all of his peers could hardly hold a candle to the strains of rock and roll starting to blast through the windows of the older kids’ Corvettes.

And then, in a second, my world changed in a way I would never forget. Through that school bus window I caught a glimpse of JFK on television, through the window of a tiny Queens cape in Bayside, New York.

Somehow, the soon-to-be president and rock and roll were suddenly one and the same. There was an epiphany, a lesson that applies to this day; that still resonates!

Some people, some select few, are not merely people. They are magic in a bottle. Canned heat. Fire and ice. We can’t try to be like this; we are either born with it or not, but we can learn from it.

Last year, I spoke at the annual Siemens’ CEO conference, Ascent, in Berlin. When I would talk to Berliners — cab drivers, executives, waiters, anyone of every age–they spoke with pride of JFK’s glorious Berlin speech.

This year, when Barack Obama needed a rocket power boost for his primary run against Hillary, Caroline Kennedy evoked the name of The Rocket Man, her father, our JFK, and Obama’s trajectory shot skyward.

God makes very few JFK’s. But he makes millions who can study him and Thatcher and the handful of men and women who set the bar.

So many of us fall short because we make excuses. Families to tend to; no money to start with; illnesses to overcome; lovers to appease. But it’s all noise. I was asked to talk about the Oprah\Palin mini-bout by Fox News the other day. And as I prepared my thoughts, it struck me how both had much more in common than that which divides them.

* Both fought like hell for success.

* Both rejected the standard excuses.

* Both would not settle for mediocre.

* Both are making a mark on the world.

* Both reject conventional thinking as “crowd control” designed to keep them in place by threatened also - rans.

When you see greatness from a bus, refuse to get off when it stops. Take the wheel and drive yourself to the finish line. No one else will.

Mark Stevens
CEO