Yesterday, I met with Don Imus at his apartment on Central Park West in Manhattan.

The man born on a cattle ranch who joined the Marines and went on to reinvent radio sat by his fireplace and talked, laughed and sparred with me about life, death, love, business, marketing, morons, geniuses and why he doesn’t shake hands with anyone.

The guy has ridden the roller coaster from fame to wealth to addiction and humiliation and back again.

Always back again.

Sitting there in his bathrobe, drinking gruel whipped up to build his immune system in the battle against prostate cancer, he is clearly at once an old man and a precocious kid.

And a true game changer in a world of game players and followers. Once you reinvent something, you make an indelible mark on life that can never be taken away from you. Not by the media. Not by Al Sharpton. Not by saints among us who swear that they are as pure as the driven snow and are fast on the draw to call for the head of anyone who makes a very human mistake.

Think of it this way: almost everyone on the radio or TV is careful with their words, guardians of their image, determined to drive safely down the middle of the road.

And then there is Imus: cranky, often nasty, brutally honest, sometimes blatantly inappropriate, impatient with fools (and tells them so), Imus in the morning.

He is not what you could call a nice man. He is what you would know instantly as his own man. And a very bright and innovative one indeed.

It becomes clear that he is concerned that his life is in its final phases. But it is clear to all who have watched his amazing real life production for decades, that he will never really die.

And that is the true measure of a life well lived.

Mark Stevens
CEO

Listen to Imus discuss Mark Stevens and “Your Marketing Sucks.”

image courtesy: 1

In business, we are always peering through a mirror of optimism. The next big thing. The game changer deal. The trophy client.

It is what makes us get up in the morning, race to the office, work through the nights when we could be reading the paper or watching a ball game. It is a narcotic of sorts, a passion cubed, a state of mind the clock watchers of the world could never understand.

I am a lover of this high, intoxicated life. And all of those who are members of The Club. But I know that while I am flirting with Beyonce, there are wheels turning around that I may be oblivious to. That we may be missing, blinded as we are by the beauty we are pursuing.

As Toyota discovered in what is the most costly oversight in corporate history. An otherwise highly disciplined and relentlessly demanding management team caught a glimpse of a ravishing beauty in the front view mirror. It’s name is market share. AKA Global leader. Humiliate GM.

In the lust of the prize, in the flirtation with Beyonce, Japan took its eye off of the people who were once at the center of its universe: its customers.

The people who trusted the company to build the best and safest cars in the world. In the race away from perfection and toward glorification, Toyota did what Detroit had tried to do unsuccessfully for years.

Made itself a third rate company, a traitor to the millions who prayed at its altar.

It is a business lesson we should all contemplate before the next crisis washes it out of the news cycle.

Mark Stevens

CEO

Images courtesy: 1, 2.

In conversations over lunch, in media interviews, in discussions with so many with whom I come in contact over the course of a business day, I find myself–for the first time in my life– having to defend America.

I would expect this were I attending a conference overseas. The US has always been a lightning rod, an easy target, among those who resent our greatness, our exceptional history and even our un-rivaled charity. So it comes as no surprise to me when the French and the Germans take me on as an “American” as they did during my speech at Siemans global CEO conference in Berlin.

The slings and arrows are common to me now, so I brush them away with the same indifference I have for rude little brats whose parents let them run their mouths without fact or respect.

But the enemy within! Where did this come from? Why do I find myself defending America from Americans. Almost everyday and on nearly every front.

Calvin Coolidge’s statement that “The business of America is business,” has always captured me. Truthfully,  it was more than a statement, it was an observation. Americans have always been a nation of dreamers and tinkerers who turned ideas into one-person garage-based ventures and stunning global giants. The size of the enterprise never mattered nearly as much as the freedom to create it.

Yet today, I find myself having to defend capitalism. A key pillar of the American way.

And then I have to defend the American people.

The other day, a new acquaintance told me, out of the blue, that middle America is a land filled with people “as dumb as rocks.” These “dumb rocks” run farms that feed the world, build cars that now, compared to  their Japanese competitors, look like marvels of technical safety. These are the same middle Americans who  kiss their kids goodbye as they suit up to join the only military that has ever stood as a bulwark of global security. And that does the real work of saving Haitian lives while Hollywood flies in for 10 minute red carpet star turns.

I hear that America is mean, selfish, arrogant, misguided. I hear all of this from Americans. And when I do, I hum the tune and mouth the words from Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “This Ain’t My America.”

I believe totally in free and open discussion among all Americans of all opinions. That is another of the cornerstones of our nation that makes the US the oldest enduring republic in the world.

But I believe that the discussion should begin with a respect for, and an acknowledgment of, the fact that this nation is a miracle that has sustained every manner of vile and evil threat from the Third Reich to The World Trade Center’s destruction, with its liberty and its heart in tact.

But now, for the first time, it has an enemy within. An enemy that resents business, risk, entrepreneurialism, profit, success, free will, freedom and most of all free people guided by their aspirations without any want or need of “help” from an increasingly corrupt government that wants to trade dollars for liberty.

Suddenly, it is old fashioned and somehow subversive to love America. To be an entrepreneur, amidst entrepreneurs, pursing  the magic of the The American Dream and wanting to share it with all who want to join hands with me.

I have always believed that the best way to deal with enemies is to identify them from afar and move out to challenge them in the distance. Once they have moved into your kitchen, it is a different kind of battle. It is the enemy within.

How did we get here?

I am not quite sure but I do know that as a son of America, as a student of Jefferson, Lincoln, FDR, Ronald Reagan, JFK and Martin Luther King, I wake up every morning and wrap myself in the flag.

Mark Stevens

CEO

Image courtesy: 1.

When we sleep, we can glide in any direction, slipping effortlessly into the past just as easily as into the future.

On our voyage back in time, we are free to rectify mistakes, wipe the slate clean, change decisions, mend broken hearts, place bets we failed to make, walk on water, recognize the genius we wrote off as weird, untie the knots that bound us up in our own deceit.

That magic is limited to the realm of sleep.

Or is it?

Nearly every day, people come into my office, standing in front of me as they dwell in the past. They talk of what might have been, of what went wrong, of why they must be anchored to yesterday. Not only can they go backwards in time, but so often, they appear to be hostage to it.

We talk about 2010, about their business goals, the challenges they will face and the odds they will overcome to achieve them. We talk. We talk.

But I see, at a moment in time, a flash, that it is an exercise in futility. They are sleep walking into the future, tethered to the past. To the failures that shook their confidence. To the losers who lied to them and told them the earth was flat. To the naysayers who took pleasure in demeaning them and whittling them down to size.

But as we head into this new year, perhaps the most important resolution we can make is to see the goblins of the past for what they are: figments of the imagination that have no place in the light of day.

Nothing great ever happens in yesterday.

Mark Stevens

CEO

Images courtesy: 1, 2.

It is widely believed that “yes” and “no” are simply two sides of the same coin.

But the truth is, they are worlds apart. The reason lies in the fact that they are more than words: they are in the case of “yes,” a pathway to action. And in the case of “no,” a brick wall to prevent it.

When faced with a challenge, a journey into the unknown, a new relationship, an uncertain investment of the heart, ego, dollars, emotion and intellect, it is far easier and safer to say “no.” And that is precisely what most people do.

Ask them to consider something new, a change in the way they work or think, a personal liaison that holds the promise of a magical connection or an innovation that transforms a business process without any assurance of success, and they chant: No. No. No.

If they cling to the current, the status quo– whether it works or not, whether it is satisfying or totally frustrating and absolutely joyless, it is what they know: it is safe and so the knee jerk response is “No.”

“Yes” on the other hand, removes the safety net. It propels us into unknown territory. It exposes us to failure, heartbreak, financial loss, regret, danger and rejection.

When we say “yes,” we invest in companies, in romance, in adventure, in uncharted territory. Anything and everything can go wrong…..and often does. And so the naysayers, the natives of Planet No, slam the door, get into bed and pull the blankets over their heads. No way they are going to risk anything. Why should they. Life is just fine in MediocreLand.

In business, in life in general, we know that so many of the people we meet, be-friend, work and collaborate with, appear to be trained to say “No.” Hardly is the question asked, that the answer fires back: “No.” This means that for all who prefer to live life to the max, to try the new, to go against convention, to violate the rules, the walk the trapeze, we must do it alone or we have to search for the few who want to hurl themselves into space without any assurance at all that we will come back to earth.

We live on the Planet Of Yes.

Mark Stevens

CEO

Images courtesy: 1, 2.

It is simply amazing how some things endure.

I have not seen my first love for a lifetime, but that moment of transition from every girl I ever knew to the first one I loved, well it has proven to be indelible. In some looking-back-through-the-fog way, it has endured.

Indelible is a word we don’t use much anymore. But we should. In business and in life in general, it has a power and a permanence that presides over the buzz words and concepts of the moment that roll in and out like the waves at Coney Island. (Which, if you have ever been there, you know is indelible.)

I can’t recall what I did July 20 of this past summer. Or August 20. Or even a week ago.

But I do remember when I first heard Abbey Road. Not that it was the best the Beatles ever created, but I recall we all knew it was the end. The end of a brief era of a band of middle class mutts who would actually rise above the British caste system and would wind up having knights among them.

It was the end of a collaboration but hardly the end of a product set, an artistic achievement, that would prove to be indelible. “Something in the way it moves us” is timeless.

As I listen to Abbey Road now, it reminds me of the fact that we can go through life whistling through checklists of “to dos,” or hopefully, seeking a way to achieve something that endures way beyond the momentary satisfaction of — what a miserable 21st century term –”getting it off our plate.”

Abbey Road begs a question that is not always comfortable to contemplate: do we live just to die? Or do we live to create ideas/concepts/products that survive us? That change the order of things?

Mozart, Van Gogh and Einstein are presumed to be dead. Are they?

Or are they indelible?

Mark Stevens

CEO

Images courtesy: 1, 2.

In the film “Wall Street,” a broker who is about to lose his job and perhaps his freedom, is advised that when a person stares into the abyss he takes a true measure of his strength.

Today, I read an article about an entrepreneur who poured his life savings into a home furnishings outlet in a rapidly growing village in the southwest, only to see the economy tank, houses foreclosed and a mass exodus from the town timed almost exactly to the opening of his shop.

In the article, he stands alone in a deserted parking lot surrounding a ghost town strip small, a black hole of sorts sucking in his dreams and all that he has worked for to this point.

The shop is his abyss. What does he see as he stares vacantly at it?

Some years ago, my mother’s common law husband told me a story of his days as an alcoholic, roaming the mean streets of New York’s Hell’s Kitchen. On one nightmare of a day in a broken life marked by chaos, he hit bottom, alone and bleeding on the steps of a church. Rescued by a stranger, he was taken to a hospital to be treated, yes, but more than that, to stare into the abyss.

What did he see?

I am reading now about FDR’s first 100 days and the character traits that guided him to navigate through the second darkest period in US history. His most improbable trait was born years before when as a vibrant and athletic young man of wealth and power, he was stricken overnight with polio. Staring at the ceiling, struggling with the idea of himself as a “cripple,” he looked into the abyss.

What did he see?

In every single human life, there is an abyss. Or two. Or more. It comes in business. In family. In our own sense of who we are, who we are not, the options in front of us, the opportunities we cultivated and those we let slip by.

In a sense, staring into the abyss is often the darkest hour. It cannot be belittled. It cannot be romanticized. It is a true and painful test.

I believe, however, that there are only two visions we can see when we stare into the abyss: endless and hopeless darkness or a tableau of what we will paint with our future once the terror passes.

My mother’s soul mate built a loving life with one of the kindest women in the world. Franklin Delano Roosevelt found a blueprint for becoming President of the United States.

What we see and what we do with the vision, shapes us more than anything in life.

Mark Stevens
CEO

Images courtesy: 1, 2, 3

When I was in my twenties, I used to sleep no more than four hours a night. First because I knew I didn’t need more sleep. Second because I was too excited by life to sleep (still true). And third because I knew life is short– I would have plenty of time to sleep, in time.

Everyone thought I was crazy. I don’t think I heard them.

When it snowed, I would leave the window by my bed wide open. I liked the sensation of the frost. Flakes would accumulate on my bed, creating mini drifts on my blanket.

Everyone thought I was crazy. I don’t think I heard them.

When the sky would turn black and raging electric storms would send bolts of lightning to the ground, I would walk out the door and run through the streets, taking in the light show that flared all around me.

Everyone told me it was dangerous. I don’t think I heard them.

In one period, I decided to sort of reverse engineer life, sleeping during the day and working at night. Just to experience life upside down, inside out. After a week or so, I went back to the “normal” but the experience with the “abnormal” left a permanent mark on the way I see things.

In the world of business, people tell me they have a great company because everyone has worked there for 30 years or more. No one is ever asked to leave. People applaud that. I say it’s a prescription for a third rate company.

People tell me that’s insensitive. I don’t think I hear them.

Out of work, I like to work. My blackberry is with me on hikes, at my pool, in the movies. When an idea strikes me, I turn my attention to developing it. I am passionate about it. To the point that the “off day” becomes an “on day.”

People tell me that means my life lacks balance. I hear them. I tell them I don’t like or want balance.

When I was walking in the electric storms, I think I was daring the elements to strike me. I don’t know why. I didn’t want to do anything but experience the wild exhilaration of the storm.

I wanted to live. Not to simply preserve life, but to stretch the experience to the max. In all we do, we have two basic choices: to sit inside until the storm passes or to take the risks and reap the rewards that come with it.

I would never suggest which path others should take. But I will make a recommendation: if you are fortunate enough to be in the path of a blizzard this winter–whether in business or in personal life– run outside and live in it.

And learn from it.

Mark Stevens

CEO

Images courtesy: 1, 2.

A billion women came before Marilyn Monroe. A billion have come after.

But she has never shared the stage, the life stage, with anyone. She is a timeless beauty, an exotic wonder woman, a sexual shockwave, an object of universal lust. And an extraordinary business lesson.

No woman ever stood in a room with Marilyn and felt beautiful. No man ever shared her presence and felt sane. She stole the heart of the most heroic athlete of her time, Joe DiMaggio–himself an American icon. She captured the soul of the greatest American playwright, Arthur Miller. She married them both and then she moved on to Camelot and wrapped the Commander-In-Chief, JFK, around her finger.

Marilyn is of no distinct period in history. She is known to teenagers and seniors alike, urban and rural, Elton John (who sings beautifully about her) and Vladmir Putin, (who has watched her films). The world loves Marilyn. Even those who pretend they are too smart and sophisticated to admit they do.

Marilyn Monroe is irresistible.

I watched a news story this morning on CNBC reporting on crowds lining up in the wee hours to buy the newly discounted iPhone. Why would they do that? Why did thousands do the same when the product was first introduced. Why have so many millions bought them when they already had phones?

Because Steve Jobs has always understood Marilyn Monroe. He has spent his entire career making sure he wasn’t selling things people liked.

Like is a commodity. Love is a force and a barrier to entry. Great marketing always finds a way to transition a product, a company, from like to love. If the marketing fails to do that, the marketing is just a glorified way of going through the motions.

I want to live in a world surrounded only by people and things that intoxicate me. Unfortunately, there are no such pure plays, but I am bored to tears when I have to spend time in the land of like. So I search out the people and things I can be passionate about– and like a soldier carrying his girlfriends picture into battle–I think of them. Amazing how they cast a glow that makes everything more beautiful.

Every time you wonder how you can make your business better, resist the temptation to read a treatise from Harvard Business School.

Look at a picture of Marilyn Monroe.

Mark Stevens

CEO

We all fall into this trap of deception, convincing ourselves that everything in business, everything in life, is so complex. So many facts to analyze, so many unknowns to deal with, so many variables to factor in. It is all so complicated that we can easily hide behind the illusion of complexity, using it as camouflage and to obfuscate the reality.

Which is that it is all so simple. Precisely as English logican William of Ockham posited in the 14 th century with Ockham’s razor.

In business, when we peel away all of the code, the rules, the myths, the jargon, the Harvard case studies, all we have to do is to find a code breaker: which is a single thing that if we do it over and over again, it will always be profitable. If we know the costs, the revenues, the margins and we can always do it in a way that delivers profit,we will have our own McDonald’s, Wal-Mart, Microsoft. Corporate giants, yes, but they started life as meager ventures that understood the code breaker concept, the power of less is more, the equation they needed to produce healthy ROI, and they stuck to it. Make a burger for 50 cents, sell it for a dollar, christen dozens of stores, go public, christen
thousands more.

It’s not complicated at all: break the code and the sky is the limit. Don’t look for complexty: pursue simplicity, for in its transparence, in its purity, extraordinary power is waiting to emerge.

The same is true in our personal lives. Another way to state Ockham’s razor is “The simplest explanation for a phenomenon is most likely the correct explanation.”

Clearly, life is a “phenomenon” that we as humans really don’t understand. And the more philosophical and introspective we get in seeking to define it, the more its complexity compounds and runs away from us.

From all we as mere mortals we can glean, the only code breaker in life is to enjoy the passage of time. However we find enjoyment, whatever our passions are, it is the goal and nothing more that counts. We will never understand death, sin, the after life, the before life, right and wrong, good and bad, morality and immorality.

We are here with this amazing gift, for a brief period of time, never static, always dynamic, moving inevitably to an end. To something else. We can rail against this condition or we can embrace it, relish it and find ways to enjoy its every moment as opposed to lamenting its end.

Today you will face a zillion issues on the job, in the home, for the moment and for the future that lies ahead. The only way you will make sense of it and dive into the heart of the matter, into the essence, so that you can build something amazing and enjoy the ride all the way, is to take our the razor and cut away all the flotsam that gets in your way.

Mark Stevens
CEO