In the thick of the triangular feud between Conan O’Brien, Jay Leno and NBC, one of the nighttime word warriors decided to cut to the chase and reveal what was going on behind the curtain.

What he said was no surprise to business people, but it provides a continuing lesson and a reminder of the rules of the jungle.

After his monologue, Jay Leno sat down alone on his stage–no jokes, no props–to reveal the set of events that led up to the mayhem on the broken, Keystone Cops network that broadcasts his show.

Essentially Jay said, when we move aside all of the rumors, whispers and ”he saids, she saids,” the entire highly entertaining tempest in a teapot boiled down to one word — one omnipresent fact of life: RATINGS.

Leno summed up the chain of events by admitting that neither he nor Conan had the ratings they needed to build a permanent home in their reshuffled time slots. The shows weren’t good enough, the people weren’t buying and in a free market that means the product gets recalled from the shelves.

All of us in business live with this. Whatever the names of our businesses, whatever we make or do, a silent but overwhelmingly powerful partner is always in the equation:  Charles Darwin.

What Leno was really saying in his tell-all revelation was that in TV land (and we know by extrapolation in ours too) success depends on the survival of the fittest.

No matter how long we have been in business, regardless of how powerful our brands have been, if we don’t remain at the top of our game, we cave to the competition and may ultimately fail to exist.

When I used to play tennis with Carl Icahn, he liked to say that we live in a corporate world of reverse Darwinism: “The CEO keeps hiring someone dumber than himself until, after time, we have a moron at the top.” Agree or not, complacency and incompetence enabled Icahn to pursue company after company, take them down like a Rhodesian Ridgeback felling a lion and amassing one of the world’s great fortunes in the process.

We cannot get by on hope or arrogance or smarts alone. We must find a way to break the code, and then break it again and again, so that our companies are fresh, inventive and ahead of the curve. We must do this because precisely like O’Brien and Leno, Darwin is our silent partner as well. If the ratings from our customers and clients slump, so do our sales and profits and the long-term prospects for our businesses.

It was refreshing for a TV star to talk candidly about the issues behind the firestorm, but when Leno gave us all a little lesson on ratings, one group of viewers already knew the power of that reality.

Business people. We simply call it by another name: Cash Flow.

Mark Stevens

CEO

Image courtesy: flickr