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.
Tenure is a euphemism. A wonderfully intellectual way of saying that you can stay on the job, protected by the rules, even if your performance is as captivating as frozen pizza.
And yet we put so much of our lives into the hands of tenured slackers who use the power of their protective armor to shield them against the natural forces of life that would toss them aside in an instant.
When my sons were kids and under the thumb of dreadful teachers, I would press a case at the school, only to find that right and wrong has no place in the lexicon of tenure.
In recent months, I have tried to alert national security officials of terror threats that one of my firm’s clients – Safe Banking Systems -is uniquely capable of detecting. But as a New York Times reporter working the case with me has pointed out, “bureaucrats don’t want to know that others may know more than them.”
The truth has no place in the lexicon of tenure.
In the legislative branch of our federal government, a congressman in a “safe” district – extemely right or left – gains a form of tenure, runs committees, take bribes from leaders and lobbyists and does virtually whatever he wants to do whether the people like it or not.
Liberty has no place in the lexicon of tenure.
Companies large and small are saddled with parasite employees who spend much of their time smoking, lunching, coffee breaking and bitching about everything under the sun. They keep their place because of unions who don’t know how to spell the word “performance.”
Meritocracy has no place in the lexicon of tenure.
Every time a I meet a company for the first time, and management brags to me that no one has ever been fired for 30 years or so, I know TENURE is written on the walls and that third-rate hangers on soak up the payroll and sap the company of its vitality.
The truth is, except for the US Supreme Court, there is no place for tenure. People, ideas, products, services, romances, grudges, feuds and strategies all must earn their place in the sun or be swept away by the winds.
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.
There is a concept in physics which holds that you cannot ever really get from one end of a room to the other because each step is infinitely divisible. As close as you get to the far wall, you always have further to go.
A rather intriguing concept but the fact is – in the real as opposed to the theoretical world – you do wind up at the end of the room, banging your face against the wall.
So much for the theory.
Similarly, we often believe we are “in the middle” of something: a project, our life span, a product life cycle, an agreement between two parties, a workday. And at other times, we sense that we are at the midpoint of something less tangible: a relationship, a friendship, a love affair, the creative force of our lives.
In both cases, we have absolutely no idea where we stand in the scheme of things. Just as we can truly cross a room and reach the other end, we can never have certainty that we are in the middle of anything.
Life does not allow anything so neat and predictable.
Until recently, one of my clients believed that she was in the middle of her managerial climb at a major company–a client of ours–when the business slammed into a brick wall of its own, igniting a management shakeup and leaving my client suddenly (but temporarily) jobless.
So often when we think we are in the middle, we are near the end. People drop dead, lose their companies to Walmarts that move next door, lose their lovers to others who come out of left field, find that their position as the world’s iconic golfer ends in an hour and discover that their business technology is suddenly obsolete and not marketable.
Life has no respect for the middle.
The truth is that we are always in a timeless flux that demands us to live, to reach, to dream, to excel, to work, to create as if we are at the starting gate with absolutely no idea of how long the race is and when it will end. Because we don’t.
So many of the people I meet are treading water, content that they can do so because they are surely in the middle of the middle. So they have time, they tell themselves, to turn up the heat later on and finish with a flurry. It is an excuse for mediocrity. Or simply a deception. In either case, it is a pretense that must be challenged so that the middle doesn’t turn out to be a brick wall in disguise.
Or if it does, you have beat it to the punch and run the race as if there is no such thing as the middle.
All of us have dreams. Things we want to accomplish. Goals we would love to achieve. Successes we want to reach out and claim.
In my role as CEO of a marketing and management firm–one that helps people achieve their business goals (and often woven into this, their personal ambitions), I have a front row seat to the dreams daily. I watch them flower and, all too often, I see them wilt.
What causes the latter? Of course, many factors come into play, but none more important, more destructive, than FEAR.
What if it doesn’t work?
What if I lose money?
What if I fail?
What if people think less of me?
These are the walls, the obstacles, the bogeyman, real and imaginary, that stop dreams in their tracks somewhere along the continuum from conception to, ideally, realization.
I have seen it myself in my own entrepreneurial career. At the crossroads that inevitably appear, I have had to face the FEARS. They do serve a valuable role, acting as checks on impulsive behavior and forcing us to examine our actions so that we can do so with the highest level of knowledge and prudence.
But at the end of that rather antiseptic exercise, we are alone again. Naked. With no real answers that can light a torch to the guaranteed route. The sure fire decisions.
It all comes down, at some point in the discovery, to whether we cave to fear or act on the courage it always takes to move mountains. To build companies and careers, to take products to market, to drive ourselves BEYOND our skill sets, to fall face down in the mud, to empty the bank account and to summon our resolve and act not without fear, anyone can do that, but in the face of fear.
Once you have stress-tested your idea to the max, once you have confirmed to yourself that the goal you are pursuing is truly the one you MUST accomplish, you/we must cross the line in the sand where fear and courage meet and be willing to move into the great unknown.
It is where we meet ourselves. It is where we define ourselves. And it is where our ultimate fate resides.
The other day I listened to a journalist, of sorts, bragging that he played golf recently with the President of the United States.
Wonderful for the reporter’s ego. Terrible for journalism.
Of course, favored journalists have always enjoyed special access to US Presidents, but that doesn’t mean the problem is any less of a threat to media independence simply because it has always been a fact of political life.
But it’s not only political life that is at the heart of this issue. Powerful people, whether they hold forth in the White House or the boardroom, attract worshipers. And that is where the system, any system, breaks down.
Carl Icahn always liked to tell me that major corporate CEOs like to have lieutenants who are several levels down the IQ charts from themselves. And that after awhile, this leads to having a moron at the top.
An exaggeration? Of course, but
Why did GM allow the Japanese to “outcar” them for decades?
How did Citi’s board permit management to wreck the business with thousands of reckless investment decisions?
For what reason did Nixon’s palace guard accede to their boss’s call to create an Enemies List in the greatest democracy in the world?
How come congressional leaders of both parties proclaim bold-faced lies only to have their press secretaries stand in front of the cameras and swear it’s the truth?
It’s all due to the Cancer Of Power. Take someone, nearly anyone, and put them on a throne, and those who pass by will tell you they are a genius. How many men and women worship every word Prince Charles utters even though this man, this entire family, its centuries of power notwithstanding, has never accomplished a single thing.
Charles is famously mediocre. Or worse. But his entourage will tell you that this is a man of the ages.
Something happens when people rise to fame. An aura surrounds them, one that is so bright, so neon, so celestial, that it blinds otherwise intelligent people to the pablum of who they are and what they have to say.
Which is, not much of anything.
How many people within Jamie Diamond’s inner circle actually tell the CEO when he makes a dumb move? How many even believe he can or does EVER make a dumb move? There is no doubt that Diamond is a truly gifted businessman, one I met when my firm worked for Smith Barney.
But gifted people need gifted critics more than anyone else. It keeps them from floating away into a place that is so far removed from the reality that they need to keep them grounded.
The problem is, kings don’t want to be grounded. And sycophants are too dazzled to remove them, even for a moment, from the Sudan chair in which they are lifted above the crowds.
And in every single case, this worship is why once great companies fail and once extraordinary nations collapse into Banana Republics.
Most of my adult life he has been there, on the television screen–horn-rimmed glasses, thick German accent, steely eyes– opining on the sweep of human events: war, plague, genocide, coups, peace and detente.
Most of my adult life I have not understood a thing he says.
I recall the early days of his public discourse, immediately after leaving the White House. As crises would flare up around globe, the call would go out for Henry The K to put it all in perspective for the nightly news audience. I would look forward to his appearances, seeking the insight I knew I lacked on the why’s and wherefore’s of this or that international incident.
And each time I would be left thinking:
“What the hell did he say?”
I have come to realize that Kissinger is a figment of a marketing machine: identified as a “wise” Harvard academic by Nelson Rockefeller, brought to full Technicolor fame by President Nixon, Kissinger was identified as a diplomatic genius due to where he worked, who he worked with, and the way he spoke. A virtual Chance, the character in the classic Peter Sellers film, where a dunce of a gardener is perceived through a weird set of circumstances to be a wealthy captain of industry, whose every word is doted on.
Henry Kissinger has had the mystique of a marketing machine–a mystique he diminishes every time he opens his mouth.
There is a wider marketing rule here: when a product, a company or a leader manages to develop a mystique, don’t let it speak. Mick Jagger could be on Letterman and Oprah once a month if he wanted to. When is the last time you saw an interview with Mick? It’s not that he doesn’t adore fame. He just knows when to shut up and let the machine do its work.
Throughout their careers, a treasure of world-class personalities have created god-like personas in part because they allow their fame to grow cult like, knowing that every time they would appear on Leno or Meet The Press would interfere with that viral magic. They know instinctively that cults grow best organically.
Think of Dylan, Lennon, Salinger, Jobs, Gandhi. Every time these icons would sit down for a Charlie Rose interview, we would see them as human. And humans don’t make for good icons.
We all fall victim, and happily so, for products that make a BIG promise but never explain HOW they will:
* Make us bone thin
* Make our minds wiser
* Make our teeth snow white
* Teach us Russian in a week
The more they say, the less we would believe. Great politicians know this all so well. The ones who win high office do so on the basis of a slogan. All of their commercials are slogans. All of their debates are simply another venue to toss out the same slogans. Ask them a question, and they answer in a slogan.
So often, clients want MSCO to say everything about their product or service. But we know, and advise, that so often, that less is more. The devil is in the details:so put them in the fine print.
Once you start talking to hear yourself speak, it’s always Kissinger redux.
We build our careers, our businesses, in order to achieve tangible results. The more ambitious we are, the greater demands we make on ourselves to soar beyond the expected and to rise to the extraordinary. The timeless. The levels of achievement that will result in a semblance of immortality.
The bar is high. Think of joining the Fortune 500, the Forbes 400, the Nobel Prize, CEO, Pulitzer and Oscar. Should we reach these heights, we believe, we will be Forever. So we map our paths to the top.
The only problem is, the entire journey is a charade.
None of us are Forever. The successes we strive for and achieve are good and fine and worth pursuing (it certainly beats sitting there, simply letting life happen to us) but the rewards are only for the here and now.
For a select few, the legend continues after we are on the sidelines. But even for this exalted group – our Founding Fathers, Shakespeare, Socrates, Paley, Rockefeller–there is a beginning and an End.
The rewards we seek and perhaps that we gain for our brains and brawn and sweat and inspiration and drive and determination and resilience, are all ours for the here and now.
Not a second later.
We don’t and cannot– even if we want to– achieve for posterity, for our loved ones, for those who will inherit our companies or succeed us in our professions. We do it (whatever it is we do) for OURSELVES.
Everything else is a myth. A lie.
This should not stop us. But we should understand how crazy the quilt is as we sew it through the years.
All the while, we are Mapping The Road To Oblivion.
From birth, we are all told the things we cannot or should not do.
Interesting, but these warnings, of sort, often come before and with greater vehemence, then the advice on what we can and should aspire to.
Let’s take one we’ve all grown up with: “Don’t do anything you’ll come to regret.”
When you think about it, that really means “don’t do anything at all.” It is, intentional or not, paralyzing. Whenever we take a chance in life, we run the risk of failing. Of losing face, money, stature, customers, popularity. Those who can’t face that kind of risk, live in the safe zone. They took that childhood caveat about the things we cannot or should not do and allowed it to dictate the terms of their lives.
They may never have the thrill of achievement, but they are safe, or so they think. I’ll return to that illusion in a moment. But first, let’s do a 180 and contemplate Martin Luther King.
We all know he had a dream and that he succeeded in turning the dream into reality. He did not achieve all that he hoped for but he was truly transformative. What gets lost about his story, is that he carried a nation on his back to bring his dream to life.
Young people who did not live in the era of King do not realize how far outside of the safety zone he ventured. They don’t understand–and you can’t glean this from textbooks or news archives alone–how he did it with German shepherds biting at his feet, water hoses driving into his body, redneck mobs taunting and beating his marchers. .
Even more so, King knew that in pursuit of his dream, he was walking headlong into an assassin’s bullet. It was an ugly time in America, with hatred and violence pouring into the streets. For most, it was a time to stay inside and lock the doors.
King would have none of that. Safety was not his holy grail.
In my lifetime, I have witnessed and had the rewards of knowing and working with famous and exceptional people. But Martin Luther King was the bravest and the one who accomplished the most magnificent feat.
King knew that there is nothing more powerful than a human being armed with a dream and willing to do something he or she may pay a staggering price for. And he knew that safety is a figment of the imagination.
Whenever we are tempted to play it safe, to avoid risk, to be driven by consensus, all we really do is expose ourselves to a far graver threat than loss of face, money, stature, popularity and even life.
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.
And yet we put so much of our lives into the hands of tenured slackers who use the power of their protective armor to shield them against the natural forces of life that would toss them aside in an instant.
When we sleep, we can glide in any direction, slipping effortlessly into the past just as easily as into the future.
Nothing great ever happens in yesterday.
A rather intriguing concept but the fact is – in the real as opposed to the theoretical world – you do wind up at the end of the room, banging your face against the wall.
What if it doesn’t work?
Carl Icahn always liked to tell me that major corporate CEOs like to have lieutenants who are several levels down the IQ charts from themselves. And that after awhile, this leads to having a moron at the top.
I recall the early days of his public discourse, immediately after leaving the White House. As crises would flare up around globe, the call would go out for Henry The K to put it all in perspective for the nightly news audience. I would look forward to his appearances, seeking the insight I knew I lacked on the why’s and wherefore’s of this or that international incident.
The more they say, the less we would believe. Great politicians know this all so well. The ones who win high office do so on the basis of a slogan. All of their commercials are slogans. All of their debates are simply another venue to toss out the same slogans. Ask them a question, and they answer in a slogan.
We build our careers, our businesses, in order to achieve tangible results. The more ambitious we are, the greater demands we make on ourselves to soar beyond the expected and to rise to the extraordinary. The timeless. The levels of achievement that will result in a semblance of immortality.
For a select few, the legend continues after we are on the sidelines. But even for this exalted group – our Founding Fathers, Shakespeare, Socrates, Paley, Rockefeller–there is a beginning and an End.
When you think about it, that really means “don’t do anything at all.” It is, intentional or not, paralyzing. Whenever we take a chance in life, we run the risk of failing. Of losing face, money, stature, customers, popularity. Those who can’t face that kind of risk, live in the safe zone. They took that childhood caveat about the things we cannot or should not do and allowed it to dictate the terms of their lives.
King knew that there is nothing more powerful than a human being armed with a dream and willing to do something he or she may pay a staggering price for. And he knew that safety is a figment of the imagination.
