Making Rain

Rainer Maria Rilke wrote eloquently and often about solitude.  He said,  ”The only journey is the one within.”

Solitude.  It’s not the first thing I think of when I think of business.  The very word “business” incorporates the word “busy,” hardly the soul of solitude.

I wrote last week about the unique ability of the entrepreneur to create community.  That is very important to me as the founder of my firm Corporate Rain International.  And yet…my most seminal personal well of meaning, ideation, and renewal comes out of simple aloneness and quietude.

I was reminded of the importance of this in a page one article in the NY Times Sunday Review, January 15, 2012, by Susan Cain.  She writes:

“Solitude is out of fashion.  Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place.  Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all….Collaboration is in.

But there’s a problem in this view.  Research strangely suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption.  And the most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted.”

Most of my business friends and employees probably would be surprised to learn I am an introvert. I’m an entrepreneurial salesman, for God’s sake.  How is that possible?  Yet my hands sweat and shake when I have to speak publicly, though I do it fairly often.  I hate to network and I love reading, being alone, thinking and having sincere one-on-one dialogue with my peers about anything but business.

But perhaps I am not such an anomaly among entrepreneurs as I sometimes think.  Ms. Cain cites psychologist Hans Eysenck who avers that introversion fosters creativity by “concentrating the mind on the tasks in hand, and preventing the dissipation of energy on social and sexual matters unrelated to work.”

Ms. Cain rails against what she calls “the collaborative tyranny of the New Groupthink.”  She notes the work of Emory University neuroscientist Gregory Berns, who recently has found that when we take an original stance or a position different from the group’s we activate something called the amygdala, which is a tiny organ in the brain associated with the fear of rejection.  Dr. Berns calls this “the pain of independence.”  So perhaps business creativity and original thinking also necessitates a frequent and disciplined stillness.

Indeed, Pablo Picasso said, “Without great solitude, no serious work is possible.”  Or, to quote Rilke again, “Love your solitude and bear with sweet lamentation the suffering it causes you….Rejoice in your growth, in which you naturally can take no one with you, and be kind to those who remain behind.” (Letters to a Young Poet”-1908)

Thank you, Pablo and Rainer Maria

One prime reason I became an entrepreneur was simply to create a community that reflected my values and spiritual center; a place where I could live and give service with fellow-travelers in comfort and assumed commonality–my own private Idaho, if you will, where I truly belonged.

I have often talked about motivations for my being an entrepreneur and they have little to do with money.  They mostly have to do with personal meaning.  And I would submit that this is true of most entrepreneurs, even those who speak in the most venal terms of their motivation and incentive.

One of the greatest dearths I find in US culture is a lack of community reflected in an increasing national sense of balkanization and emotional isolation. (Counterintuitively, this is despite our growing capacity for instant connectivity.)  What are our common visions, our common goals? These are no longer clearly coming from a consensus of values and universal common ground.  The entrepreneur has the opportunity to create, at least in miniature, a true community that can help allay this sense of cultural anomie.  In fact, I can think of few long-term successful entrepreneurial ventures that have not created this sense of community one way or another.  Such a sense of community and shared mission is a hidden reward of entrepreneurship done well, and the list of the entrepreneurial companies that have done this are legion, from Apple and Starbucks to Zappos and Zynga.

Healthy business cultures and communities ideally create an amniotic sea of nourishment, identity, values, and peace.  In the best companies every action of each member of a corporate community becomes to some degree gravid with meaning.

I was reminded of this possibility when visiting the Hancock Shaker Village in Pittsfield, Massechusetts recently.  The Shakers were a wonderfully original sect of Christianity that existed from the late 1700s to the early 1900s.  They eventually died out because they didn’t believe in sex with the natural result of no children.  But what surprised me was that the Shakers were a remarkable, even genius, entrepreneurial community.

Here’s one very sweet custom practiced by the Shaker community. When one of the Shakers was ready to die he or she was assigned to an adult cradle.  In this cradle the member was rocked softly day and night by a fellow shaker till he or she peacefully passed.

Fernando Flores, President of Chile’s National Council For Competitiveness, writes on the subject of entrepreneurship and community the following:

“We live in an extraordinary time.  Our thinking styles are severing us from our families, our religions, our ideologies, and nature.  We are caught up in a pace of social and technological change that makes our work, business, and education sources of anxiety and unfulfillment. At the same time, thinking about our thinking and observing our observations can bring us a new world in which work becomes a place for innovation, and in which peace, wisdom, friendship, companionship, and community can exist.  Let us design this world together.”

Thank you, Fernando.

At a symposium of Inc.’s Business Owners Council last year,  Deepak Chopra related an incidental conversation he had with Bill Clinton over dinner. Clinton startled Chopra with the fact that there are millions of unfilled, high-paying jobs in the U.S. Enough to put a real dent in our unemployment rolls.  However, there is simply a dearth of Americans to fill these positions. Furthermore, this paucity of skilled workers is not getting better.

We are a country and a culture that glorifies youth, but the HR assumptions about the low value of older workers is simply out of date.  The increasing utilization of an aging workforce may well become a necessity.

In a Wall Street Journal article of December 28 (Section B, page one), James R. Hagerty describes this conundrum.  ”Given high unemployment, companies could hire young workers to replace older ones, but many jobs require years of on-the-job training.”  So true.  And it is not just physically skilled jobs.  Much of the value in a service industry job–from salesman to consultant to trainer–comes from the unteachable gravitas and judgement that simply can’t be taught quickly.  Additionally, as I mentioned last week, many veteran workers are highly flexible and adjustable about hours, a plus for any business.  McDonald’s has a program for recruiting seniors for just this reason.

Joseph Coughlin, the director of MITs AgeLab, feels many more employers should be preparing to use and recruit an older workforce.  He points out that the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that 24% of the U.S. labor force (an estimated 40 million) will be 55 or older in 2018.  It’s already 18% of the workforce.  He says, “Frankly many companies don’t get it yet…They can’t imagine a time when there isn’t going to be this endless supply of young people coming through.”  Ergo, demography will necessitate workforce adjustments.

Duke Energy, Harley-Davidson, Unimin, and Vulcan Materials, among others, have instituted successful programs aimed at maximizing the life of their skilled veteran workers and hiring more when they can find them to recruit.  They are putting in place automation systems specifically created to vastly reduce physical demand on older workers.  They also incentivize their older employees to exercise and stay limber as a regular part of their workday.  Surely this increasingly healthy and long-lived generation should be a growing resource for the small businessman, as well as the large.

As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “The years teach much which the days never know”.

Thank you, Ralph Waldo.

Let us consider today the HR implications of the growing population of the gerontologically challenged and their opportunities and challenges for the entrepreneur.

I continue to be bemused by the insufficient attention that is being extended to an important demographic fact:  An increasing number of oldsters are working deep into their “Golden Years.” Edward Glaeser of Harvard writes about our graying workforce in a November 19, 2011 article in The New York Times.”

“Between 2007 and 2010, the number of working Americans over 65 years old jumped 16% …. The trend started before the current downturn:  the number of Americans over 65 in the work force increased from 10.8 % in 1985 to 15.1% in 2005 to 17.4 % in 2010.  Until 2001, most workers age 65 and older had part-time jobs:  since 2001, full-time work has been far more common.”

The number of unemployed older job seekers has doubled in the last four years and may double again in the next four.  Carl Van Horn, head of the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University, says,  ”This is new.  It is different.  It is worse than we have experienced before and it is very widespread. It is going to [continue].”  (WSJ, Dec. 19, 2011)

The reasons for this are several.  One, people are simply healthier.  65 is the  new 50.  Two, 401-Ks have become 201-Ks and people cannot afford to retire.  And three, people no longer trust the “guaranteed” government programs will be there for them.

I’m sensitive to this phenomenon since my 17 year old executive outsourced sales firm, Corporate Rain International, has always relied on older employees.  Mine are in their 40s, 50s, and 60′s.  They desire flexibility and a freer lifestyle.  These veteran executives offer my clients useful gravitas, judgement, and personal sensitivity that can only come through the ups and downs of experience and a lived life.

I remember last year hearing the entrepreneur Norm Brodsky, speaking at an Inc. Magazine symposium in NYC, predict that most of the high-level executives laid off in 2009 will never be employed again at six figure jobs, or perhaps any job.  Never.  Yet these valuable people still want to work and, indeed, have to work.  (Edward Glaeser reports the number of unemployed elderly job seekers has more than doubled in the last four years and may double again in the next four.)

America glorifies youth.  But, like good football and baseball teams, there is corporate health in mixing seasoned players with rookies. An increasing glut of seniors seeking work can change the workplace for the better.  Again, Dr. Glaeser cites recent studies in Britain and Germany that find many positive correlations between labor-force participation among the elderly and the young.

Finally, Dr. Glaeser points out that the elderly are often the most entrepreneurial Americans.  He states, “Self-employment rises significantly with age.  West Palm Beach, a retiree haven, has the highest self-employment rate of any metropolitan area in the nation.”

So don’t automatically look askance at the graying boomers who want to, and will have to, work longer.  They are not a phalanx of drooling, curmudgeonly, useless old coots, but rather a rich new, cost-effective human resource.

As Francis Bacon said, “I will never be an old man.  To me old age is 15 years older than I am.”

Thank you Francis.

Merry Christmas!

There are groaning bookshelves of celebrated sales books out there.  Though I have read very few of them, there are surely reasons to read most of them, I suppose.

The reason I don’t read many sales books, even though elite sales initiation is the specialty of my firm Corporate Rain International, is that the assumptions behind many of these books seem non-essential, trivial, and cynical to me.  Though I know sales gurus command big bucks for their writing and personal appearances, from the outside most of this stuff looks to me to be about process, technique, psychology, dazzling virtuosity, and penultimate values and skills–a veritable plethora of sales technique insufficiently moored to core value and core values.

Sales is not about fooling people, despite our increasingly hucksterish culture of voyeurism, chimera, sophistry, and ends-justifies-the-means manipulation, mistaking image for essence. Per this, I am bemused that my home state of New York has started a 50 million dollar image campaign to attract new business to the state.  This is a fools errand while the state isn’t forthrightly addressing its business-hostile environment and frightening structural debt issues.  A PR campaign in such an environment is the worst sort of wasteful pablum, really a cynical attempt to paper over the obvious reasons businesses should not locate to New York.

(Tangentially speaking, politics drives me crazy these days.  I occasionally watch the Republican primary debates, as well as the unceasing four year, 365 day/year Obama reelection campaign, and am exhausted by the superficial, the calculated, the disingenuous.  It’s enough for me to take a second look at Newt Gingrich, who looks like a haughty, unsmiling, overstuffed sausage, but is at least arguing real policy and serious issues.  He is rising in the polls, despite his personal unlikeability quotient, because people long for seriousness and real depth of thought.)

Which brings me back to sales and substance.  I really believe sales is simple.  You simply tell the truth and tell it fiercely and sincerely.  If you can’t do that with a product or service, find a product or service you can do it with.  At that point you are doing your potential client a favor by revealing to him or her the truth, in much the same way a social worker or a minister seeks to serve and enlighten. There is no reason a salesman should look upon his profession as less than ennobling.  People intuitively respond to real value sincerely explicated.

There is always a hunger for the essential, whether in sales, politics, entertainment, or finance.  People have been spiritually sickened by the Bernie Madoffs, the Kim Kardashians, the banking and governmental con men, and an increasingly sclerotic culture that denigrates real essence and accomplishment and raises up image, branding, and phony feel-good nostrums.

So clear explanation and education about substance and real value is about all there is to sales, to my way of thinking.  That and hard work.

Or, as Bill Bernbach of Doyle Dane Bernbach once said, “Forget words like ‘hard sell’ and ‘soft sell.’ That will only confuse you.  Just be sure you’re saying something that will inform and serve the consumer, and be sure you’re saying it like it’s never been said before.”

Thank you, Bill.

Just a simple idle thought on sales today.

Please keep in mind the special circumstances and opportunities posed by the end of the year.  It is often a great time to initiate with new clients at corporations.  Here’s some simple counter-intuitive experience I have unearthed in 17 years of helming my executive sales outsourcing firm Corporate Rain International.

Remember the end of the year is a time of accounting shenanigans.  Corporate CPAs, as often as not, may well want to have their clients lose money in December.  Thus, a different pattern of spending and ROI sensitivity may animate the last month of the year.

There is often selling opportunity in this circumstance.  Even in a scary and cautious business environment, December may give an impetus to the experimental and the new.  Almost every year one corporate client or another of mine will unexpectedly pull the string on a new project after discovering end-of-the-year revenue.

In addition to tax adjustments, individual departments within companies may have surplus funds left over from the year.  They need to use this money or lose it.  Corporate managers do not like leaving money on the table for a couple of reasons.  One, it reflects ill on their strategic fiscal plan from the beginning of the previous year.  And two, it may have budget reduction implications for their department’s strategic allocations in the next fiscal year.  So I have often found it is very worth an extra nudge to recalcitrant or timid potential corporate clients as the holiday season approaches.

A second counter-intuitive suggestion is not to view December as a selling dead zone.  While it is true that corporate decision-makers are often very busy with parties, vacations, personal travel, and family from Thanksgiving on, they also frequently find themselves with unexpected pockets  of inactivity available.  It can be a particularly propitious time for sales initiation and spec meetings.  There is always opportunity in times of disruptive corporate patterns.  So while many decision-makers may be especially hard to reach in the holiday season, those that are working may have out of the norm availability for real consideration of the new, the out-of-the-box, the uncommon, the magical—a particular opportunity for the creative entrepreneur.

So, as far as problematic holiday executive selling is concerned,  I stand with Lee Iococca, who said,  ”We are continually faced by great opportunities, brilliantly disguised as problems.”

Thanks, Lee.

There was an excellent article in Barron’s last week about John Mackey, the CEO of Whole Foods Market. (Barron’s, 1/21/2011, p. 54-55)

Mackey started life as a sort of hippy and a full-throated socialist after he dropped out of the University of Texas in 1977.  He worked as a busboy, bartender, waiter, and dishwasher in Austin, Texas, and finally as an assistant manager at a health food store.  That last position made a lot of sense since he was already a committed vegan.  The vegan identity is about his only original identity that hasn’t been changed fundamentally by his entrepreneurial journey.

I was surprised that his story is in many ways parallel to my own.  I too started as a Socialist (Norman Thomas, head of the US Socialist Party, gave seminars in my parents living room) and made my way to becoming a committed libertarian capitalist.  But mostly we share a primary interest in entrepreneurship as a source of salvation and dynamic becoming, more than as a money multiplier.  This latter is certainly the true joy and satisfaction of entrepreneurship for me.

As Mackey puts it, he started to change his philosophy when he had to meet his first payroll.  Here’s what he says:

“I had imbibed the liberal ethos of Austin, and the general thinking about inequality of wealth, and that there are all these greedy business people out there that take too much of the pie for themselves, and that we would have a much more just society if we all shared, until I started a business and found out I was now one of the greedy, selfish people, yet I wasn’t making any money, and I had to meet a payroll every week.  And I had all these ideals that came crashing down.”

Mackey has concluded that the really great motivator of most entrepreneurs is not ultimately money  but meaning.  (In this sense he remains true to his idealist, socialist roots, including his concern about the unfairness of income inequality.)  I agree with this. To this point, Mackey says the following:

“There is this common belief in our culture and also in the business schools themselves, that business is just about money, and if you are doing it, then you’re basically a sellout. I talk about purpose, and how business creates value with a mission- and that you can also make a lot of money doing it.  Whole Foods has proven you can do both.”

Mackey is coming out with a book next year called Conscious Capitalism, which outlines his  business and life philosophy.  I look forward to it.

Entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki says, “The best reason to start an organization is to make meaning–to create a product or service to make the world a better place.”

Thanks, Guy.  That seems about right to me.  I think John Mackey would agree

Ricky Nelson wrote a hit song called Garden Party in 1972.  The chorus and conclusion of the song goes like this:

“You see, you can’t please everyone, So you got to please yourself.”

I mentioned last week that I don’t consider myself a very good businessman, but my many business deficiencies have been compensated for over the years by the associates who have been drawn to work at my company and in the business community I have made in 17 years as head of my outsourced executive sales firm Corporate Rain International.

However, while I am a flawed businessman, I am a wildly successful entrepreneur. How is that?  Well, it is because I have achieved exactly what I intended through my adventure in entrepreneurship.  It can be judged by time and by others whether I have created a long-term viable capitalist entity, but I genuinely don’t much care whether I’ve created a profitable institution for the ages or not.  I’m in business because it makes me happy and free.  It’s a gas.  It’s a joy.  It’s an ecstasy of self-discovery.  It’s infinitely not boring.  It is healing and whole-making.

My personal goals have never been financial, though I’ve made more than a living through the years.  What I knew when I started my company in 1996 were my personal values and the tone of service I wanted my company to emanate.  I knew I wanted to create a community I could comfortably live in, a horizontal company inhabited by peers and fellow travelers, both in my associates and in my clients.  I came out of a two decade personal history of failure in four different careers before founding my firm.  I had also had issues with three different addictions.  (In fact, my entrepreneurial success came directly out of disciplines developed and informed by the recovery from these addictions.  Finding a comfortable center in my work was an essential part of that recovery.)

If truth be told, I’m not especially interested in business, per se.  I have no desire to be a master of the universe.  What I desire is to be happy, centered, and whole, while running a healthy enterprise with integrity and freedom, and offering a real needed service to the world.  Those are my reasons to be an entrepreneur and if I went out of business tomorrow it would in no way adumbrate my personal sense of success and achievement as an entrepreneur.

(If you get a chance and are interested in this topic, take a look at a recent book called The Big Enough Company (Portfolio/Penguin–2011) by Amy Abrams and Adelaide Lancaster.  It’s written for women, but I loved it.)

So for me, entrepreneurship is, fundamentally, non-quantifiably personal and spiritual in its rewards, particularly in its ability to impart freedom and inner wholeness.  As Martin Luther King, Jr. said so passionately at the end of his “I Have a Dream” speech,  ”Free at last!  Free at last!  Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.”

Amen, Brother Martin.

I’m pretty sure it helps to be a little crazy if you want to be an entrepreneur.  I suspect I am.

I am personally not the world’s best businessman.  I’m just not.  Fortunately, a series of gifted associates have always been able to buttress my considerable dearth of quotidian business skills at my executive sales outsourcing firm Corporate Rain International.

Part of the inadequacy of my basic business backgrounding is chosen.  I simply don’t enjoy administration, spreadsheets,  human resources, and quantitative analysis.  What does interest me are the more elusive values of entrepreneurship–the envisioning, the strategy, the philosophy, the ethics and the collegiality of it.  What I want out of my business is no less than freedom, truth and salvation.  I want entrance into that metaphorical Golden City On The Hill, what Shakespeare calls “the brightest heaven of invention.” (Henry V, Act One, Prologue)  I think great entrepreneurs (which I am most assuredly not one) have this procrustean longing and intent.  In this myopically secular age, many business founders are perhaps inchoately and unconsciously involved in a closeted, low level search for God.

Certainly that was the case with Steve Jobs.  Walter Isaacson has just written a biography of Jobs.  (I have not yet read his book, but only read criticism and seen 60 Minutes on the book.)  But one thing that struck me from reportage was that Jobs was more than a bit nuts.  And I mean that in the nicest possible way.

Maureen Dowd, in a NY Times op-ed on October 26, referred to Jobs as a “monstre sacre.”  She says, “…his life sounded like the darkest hell of volatility,” a bipolar madness.

I have already talked about Jobs as an artist in a posting on October 11, but he was also a avid spiritual searcher and seeker of ultimate truth.  Because he sought to find his spiritual center in his business, doesn’t mean he was a nice man.  He was difficult, bullying, and arrogant.  His spiritual entrepreneurial journey did not make him Mother Theresa.  Yet like Moses, Jesus and Captain Kirk he went boldly where no man had gone before.  Ultimately his business journey was a uniquely autodidactic search for personal meaning and God in a non-religious age.

Here is what Plato, by way of Socrates, said about poetry, but it could apply equally to the heart of the entrepreneur.

“…if any man come to the gates of poetry without the madness of the Muses, persuaded that skill alone will make him a good poet, then shall he and his works of sanity with him be brought naught by the poetry of madness…”

Thank you, Plato.

I went to my fall church fair last Saturday and I bought a bunch of old books.  Of all things, I, most unexpectedly, found a simple and elegant riposte therein to the many negative comments about business, greed, and venality coming out of the Occupy Wall Street movement.  And particularly as these calumnies relate to my prime interest–the small businessman and the entrepreneur.

As those who follow this blog regularly know, I recently railed against the mantra of media and the present government casting me and my confreres as evil doers.  (See posting of October 25–Animal Spirits and Entrepreneurship)  Most of the regulation and taxation and rhetoric of the last three years is aimed squarely at “millionaires and billionaires” like me, not at fat cats.  (If they come looking for my millions and billions they will be sorely disappointed.)

I personally quite agree with Occupy Wall Street about payoffs and bailouts to the big banks.  But why is the practical result of this animosity punitive to creative small capitalists?  Why not Jeffrey Immelt, John Corzine, Ken Chenault, George Kaiser, et. al., oligarchs who led companies that paid no tax while reaping huge government benefits?  Why me, dammit?

So what did I unexpectedly find in a book at my church fair?  A profound quote from Adam Smith, Frederick Hayeck, or Milton Friedman?  Nah.  I discovered an answer to Occupy Wall Street in these simple words from Abraham Lincoln, written just before his assasination.  (Quoted by Carl Van Doren in a 1942 compilation called, The Literary Works of Abraham Lincoln.)

“The strongest bond of human sympathy, outside of the family relation, should be one uniting all working people, of all nations and tongues, and kindreds.  Nor should this lead to a war upon property, or the owners of property.  Property is the fruit of labor; property is desirable; it is a positive good in the world.  That one should be rich shows that others may become rich, and hence is just encouragement to industry and enterprise.  Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another, but let him work diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built.”

Abraham Lincoln, philosopher of entrepreneurship.  Thanks, Abe.

This is a new time for sales.  The rules, they are a changin’.  The old verities are being heavily and quickly abridged by a combination of fiscal caution, increased workloads, and technological innovation.

Austerity has become a particular byword for business and government in the last two years.  And nowhere is it more noticeable than in executive sales.  For example, at my own seventeen year old executive sales outsourcing firm, Corporate Rain International, I’ve never seen such a timidity among real decision-makers at corporations.  Caution and conservatism reign supreme.  In fact, there is a palpable hesitancy in the air from top to bottom about anything that requires more than a short-term commitment—in government, in the private sector, in education, politics, art, and media.

Internationally these jitters are taking the form of violent and non-violent mass protests.  As much as anything, I think these actions are fueled by simple fear of the future and fear of the unknown, an inchoate anger at forces beyond our control and a distrust of uncertain change.  Greece, Thailand, and the Arab world have had violence in the streets and Wall Street is under duress from the unfocused, confusing protests in Zuccotti Park.

Individual executives are stressed too, often groaning under twice their previous workload with half the staff.  Annecdotally, my next door neighbor is vice-president of a large non-profit in NYC.  Her staff has been cut from 15 to 3 this year with no change in workload.  Though experienced and competent she is overwhelmed.  I find this is a very common tale these days.

One result of this is an increasing premium on executive time.  Decision makers will not take meetings unless these meetings are very focused and address specific needs with a clear ROI objective.  Also, if your product is perceived as commoditized you are dead, brother.

It is also not easy to get a hearing for the new, the magical, the inspired, the groundbreaking, either.  When executives are overworked with reduced budgets and scared of losing their jobs, the salesman must be succinct, soothing, efficient and yet aggressive and compelling—all at the same time.  No easy task.  Caution about taking any risk is redoubled in the harsh dawning of economic bleakness.  Buyers and decision-makers are frequently deer immobilized in the head lights.

As Edmund Burke put it in A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1756),  ”No passion so effectively robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.”  Thanks Edmund.

John Maynard Keynes coined the phrase “animal spirits” in his 1936 book The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.  He uses the term to describe emotions which influence human economic behavior.  Healthy animal spirits create an ambience of trust and faith and are a necessary prerequisite for human actions, much more than quantitative logic.  Keynes felt animal spirits were needed as a goad to economic action rather than inaction.

Entrepreneurs are different than other business people.  They are optimistic risk-takers and people of passion and instinct.  They are marchers to the beat of their own drummer.  But they are also very much dependent creatures of their own animal spirits.

In a sense, entrepreneurs are much like the wild things of the forest.  They are part of an economic and emotional ecosystem that molds them, that fertilizes them.  They will not stay healthy without this ecosystem.  Hence, the importance of a salubrious trope in the macroeconomy.

A very wet blanket has been thrown over the animal spirits of small business in the last three years.  While excessive and growing regulation saps energy and time, it is ultimately only a wasteful annoyance.  A growing tax burden excessively milking the small business community is a more serious discouragement to the entrepreneur, but also not fatal.

What is potentially fatal is the undermining of the spiritual reason for entrepreneurship.  As much as profit is important, at base I believe most entrepreneurs are seeking a meaningful and free life.

While political philosophy can be argued one way or another, I personally feel the greatest and most unnecessary economic mistake of the current administration is its gratuitous and overwrought attack on the motives and values of business.  It is very hard to continually pillory the businessman as venal, greedy, and selfish and not destroy the animal spirits and passion prerequisite for success within our group.

It is also unnecessary and wasteful to cast the businessman as a villain.  It would cost nothing to hold up the virtue and value  of our group rhetorically, rather than debunking and denigrating our community.  The rewards in entrepreneurial optimism and response would be significant.  And it would not cost a dime.  Even within our depressed economy, the entrepreneur remains a risk taker.  But who wants to take the risk of adding investment and new hires when the reward is a cacophony of governmental contempt and calumny?

The current government cannot create an emotional dead zone for the entrepreneur and expect him to be enthused and fierce.  If our current recession must be remediated through the 65% of new hiring done by small businesses, why not lift us up with celebratory eloquence?  It’s free to do so, so why not a little sunny celebration and support, rather than depracatory demonization?

As John Maynard Keynes puts it, “…if the animal spirits are dimmed and the spontaneous optimism falters, leaving us to depend on nothing but a mathematical expectation, enterprise will fail and die.”

Thank you, John Maynard.

Per my meditation on Steve Jobs last week, I’ve been thinking about advanced business degrees and entrepreneurship.

Coincidentally, the Wall Street Journal came out with a whole section on the value of MBA’s the day after Jobs’ death (October 6, 2011-Section B).  In an article titled, “Is an MBA Worth It?,” reporter Melissa Korn interviews five students on the value of their degree.  While these students were generally positive about their degrees, she points out that companies are significantly reducing their hiring of MBAs in favor of their less educated and elitely sculpted brethren.  While the MBA may offer credibility across industries, may result in extra earnings, and should offer rich peer-level networking opportunities, corporations are becoming less sanguine about this accreditation–even among the most prestigious institutions like Wharton, HBS, CBS, Booth, Tuck, Kellogg, Fuqua, et. al.

Whatever the reasons for corporate caveats around MBA training, these caveats should apply in spades to MBAs for entrepreneurial leaders.  While there is a real need for the traditional training in green-eyeshade strategic and practical orthodoxies and legacy business skills that can be easily slotted into corporate culture, I am quite agog at the proliferation of institutions that now are offering MBAs in entrepreneurship.  I can see how they can teach you how to run an entrepreneurial company, but not to create one.

One of my clients at Corporate Rain International is a very successful multiple entrepreneur who actually teaches a course in entrepreneurship at Tulane Business School.  I asked him frankly over dinner last year how in the world do you teach entrepreneurship?  (I certainly couldn’t.) How do you teach originality?  How do you teach personal vision?  How do you teach stewardship of the larger universe your parvenu company is part of?  How do you teach the passion for freedom?  How do you teach the courage to fiercely fail and even fail multiple times?  How do you summon sufficient hubris to slay the dragon of self-doubt each day and continue to create something out of nothing?  How do you teach all that and many other non-quantitative intuitions? How do you bring love into the building of a company?

There seems to be a romanticism that has developed around entrepreneurship in our country.  It’s cool to be an entrepreneur.  But, I tell you, most of the successful entrepreneurs I know, including myself, are somewhat eccentric, if not downright odd.

So was Steve Jobs.  Jobs created his own country, his own universe of meaning, his own private Idaho where he could live with freedom, passion, and love.  It is no wonder it is a country many people want to live in with him.  An MBA will not teach you how to create these things.

Herman Melville says in Moby Dick, “A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.”

Whale ships, not MBAs, make entrepreneurs.  Thank you, Herman–and thank you (again) Steve Jobs.

Amidst all the encomiums and panegyrics to Steve Jobs over the last week, the most notable thing to me was a celebration of Steve Jobs as an almost religious artistic entrepreneur.

While Jobs is certainly a great and seminal American businessman, very much the equal of Thomas Edison, Henry Ford , or Bill Gates, he also clearly thought of himself as an artist.  Bob Rice, General Managing Partner of Tangent Capital Partners, in an interview on Bloomberg (10/6/11), speaks of Jobs as “living at the intersection of art and technology.”  Indeed, Jobs defined himself specifically in terms of art.  At his speech introducing the iPad in 2010, Jobs defined Apple’s success in the following words:  ”It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough.  It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields the results that make our hearts sing.”  That very verbiage is the language of the poet.  His lifework is as much that of the auteur as of the entrepreneur.

An artist illuminates and helps us understand the truth of existence in a way not unlike that of a religious thinker.  l think great entrepreneurs are imbued with this sense, even if not explicitly acknowledging it, as Jobs has done.

On August 26, 2011, after Jobs resigned as CEO of Apple, Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. wrote the following in an editorial in the Wall Street Journal.

“What comes to mind now is a forgotten PBS show in the 1980s that tried to explain what was then known as the ‘quality revolution’ in business.  Interviewed was some wise old MIT professor who said, ‘Quality is love.’  Mr. Jobs determination to make superb products was, one likes to think, an expression of love for the world, life and possibility.”

Perhaps I am especially sensitive to these qualities in Steve Jobs, since I personally come out of an explicit background in the arts and in religion.  It seems to me entrepreneurs who are unattached to the deeper values that make a meaningful, truthful existence are that much lessened in the value of their business life.  Steve Job’s lived a uniquely successful business life that inculcated art, truth, ethics and also lucre.  He was a uniquely integrated entrepreneur and an elegantly realized human being.

My favorite tribute to Steve Jobs this week came in a tweet from Michael Yang, CEO of Become.com, who says, “Steve Jobs will be remembered in the same vein as Einstein, Ford, and John Lennon.”  That seems just right to me.  Thank you, Michael Yang.

Failure is seminal for any successful salesman.  And failing big is even more wonderful.

As many of you know, I was an actor for a good while in my younger years.  One of my colleagues was a man named Austin Pendleton.  I remember Austin talking one day about solving his auditioning conundrum–the problem being how to figure out what directors really were looking for.  He told me what he had finally decided was to “go big” with his audition choices.  If he had an “outrageous failure” at least he was rejected for something distinctive.

I have often thought back on that comment in my 17 years as head of my executive sales outsourcing firm Corporate Rain International.  I fell on my face often as an actor and I had to learn to handle my frequent (very personal) rejections and even enjoy the process.  It’s helped me enormously as an entrepreneur and salesman for my company.

I was caught by an article in the Wall Street Journal last week by reporter Sue Shellenbarger, titled “Better Ideas Through Failure.” (Tuesday, Sept. 27, 2011-Section D, p. one)  It concerns a pitch done by Amanda Zolten, a Sr. VP at Grey Advertising for a kitty litter product.  Ms. Zolten found an answer to her pitch through her cat, Lucy Belle.

“Before she and her team met with six of the company’s executives, Ms. Zolten buried Lucy Belle’s mess in a box of the company’s litter and pushed it under the conference-room table.  No one noticed until Ms. Zolten pointed it out–and the fact that no one had smelled it.

Shocked, several executives pushed back from the table. Two left the room. After a pause, those who remained started laughing, says Ms. Zolten, a senior vice president with Grey New York.  ”We achieved what we hoped, which was creating a memorable experience.” she says.

She won’t know for a few weeks whether Grey won the business. But her boss, Tor Myhren, named Ms. Zolten the winner of his first quarterly ‘Heroic Failure’ award for taking a big edgy risk.”

There is a wonderful lesson for the entrepreneurial salesman here.  Compelling charismatic sales narrative  comes out of fearlessness and free expression of the truth.  Peregrinations within the timid confines of the quotidian n’er did win fair maidens–nor new clients.  Bravo, Grey Advertising!

As Dostoevsky put it in The Idiot in 1869, “Inventors and men of genius have almost always been regarded as fools at the beginning (and very often at the end) of their careers.”

Thank you, Fyodor.

Louis XV of France (1710-1774) memorably said, “Après moi, le déluge.” Indeed.  The French Revolution soon followed.

As I look with bemusement and attempted objectivity at recent proposed solutions to our ailing entrepreneurial and business climate, one fact increasingly leaps out at me:  Almost all political and economic suggestions for remediation of our conundrums are based on short-term, strategically parochial and self-serving  base assumptions–many deleterious to the long-term health of business and, particularly, of small business.  It is so much easier for to apply quick band aids and feel-good nostrums and say we are doing something.  To cite that overused but accurate phrase, we are engaged in “kicking the can down the road.”

Take for instance, the tax incentives offered to us small businessmen in the American Jobs Act.  This Act offers $240 billion in new short-term tax incentives to hire new workers.  However, these temporary incentives apply for the next 16 months only, after which new employees will become part of large permanent new bureaucratic fiats and taxes, like Obamacare and Dodd-Frank.  In what way will this incentivize any entrepreneur to saddle herself or himself with any but the most essential new hires?  It feels like a trick to bribe our entrepreneurial community to shut up till after next year’s elections, after which point we get hit with a variety of giant tax bills and more stupid regulation.

The Wall Street Journal (Editorial-9/14/11) sums up White House thinking as hoping “new spending and temporary tax cuts will so fire up investment and hiring in the next 16 months that the economy will be growing much faster in 2013 and could thus absorb a leap off the tax cliff.”   To me, this is simply a panglossian myopia unattached to long-term business reality.

I worry that both of our political parties can never think past the next election.  Obviously, we should keep our basic welfare safety nets at reasonable levels (and that includes entrepreneurs paying more taxes), but you shouldn’t kill the goose that lays the golden eggs of employment and economic growth through stultifying, excessive regulation and punitive taxation.  Our present governmental thinking does exactly that.

I often wonder if my own Boomer Generation has become incapable of the long-term sacrifice and common sense necessary for fundamental reform because of simple selfishness and generational narcissism.   Or perhaps that judgement should apply to all of our current society, whether this be the welfare recipient or the millionaire.  Where is the commitment to the greater good?

Perhaps we have become an epicurean society, living for only a short-term happiness and never paying the piper.  The modern use of the term “epicurean” is associated with the saying, “Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die.”  Though this is a false oversimplification of Epicurus (341-270 BC) philosophy, perhaps this is where we are in our societal and political thinking.  Not good for any of us or the the future of our polity, much less our entrepreneurial community.

Is there anything more predictably impotent than a high-profile, elite panel of politically appointed corporate big shots?

Daniel Massey of Crain’s recounts an annecdote told him by New York Lt. Gov. Robert Duffey in August (Crain’s-8/24/11.)  It concerns the genesis of a newly appointed panel of corporate leaders who will spearhead a campaign called “New York Open For Business.”

Apparently Lt. Gov. Duffey read a newspaper article last January about an Illinois chief executive who wanted to relocate his company due to Illinois’ infamously hostile-to-business state government.  Massey reports Mr. Duffey swinging into action and immediately getting the CEO on the phone.  He says, “I mentioned I was calling on behalf of Governor Cuomo in NY State and that we wanted him to consider coming to New York.  He actually laughed in my face.”

This annecdote highlights New York’s image problem.  Why should the Illinois CEO jump from the frying pan into the fire?  Or at least into another frying pan?

The solution New York is offering to this conundrum is a prestigious blue ribbon panel, appointed by Andrew Cuomo, to craft a new, business friendly image for New York.  Sounds great, no?  The only problem is that New York does not fundamentally face a PR problem.  It faces a real problem, a problem of essence.  Oh sure, PR can help, but what is needed is a total revamping of public policy, not a superficial papering over and attempt to hide from potential entrepreneurs the uncongenial nature of the New York business trop.

What such a panel could truthfully say is only (perhaps) that it’s better here than in Illinois or California or New Jersey.  It can only pretty up the image of an increasingly gangrenous business atmosphere—of out of control unions, high taxes, budget deficits, tort lawyers, and bureaucratic obfuscation.  Such a blue ribbon panel is like putting wallpaper over a large hole in the wall.  Or like the opening scene in David Lynch‘s movie Blue Velvet, where the camera pans down from an idyllic suburban lawn to a rotting, bug-ridden under layer.

I noticed half of the people on this blue ribbon panel are marketers and the other half are representatives of big business.  The people who are most undermined by our governmental reality are small businesses, whether incipient or extant, with no presence at all on this panel.

Entrepreneurs are ultimately not fools.  They will logically go to states that consciously structure policy and governmental support to their businesses.  This panel will not change that.

When you put lipstick on a pig, it is still a pig.

In this season of our discontent, I was cheered by a wonderful proposal from the Kauffman Foundation last month that is aptly called the Startup Act.

The proposal, which already has bi-partisan support in Congress, is a simple, elegant, and cost free way of accelerating the growth of startups and young businesses. What’s not to like?

As anyone knows who reads this blog, I’ve been bitching for two years about the Mt. Everests of unnecessary and growing new regulation being foisted on our small business community by the current government. Well, here’s a proactive and specific solution.

Carl Schramm, CEO of the Kauffman Foundation, says, “With a recent Kauffman study indicating that new companies are starting smaller and staying smaller, and with our unemployment crisis, it is more important than ever for policy makers to create an environment that makes it easier for more startups to survive, grow and add jobs.” (Kauffman Foundation press release-July 19, 2011)

The Startup Act emphasizes the central role startups and entrepreneurs must play for the U.S. to escape the current recession. (It is acknowledged, even by the current administration, that any growth in American jobs will have to be driven by the health and new formation of entrepreneurial firms.)

To oversimplify here’s what the Startup Act says:

1. Welcoming immigrants capable of building high-growth companies to the U.S. by providing “Entrepreneurs’ Visas” and green cards.
2. Reducing the cost of capital through capital gains tax relief.
3. Reducing barriers to IPOs by allowing shareholders to opt out of Sarbanes-Oxley.
4. Charging higher fees for patent applicants who want quick decisions, thus removing a bottleneck of applications in the Patent Office.
5. Having the government publish data ranking the startup friendliness of states and localities.
6. And, finally (this is my favorite), regular sunsets for regulations and a policy of only putting new regulations in place if their benefits exceed their costs.

This is simple and practical stuff that should pass Congress with little controversy. And, for once, it shows real concern for a reinvigoration of the beating heart of American business. It is a partial antidote to the poisonous 2,000+ page micromanagement of both Dodd-Frank and Obamacare. Simple.

As the late George Meredith put it in The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859), “Perfect simplicity is unconsciously audacious.” Much like entrepreneurship.

Thank you, George.

Well, it’s the end of the summer and I’m taking a vacation.  I’m off to Cape May, New Jersey next week. I’ll be back restored for September with more idle thoughts about entrepreneurship and sales.

But for this week I just wanted to share this revised take on the fable of “The Ant and the Grasshopper,” sent to me by my friend and fellow business owner Terri Guarnieri last week.  It’s provenance is a gentleman named Howard Davidow.

The Ant and the Grasshopper

This one is a little different….
Two Different Versions….

Old Version

The ant works hard
in the withering heat all summer long,
building his house and laying supplies for the winter.

The grasshopper
thinks the ant is a fool and laughs
and dances and plays the summer away.

Come winter, the ant is warm
and well fed.

The grasshopper has
no food or shelter, so he
dies out in the cold.

Modern Version

The ant works hard
in the withering heat and the rain all summer long,
building his house and laying up supplies for the winter

The grasshopper thinks the ant
is a fool and laughs and dances
and plays the summer away.

Come winter, the shivering grasshopper
calls a press conference and demands to
know why the ant should be
allowed to be warm and well fed while he
is cold and starving.

CBS, NBC, PBS, CNN, and ABC show up to
provide pictures of the shivering grasshopper
next to a video of the ant in his comfortable home
with a table filled with food.
America is stunned by the sharp contrast.

How can this can be, that in a country of
such wealth, this poor grasshopper
is allowed to suffer so?

Kermit the Frog appears
on Oprah with the grasshopper
and everybody cries when they sing,
‘Its’s Not Easy Being Green…’

ACORN stages
a demonstration in front of the ant’s
house where the news station film the
SEIU group singing, ‘We Shall Overcome’

Then Rev. Jeremiah Wright
has the group kneel down to pray for the
grasshopper’s sake,
while he damns the ants.

President Obama condemns the ant
and blames President Bush 43, President Bush 41,
President Reagan, Christopher Columbus, and the
Pope for the grasshopper’s plight.

Nancy Pelosi & Harry Reid
exclaim in an interview with Larry King
that the ant has gotten rich off the back of the
grasshopper, and both call for an immediate tax hike
on the ant to make him pay his fair share.

Finally, the EEOC drafts
the Economic Equity &
Anti-Grasshopper Act retroactive
to the beginning of the summer.

The ant is fined for failing to hire a
proportionate number of green bugs and,
having nothing left to pay his retroactive taxes,
his home is confiscated by the Government Green Czar
and given to the grasshopper.

The story ends as we see the grasshopper
and his free-loading friends finishing up the
last bits of the ant’s food while the government house he is in,
which, as you recall, just happens to be the ant’s old house,
crumbles around them because the grasshopper
doesn’t maintain it.

The ant has disappeared in the snow, never to be seen again.

The grasshopper is found dead in a drug
related incident, and the house, now abandoned, is taken
over by a gang of spiders who terrorize the ramshackle,
once prosperous and peaceful, neighborhood.

The entire Nation collapses
bringing the rest
of the free world with it.

Thank you Howard Davidow.

(Tim’s next blog will appear September 6th 2011, when he returns from vacation.)

Who is John Galt?  Well, he’s pretty much the bloody patron saint of entrepreneurship and capitalism. Saint John Galt.  Of course, his provenance is as the cryptic, chimerical entrepreneurial hero of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.  But his essence is becoming spookily real again as personified by a spirited, unspoken, unorganized strike that may be taking hold in the entrepreneurial community.  This is not a good or healthy thing for the economy.

The most recent Bureau of Labor Statistics report shows the sum of new business “births” was lower than any other year since it’s research began in 1994.  Robert Litan of the Kauffman Foundation states, “If this persists–the sputtering engine of entrepreneurship–it will discourage future generations of entrepreneurs.”

Mr. Litan is right. The economy simply cannot afford the continuing degradation of the private sector, particularly juxtaposed to the expansion of the public sector.  Entrepreneurship is the goose that will increasingly not be able to generate the golden eggs of national prosperity.

For example, on Saturday I was idly watching CNN and an economist cited this statistic:   In 2008 the Department of Transportation had one employee making over $170,000.  Today it has 1,090 such employees.  Wow.  This while businesses continue to tighten and lay off.

John Bussey states in an article in The Wall St. Journal of August 12 (Section B, page 1):

“Imagine a small airstrip where single-seat planes head down the runway, get 100 feet into the air and crash back to Earth, joining a heap of wreckage that grows by the day. You’d think this might discourage people deciding to become a pilot.

That’s a snapshot of what the recent recession did to many small businesses in America, where beneath the wreckage of failed companies lies a collection of would-be entrepreneurs.”

Entrepreneurship cannot thrive in a cautious, timid, uncertain culture and in the face of hostile governmental rhetoric and bureaucratic overreach.  Certainly, with the advent of Obamacare,  business will increasingly be forced into a position of being the administrator and flow-through mechanism for the money of the nanny state–a cash cow for a statist dirigisme.  This is a nuisance, an annoyance, a distraction and an inhibitor of efficient enterprise.

A prime personal reason I became an entrepreneur was simply for personal freedom.  It is my prime non-monetary motivation to create and lead my firm Corporate Rain International.  Dignity and autonomy are the rewards for the personal act of courage that is entrepreneurship.  Growing governmental control diminishes this incentive.

Several of my friends are taking golf holidays this summer.  They can’t get enough of the sport.  When they ask me to play with them, I tell them I’ve never learned how to play.  Their reaction is usually somewhere between pity and wonderment.

As long as I can remember, golf has been one of the quintessential guy things to do.  And, more than that, golf seems to be viewed as a key skill by executive salesmen–and that is one of my primary jobs as CEO of my company, Corporate Rain International.  In fact, I have heard sales folk speak of the golf course in almost reverential tones, as the ideal networking format.  I hope this doesn’t make me a partial sales cripple.

Certainly golf seems to be great fun.  There is at least a hint of a fanatical, addictive gleam in the eye of golfers I meet.  Also, to judge from the number of fund-raising invitations I get involving golf, it seems to be a mainstay of the eleemosynary.

As an outsider looking in on this business sport of golf I have one primary observation:  It takes a long time to play.  I’m told that the average golf outing is three hours.  For me, my time is my most cherished resource as a salesman, as an entrepreneur, and as a human being.  Do I spend it teaching my daughter tennis?  Do I spend it with my wife?  Do I spend it on the endless myriad of tasks I should be doing as head of my company and often don’t get to?  Should I spend the time just thinking or winnowing down that Mt. Everest of books that sits by my bed?

I don’t think I’m alone in this calculation.  I can see that golf is a wonderful esthetically pleasing sport.  I could see myself enjoying it one of these days.  But, in terms of a business tool, it doesn’t seem a particularly efficient way of initiating new business.

We’re in an increasingly fast-moving business world.  Efficiency in business presentation and connection is paramount.  As an observing outsider with his nose pressed to the glass,  I find golf quaintly inefficient as a rainmaking tool.

Mark Twain called golf “a good walk spoiled.”  Golf, if nothing else, seems to breed wonderful, witty comments.  Here are a couple.  ”Golf is a game where white men can dress up as black pimps and get away with it.” (Robin Williams)  Or how ’bout this.  ”If every golfer in the world, male and female, were laid end to end, I, for one would leave them there.” (Mark Parkinson).

Thanks Mark, Robin, and Mark, et. al.

I was struck by a David Brooks op-ed in the New York Times this spring (3/10/11).  Brooks starts his column with this statement, “We’re an overconfident species.  94% of college professors believe they have above average teaching skills.  A survey of high school students found that 70% of them have above average leadership skills and only 2% are below average…[Recently] 80% of high school seniors said they were “a very important person.”

I went back to Mr. Brooks article as I watched dumbfounded the debt debacle debated last week in Washington.  The fear was palpable among politicians of both parties that if they don’t let Americans continue to have their cake and eat it to, they will be voted out out of office.  The assumption being that we have become a nation of spineless, self-seeking individuals incapable of responding to larger issues of communal sacrifice and the greater good.

This spiritual arrogance has been written about extensively by Dr. Jean Twenge and Dr. W. Keith Campbell.  They say, in their introduction to The Narcissism Epidemic (April, 2009, Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster),

“On a reality TV show, a girl planning her Sweet Sixteen wants a major road blocked off so a marching band can precede her grand entrance on a red carpet.  Five times as many Americans undergo plastic surgery and cosmetic procedures a ten years ago, and ordinary people hire fake paparazzi to follow them around to make them look famous.  High school students physically attack classmates and post YouTube videos of the beatings to get attention.  And for the past several years,  Americans have been buying McMansions and expensive cars on credit they can’t afford.”

David Brooks wonders if the rise of consumption and debt is influenced by an increasingly grandiose citizenry who desire to adorn their lives with the things they feel befit their station.  Brooks says, “I wonder if the rise in partisanship is influenced by a narcissistic sense that, ‘I know how the country should be run and anybody who disagrees with me is just in the way.’”  Brooks conjectures a link between a generational “magnification of the self and a declining saliency of virtues associated with citizenship.”

(For example, I have always felt that a practical humility is my best friend in objectively dealing with the daily challenges of entrepreneurship.  Last year one of my clients sent me a book called “Crush It” by Gary Vaynerchuck.  While Mr. Vaynerchuck is clearly a smart cookie in terms of internet technology and the wine business, the hegemonic arrogance of the title (and frequently in the body of the book itself), struck me as unusefully self-aggrandizing and self-serving in an entrepreneur, not to mention in terms of being a salutary corporate citizen and resident of the larger body of humanity.)

Mr. Brooks concludes his column with the following:

“Perhaps the enlargement of the self has also attenuated the links between the generations.  Every generation has an incentive to push costs of current spending into future generations.  But no generation has done it as freely as this one.  Maybe people in the past had a visceral sense of themselves as a small piece of a larger chain across the centuries.  As a result, it felt viscerally wrong to privilege the current generation over the future ones, in a way it no longer does.”

Thank you, David Brooks.

Here I go peering into the abyss again.  Still I say, “Be afraid.  Be very afraid, small businessman.”

The latest business warning comes from Steve Wynn, Chairman and CEO of Wynn Resorts, who unleashed a blistering jeremiad last Tuesday on an investor conference call published by Business Insider, directed at the business climate in the U.S. and, very specifically, at the constant stream of new regulations and the anti-business rhetoric of the current federal government.

What he said was most surprising in that Steve Wynn is a big contributor to the Democratic Party and heavily bankrolled Sen. Harry Reid’s reelection in Nevada last year.  He said, “I’m saying it bluntly, that this administration is the greatest wet blanket to business and progress and job creation in my lifetime.”

He says all business at all levels should fear President Obama and his bureaucrats.  Wynn feels the U.S. is becoming dangerously statist, oligarchic and authoritarian, even as China successfully embraces free enterprise and capitalism.

Though there is a huge amount of capital waiting to invest, including his own, he basically feels you’re nuts to invest in the U.S. in the increasingly suffocating bureaucratic environment.

“Until we change the tempo and the conversation from Washington, it’s not going to change.  And those of us who have business opportunities and the capital to do it are going to sit in fear of the President.  And a lot of people don’t want to say that.  They’ll say God, don’t be attacking Obama.  Well, this is Obama’s deal and it’s Obama that’s responsible for this fear in America.”

Warren Buffet (another large Democratic donor) and Bernard Marcus of Home Depot also spoke with increasing alarm about our business climate last week, and, unsurprisingly, Nouriel Roubini is quoted in Forbes Magazine as saying we have already entered a new recession.

Now, the interests of big business big shots like Wynn, Buffet, and Marcus are not always congruent with your or my interests.  However, in this case they are.  Marcus said flat out he could never have started Home Depot with all the bureaucratic  barricades set up in the last three years.  These new and multiplying regulations create a stultifying trope for small businessmen.  And we have yet to see what time-wasting paperwork awaits us in Obamacare (145 new bureaucratic entities and counting) and Dodd-Frank.  All this new regulation is well-meaning but the results are a killer for the entrepreneur.

I wouldn’t be an entrepreneur if my core wasn’t that of an optimist, but reality is daunting these days.  As Jon Huntsman, former Governor of Utah puts it, “We have lost that which has made us great over the generations, and that is the sense…that we can come up, that we can pursue our dreams and our aspirations and that we won’t be blocked by government [from making] our dreams come true.”

Thanks, Jon.

I attended a speech by Deepak Chopra a couple of months ago hosted by the Inc. Business Council.  The talk was pleasant enough, but I came wide awake when Mr. Chopra cited Bill Clinton telling him over lunch there are well over two million jobs now in the US that are going unfilled.  I thought, “How in God’s name can we have an official unemployment rate of 9.2% and a real unemployment rate of over 16% and have two million jobs unfilled?”

My initial reaction to Mr. Chopra’s annecdotal citation of this fact was beyond dubious.  However, it bloody well is true!  Not only is it true, but these jobs-gone-begging are generally high-paying jobs.  Yup.  I’ve seen it confirmed in multiple places, most recently in the just released report of President Obama’s Jobs and Competitiveness Council chaired by Jeff Immelt of G.E.

Mr. Immelt and Ken Chenault (CEO of American Express) co-wrote an editorial that prominently notes this employment conundrum.  They write in the Wall Street Journal (6/13/11), “There are more than two million open jobs in the U.S., in part because employers can’t find workers with the advanced manufacturing skills they need.  The private sector must quickly form partnerships with community colleges, vocational schools and others to match career training with real world hiring needs.”  (I find it amusing, if a bit hypocritical, that the politically connected CEO of G.E, which contributed millions to the election of the current President and coincidentally paid zero taxes last year, suggests that the “private sector,” meaning mostly small businessmen like you and me, should “quickly” solve the problem.)

Last Friday, July 15, Alan Greenspan also spoke to this.  He told The Globalist, “In the United States, we are in the process of seeing the baby boomers–the most productive, highly skilled educated part of our labor force–retire.  They are being replaced by groups of young workers who have regrettably scored rather poorly in educational match-ups over the last two decades.”  Indeed.

One solution I see is clearly to keep these skilled baby boomers working years longer.  (I previously posted  about this on June 29, 2010 if you want to read more.)  Employers and HR people need to get this message.  The recent Associated Press-LifeGoesStrong.com poll finds that most boomers consider old age to now begin at 70, and over a quarter of boomers aver you’re not old till you’re 80.  In what I see as a coming age of austerity and probable entitlement cut-backs, there will also be need for older, skilled workers to work much longer before going quietly into that good night.

As the late Andre Maurois says in The Aging American (1961),  ”Growing old is no more than a bad habit which a busy man has no time to form.”  Thanks, Andre.

As with much of my business philosophy, my intuitions about sales are formed out of an autodidactic maelstrom of hit and miss, hunt and peck experiences of getting it wrong a lot, till I finally began to get it right.  In other words, I generally get good by being bad.

Essentially my approach to life and sales is one of leading from weakness.  By radically accepting my personal foibles, character flaws, wounds, emptiness, and inadequacy, I become paradoxically centered, whole, and compelling.  My presence becomes a truthful and real thing by its very brokenness.

My doctor tells me bones grow back stronger after healing from a break, and I believe that persuasive sales presence emanates from a worked-through, self-accepting weakness.  I’m not saying this approach is for everyone, but it is certainly the source of whatever success I have had as a salesman and as a useful human being.

I was reminded of this recently in a posting by my friend Rev. Stephen Bauman of Christ Church Methodist in NYC.  He tells the story of Anna Mary Robertson, who worked as a hired girl on a farm.  She met and married a hired hand on the farm named Tom Moses.  They moved to a farm of their own and raised ten children.  Ann loved to do needle work, but as she became older, her hands stiffened with arthritis.  So she decided to try painting and found she could handle the paintbrush more easily.  One day an art collector passed through her small town and saw her paintings in a drugstore.

She had been discovered-at seventy-seven years of age.  She continued to paint until several months before her death at 101.

Stephen asks, “Why do we have the wonderful paintings by Grandma Moses?”  His answer is that Grandma Moses was a crippled old woman whose hands were too stiff to embroider.

In other words, out of her human handicap and frailty came Grandma Moses greatest wholeness and greatness.  Her crippledness and arthritis resulted in her success.

Swiss physician and author Paul Tournier says, “Acceptance of one’s life has nothing to do with resignation; it does not mean running away from the struggle.  On the contrary, it means accepting it as it comes, with all the handicaps of heredity, of suffering, of psychological complexes and injustices.”

Thank you, Brother Paul.

I don’t think I’ve been bored a single day since I started my firm in 1996.  Not a day.  Not an hour.

One of the great non-monetary rewards of entrepreneurship is the frisson it brings to each day.  There is an elan vital that suffuses every breath of the entrepreneur’s day, a personalization and weight that comes with being radically responsible for your own life and for the life of the corporate entity you animate.  What you do, what you decide, really counts.

I was reminded of this reading an article in Business Week last month.  The article was entitled, “28:  Grateful to be Employed, Bored Half to Death” (Mike Dorning, 6/20-6/26, 2011).  It talks about the great sense of ”stuckness” endemic in the young corporate workforce.

“From the factory floor to the boardroom, few Americans these days are willing to tell the boss shove it.  Many of those who have weathered the recession with their jobs intact are now sheltering in place, either fearful of risking a change or simply lacking the opportunity.  Since January 2009, an average 1 million fewer Americans per month have quit their jobs than in previous years. Through April, the most recent data available, that adds up to 28 million Americans stuck in jobs they would have left in ordinary times.”

I think the stagnancy and tightness of the job market since 2008 could have long-term consequences for the vocational health, esprit de corps, and creativity of traditional corporate employees, where the primary goal becomes to survive at all costs and hold tight onto what is at least a stable status quo rather than step into uncertainty, even if that uncertainty offers a potential improvement in pay or career advancement.  It creates timidity and boredom.

Stan Greenberg, a former pollster for Bill Clinton, notes people’s hesitancy to make any moves in the current economy, whether into a new life in a new place, or even to escape from a tyrannical boss.  He says, “You’ve got 28 million people whose aspirations are being contained.”

A great, if unquantifiable, benefit of entrepreneurship is the gift of freedom. Freedom to be yourself, freedom to tell the truth, freedom to grow, freedom to laugh, freedom not to be cowed or compromised, freedom to march to the beat of your own drummer.  And freedom from boredom. The price of admission to this entrepreneurial reality is courage and risk.  Even if the entrepreneur fails, the growth of innate stature, earned gravitas, personal dignity, and moral centeredness remains.  It is well worth it, whether a business succeeds or fails.  And one is guaranteed never, ever to be bored.

The late Susan Sontag says, “The life of the creative man is lead, directed, and controlled by boredom.  Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.”

Thank you, Susan.

I’ll be short this week. Last week I posted my latest caveats about unanticipated conundrums surrounding social media. I’ve written several times about this already.

One of the reasons I’ve found myself dubious and cautious about social media is the perfervid evangelical zeal of its proponents, which I frequently find blinker-visioned, jaundiced and of limited practicality for busy, non-genius entrepreneurs like myself.

Drew Neisser, CEO of Renegade Marketing, partially addressed this issue in his blog, The Renegade Cut, last week. Drew is a successful entrepreneur and frequent speaker and thought leader on social media. He writes well and simply. He offers several helpful practical suggestions for “social media fatigue.”

1.  He suggests keeping Twitter lists under 200 and perhaps keeping a much smaller list you really care about.
2.  If you have more than 100 friends on Facebook, hide the dull ones.
3.  Look for trusted curators in your area of interest. Don’t follow everything. Drew recommends PSFK to discover the best of the best.
4.  Don’t feel you can’t go silent for a while.

As I hunker down in my Luddite cave cowering away before the onslaught of social media, I’d like to have more of this kind of practical advice. Every day seems to offer an avalanche of cool new technological must-haves. I need advice that helps me manage, sort, and prioritize a multifaria of social media. I could use a lot more common sense techie thinking. I don’t need to be “cool” and I don’t need every cutting-edge app. I don’t need technological Nirvana. I do need what I can use simply, quickly and efficiently.

Avinash Kaushik of Analytic Evangelist says, “Social Media is like teen sex. Everybody wants to do it. Nobody knows how. When it’s finally done there is surprise it’s not better.”

Sounds right to me. Thank you, Avinish.

Anthony Weiner is interesting. And not just because of his jejune technological hijinks. We have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. Heck, I personally come from a background of addiction and extended immaturity, and have done many more egregious and embarrassing things than Mr. Weiner. Many. Though I don’t particularly like Anthony Weiner, I do think there is a deal too much schadenfreude and gleeful piling on per his recent salacious tweeting.

However, Weiner’s case got me thinking again about technology. Weiner’s puerile acting out over the Internet could not have happened even four years ago. I think it is especially important for us entrepreneurs to be aware of the possibility of unintended consequences inherent in the marvelous efficiencies of technology and social media. My own virtual company, Corporate Rain International, could not exist without this multifaria of technological magics, and yet…

Technology has created a multitasking enablement that is almost God-like in its efficacy. But could these God-like powers be breeding an ethically unmoored, shallow thinking, morally unclear, hubristic new species of politician or business leader?

Linda Stone writes about this in the Harvard Business Review. (2007, February) She describes what she calls “continuous partial attention,” which she defines as a constant state of “scanning for opportunities and staying on top of contacts, events and activities in an effort to miss nothing.” Both William Powers in Hamlet’s Blackberry and Nicholas Carr in The Shallows have written thoughtfully on this phenomenon. (See blogs of 7/20/10 and 7/27/10.)

It’s hard to pay deep attention while tiptoeing through the tulips of constant emailing, blogging, friending, tweeting and linking in. As the leader of my small firm, I have to concentrate to maintain meaning and tonality for my company culture, not to mention for my own life. I need non-efficient, non-multitasking space to reflect, maunder and dream. Otherwise my life becomes a roundelay of shallow skimming; a heedless, uncentered, probably narcissistic, self-referential solipsism. Perhaps this is what happened to Anthony Weiner. Maybe technology can affect character.

Christine Rosen comments compellingly about a U.S. culture increasingly defined by a social media that presents a constant demand to collect fans and adoration. (The New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology and Society, Number 20, Spring 2008) She quotes Lord Chesterfield, who wrote to his son in the 1740s: “There is time enough for everything in the course of the day, if you do but one thing at once, but there is not time enough in the year if you will do two things at a time.” For Lord Chesterfield such steady focus was a sign of intelligence and moral rectitude. “This steady and undissipated attention to one object, is a sure mark of a superior genius; as hurry, bustle, and agitation are the never-failing symptoms of a weak and frivolous mind.”

Or, as William James said, “The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will.”

Thank you, William.

Here I go again. Foaming at the mouth about government hostility to small business. I’m sorry. I can’t help it.

The present occasion for my bile comes out of a Charles Gasparino column in the NY Post (p. 21) of June 3, 2011. Mr. Gasparino speaks about how much small businessmen want to employ Americans in their firms, as well as to keep their companies firmly rooted in the US, but are being forced away from this strategy. He states, “Businesses have learned to make money by cutting costs (i.e., jobs) or relocating to China or India.  And it’s not merely that it’s cheaper to operate overseas; a huge part of the problem is the fear that it’s going to keep getting more expensive to hire here.”

I know lots of small business owners and to a man they are lovers of America and are committed to their local communities. But why should any of us hire in an increasingly hostile anti-business environment that limits entrepreneurial creativity and flexibility, and lards on ever-increasing bureaucracy and taxes? I personally know owners of small firms who manufacture things like gloves, eye glass frames, automobile filters, electronics, etc., who are wracking their brains to figure out how to profitably stay in the US.

Or, to look at a large business, Boeing, out-of-the-blue, is being prevented from opening a new plant with thousands of new jobs in right-to-work state South Carolina by an obscure bureaucratic agency packed with unelected labor union activists. If the ruling holds, Boeing will not open a non-competitive union plant. It will simply move the plant overseas. Bye, bye American jobs. John Galt, where art thou?

Peter Sidoti of Sidoti & Company and a specialist in analyzing small corporations, points to the disturbing example of A.T. Cross Co., which makes Cross pens. Cross couldn’t imagine taking on the expense of relocating out of Rhode Island–until it started adding up costs of federal, state, and local taxes and bureaucracy. You guessed it. Another plant goes to China. (And now their stock is booming.)

Sidoti goes on to talk about his own Wall Street firm which pays a 75% tax rate in New York. Says Sidoti, “Washington has to decide what they want the country’s future to be. Is it going to be Detroit, which did nothing to help business so people and capital have fled. Or will it be Texas, which is attracting people and capital?” Mr. Sidoti is himself looking into relocating his office to Austin, Texas.

It’s becoming increasingly easy for small business, as well as large, to relocate internationally and to a few business-friendly states. Like China and India. Like Texas. Note the Wall Street Journal’s lead editorial on Friday (page A-14, June 10, 2011) which lists Texas as generating fully 45% of non-farm new jobs in America since the recovery began. Says the WSJ, “The Texas economy has grown on average by 3.3% a year over the last two decades, compared with 2.6% for the US overall. Yet the core impulse of [the current national government] is to make America less like Texas and more like California, with more government, more unions, more central planning, higher taxes.”

To quote Charlie Gasparino again, “The bad news is that not everyone in this country is wealthy enough to own [foreign] stocks or can afford to move to China for a factory job.”

Thank you, Charlie Gasparino. I guess.

To continue from last week–My philosophy about sales employees is this: I don’t want employees at all. What I want is peers with a congruent value system to share a personal and business journey.

For me that journey must begin with common values. I seek out executive sales associates who want their work to give back to the world through service and truth telling to customers and potential customers. Under that rubric of shared values, I try to only hire executive sales colleagues who are better than me at both genuine caring for the client and creating efficacious results, in that order. However, the truth is we are all better and worse than each other in our variegated ways.

So I organize my firm, Corporate Rain International, as a lifestyle firm; as a virtual company that affords all associates the freedom to maximize their own sales instincts and acumen with minimal interference from the big, bad boss (me). Over 17 years I’ve found this philosophy makes for an enlivened company and a happy community. It incentivizes and vivifies autonomy as a core value.

Etymologically, the term autonomy derives from the Greek word meaning self-governing. To be autonomous means to act in accord with oneself. When we are autonomous we all emanate a salesmanship infused with energy, integrity and a personal authenticity that sells.

Authenticity is compelling. Like the judge who, when asked to define pornography, said, “I can’t define it, but I know it when i see it.” Buyers feel much the same way. They know authenticity when they see it. Stephen Colbert famously calls this quality “truthiness,” I see incentivizing “truthiness” in every sales associate of my firm as a primary leadership imperative. You want to activate “truthiness,” not just because it is moral, but because it is effective.

Therefore, part of incentivization is hiring people who share corporate values so they are always, without thinking, succeeding by propelling a truth inside themselves. In my case I hire educated, value-oriented, experienced salespeople who are adults and self-starters and I turn ‘em loose within a controlled system. And then I trust in the Lord. The results have generally rewarded my faith.

Of course, everyone works for money. That has to be fair and appropriate. But I firmly believe that passion and commitment are not fundamentally incentivized by money. They are better motivated by a will to happiness and autonomy.

Or, as Albert Schweitzer said, “Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.”

Thank you, Albert.

I believe much of what is expressed about incentivizing the salesman emanates from underestimation, condescension and even contempt for that person and her profession.

I don’t read sales books. They make me mad. From my own experience as an executive salesman, I believe most sales managers approach the whole subject of sales incentivization ass-backwards.

In my case, this judgment comes from being an unexpected, untrained and accidental success as an entrepreneur in elite sales outsourcing. My intent as a company founder was to build a happy life and create a community of peers who shared my values. While I wanted to make a comfortable living, money was not my business raison d’etre. And over the years I have managed to assemble a coterie of sales executives who, to one extent or another and in their variegated ways, are compadres in the realm of service, morals, humor and fierce independence.

After 17 years of accidental sales success emanating strictly form my own sales intuition and longings to be part of an ethical sales and service community, I have begun to discover I am not as odd or alone in my approach as I had always assumed.  And even more amazingly there is an increasing body of scholarly research that supports the instincts of my life experience and of conducting my business in a manner I damn well felt like. God bless entrepreneurship.

This is particularly true in the realm of sales incentivization. My core assumption has always been that happy people don’t fundamentally work for money because I don’t fundamentally work (or want to work) just for money. They work for satisfaction, happiness, a free life and other non-quantifiables.

Dr. Edward Deci, Director of the University of Rochester’s Human Motivation Program says:

“When people say that money motivates, what they really mean is that money controls. And when It does, people become alienated–they give up some of their authenticity–and they push themselves to do what they think they must do.” (Why We Do What We Do: Understanding Self-Motivation, G.P.Putnam’s Sons, 1995, p. 29)

In the realm of incentivization, I have always felt that salesmen are particularly misunderstood. Sales hires fail 80% of the time within the first year. That is a phenomenal statistic. While the reasons for this are complex, I believe the overemphasis on monetary reward is a large part of this statistic.

People want to be part of an organization that imbues quality and meaning to their lives.  Yes, they need to make money, but I don’t believe it ever activates their ardor and deep commitment. It does not inspire full use of their internal resources, their full being, their passion.

As CEO of my virtual executive sales outsourcing firm Corporate Rain International, I genuinely try to start with the assumption that every person I hire should be better than me, that every person I hire can teach me something, that each person I hire can comfortably grow the extant values of my company as a corporate companion.

To quote Edward Deci again, “[In speaking about motivation] the proper question is not, ‘How can people motivate others?’ but rather, ‘How can people create the conditions within which others will motivate themselves.‘” (Ibid, p. 10)

I agree. Thank you, Edward Deci.

Much as I hate it, I am deeply convicted of the entrepreneurial mandate for constant change. That is, change should be a value unto itself, not just a reaction to periodic business challenges.

As I see it, a corporate culture is a defensive construct erected to ward off and control chaos and the impact of existential business randomness, while generating a consistent and predictable profit. The dialectic of stability and creativity should ideally result in a vital organization that is both dynamic and stable. But if one is to err, my preference and personal instinct is to err on the side of the dynamic, on the side of change and creativity.

As you may know from past blogs, I was an actor for many years. That has had a seminal, if ineffable, effect on my instincts as a small businessman. One of my favorite acting stories was recounted to me by character actor and teacher Paul Austin. I never tire of sharing it. Paul was doing a Eugene O’Neill play with the actor Rip Torn. Rehearsals were going well, but, with two weeks of rehearsal remaining. Paul felt he had fully realized his character and was ready to open. He was in a quandary about what to do with himself for the last two weeks of rehearsal, so he went to Rip Torn and asked his advice. Paul recounts that Rip Torn thought for a moment, shrugged his shoulders and said, “Fuck it up.”

On the same theme, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, of Claremont Graduate University, recounts a story told him by Canadian ethnographer Richard Kool, describing one of the Indian tribes of British Columbia.

(Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, p. 80, Harper & Row, 1990)

The Shuswap region was and is considered by the Indian people to be a rich place: rich in salmon and game, rich in below-ground food resources such as tubers and roots–a plentiful land. In this region, the people would live in permanent village sites and exploit the environs for needed resources. They had elaborate technologies for very effectively using the resources of the environment, and perceived their lives as being good and rich. Yet, the elders said, at times the world became too predictable and the challenge began to go out of life. Without challenge, life had no meaning.

So the elders, in their wisdom, would decide that the entire village should move, those moves occurring every 25 or 30 years. The entire population would move to a different part of the Shushwap land and there, they found challenge. There were new streams to figure out, new game trails to learn, new areas where the balsam root would be plentiful. Now life would regain its meaning and be worth living. Everyone would feel rejuvenated and healthy.

Essentially, the Shuswap Indians elected to “fuck it up” every few decades. It kept their business culture (if you will) healthy, thriving, and imbued with aliveness and meaning. They elected to culturally and institutionally discipline themselves to see existence through perennially fresh eyes.

The reason I am in business is to be happy and whole. Profitability and personal wealth, if they come, are useful and satisfying in this, but profitability disengaged from meaning and spiritual growth is a dead thing. Change is an essential palliative to summon meaning, aliveness, and salvation into any business culture.

Thank you, Dr. Csikszentmihalyi.

On Friday morning my eye caught this headline in the New York Post (May 13, 2011, p. 2): Empire’ Exodus–36% of under 30 New Yorkers plan to flee state. Goodness me.

Now, I like living in New York. I like having part of my company here. But, increasingly, there seems to be no good reason for small business to locate here or in any of New York’s business loathing, fellow-traveling states like California, New Jersey, Illinois, or Michigan, to name the most obvious. God bless all these states, but avoiding them is simply prudent common-sense, particularly for the parvenu entrepreneur.

Readers of this blog sometimes think I am a wailing Cassandra, but I say with Jack Webb on Dragnet, “Just the facts, ma’am.” And the facts are these: Businesses and ambitious youth should go and will go where they encounter fertile, fecund, ROI rich soil–free of excessive bureaucracy, de-incentivizing taxation, inefficient government, high living costs and intransigent unions.

The Post article cites the NY1/YNN-Marist survey, which finds almost a third of NY State residents, over all age categories, are making plans to exit for greener pastures right now. Such grim statistics bode no good for the economic future in NY and similar states. For it’s business salvation NY needs radical change.

Entrepreneurs are by nature optimistic and sunny and positive people. I love being one and I love being around them. However, successful entrepreneurs are also clear-eyed realists, and not all states in this wonderful US of A offer equally business-friendly environments for spawning small business success. (If you’re interested in other thoughts on this topic try posts of 4/26/11, 12/21/10, 4/13/10.) So good luck to NY from the depths of my worried, but well-meaning, small business heart.

In this fast paced world, I am increasingly sensitive to the lurking, insidious danger of creeping commoditization for any product or service.

The President of my firm, Corporate Rain, has been kicking my ass lately about not moving quickly enough with the times. He’s right. I know I am not alone in wanting to rest on my laurels and assumptions of the status quo ante, but I’m realizing that long-term reputation and past successes are less relevant (though still important) in a rapidly changing, ROI intensive, technology-driven, chaotic, flat earth business climate.

Even though mostly I’ve had the good sense to accept change despite myself, I don’t like change. I don’t like the unknown. I want to reject it like a small child having a foot stomping tantrum. But for the healthy entrepreneur, just as for democracy, the price of ongoing success (or freedom) is eternal vigilance.

I finished Howard Schultz‘ memoir, Onward, last week. One of my favorite passages in his book is his very useful discussion of the dangers of commoditization.

Schultz reports that, in the spring of 2007, Starbucks’ stock kept bouncing to new highs and there was intense pressure from Wall Street to continue increasing profitability and velocity of sales. At one point Starbucks was opening as many as six new stores per week. This growth was taking a toll on quality control and service.

But Starbucks also was adding new items to the menu, which, while highly profitable, filled Schultz with foreboding. He felt his firm was increasing profits at the cost of its identity and its soul. For example, Starbucks had introduced breakfast sandwiches which often left the smell of burnt cheese in the air, rather than the signature aroma of roasted coffee beans. He felt Starbucks, in its rush to coruscating profit, was losing its essence. He states, “…negative incrementalization, like one thread after another pulling at our seams, could be the company’s undoing.” (p. 38) He did not want Starbucks to become more like McDonald’s. He recognized the threat of long-term brand dilution and commoditization. Accepting an initial loss of company revenue and internal company distress, he set about uncommoditizing Starbucks and restoring Starbucks traditional trope of quality and specialness from top to bottom. He sought to restore Starbucks soul, no matter the price. He was right.

Increasingly, I believe, commoditization is a real bete noire for business. You can’t sell everything, even if it is temporarily profitable. In a large sense, if you sell everything you may ultimately sell nothing. Long-term business health requires a constant honing of the identity and essence of any firm. With pressure to meet profitability and payroll goals, it is so easy to take on business that blurs your image. Certainly sales must be based on clear differentiation.

Otherwise you become, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, a pudding without a theme.

Thank you, Winston.

No. Not that “F” word, potty mind. Failure.

The Harvard Business Review, that white-shoe paragon of scholarship in successful corporate management and analysis, devoted it’s entire April edition to the most un-Harvardlike of subjects: Failure. HBR is on to something here. It’s April issue is particularly applicable to the entrepreneur in the contemporary world and our current unstable business environment.

What the Harvard Business Review is on to is neatly summed up by Adi Ignatius, the editor-in-chief, in his introductory column titled, “When We Fail at Failure.” He describes his issue as “examining the art and science of failing well.”

I recommend the April magazine, if you can still buy or access it, and I will not go into a listing of its many topics here, except to say that anyone who hasn’t explored failure and its variegated lessons is missing an essential tool, not only for entrepreneurial success, but also for fully living life. (I’ve already blogged very personally about this on 1/19/2010 and 1/26/2010, if you’re interested.)

One of the things I find common to entrepreneurs is a joi de vivre in the high-risk creative business process, a sense that the joy of the journey is as spiritually nurturing as the achievement of the business goal. So, the psychologically healthy entrepreneur must accept and grow from failures.

I in no way mean to say that failure, per se, is good. It is so painful and frightening. I’ve been through it a lot. Rita Gunther McGrath sums this up neatly in an essay called “Failing by Design” in the previously mentioned HBR issue. She says, “[Failure] can waste money, destroy morale, infuriate customers, damage reputations, harm careers, and sometimes lead to tragedy. But failure is inevitable in uncertain environments, and, if managed well, it can be a very useful thing.  Indeed, organizations can’t possibly undertake the risks necessary for innovation and growth if they’re not comfortable with the idea of failing.”

Friedrich Nietsche famously said, “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.” Not a bad mantra for the entrepreneur, but I prefer the simple sanguine confidence of Babe Ruth on the subject of the “F” word. He said, “Every strike brings me closer to the next home run.”

Thanks, Babe.

I saw a news item that caught my eye last week. California Lt. Governor Gavin Newsome led a delegation of California lawmakers to Austin, Texas to research why so many businesses are leaving California to set up shop in Texas.

Hell, it’s not brain surgery. They didn’t need to go to all that trouble. They could have just called me. The answer to why companies are leaving California is that California is a cesspool of bureaucratic red tape, union mandates and punitive taxation. For example, my outsourced sales company, Corporate Rain International, has but one employee in California. But I am required to pay almost $900 to CA each year just to allow this part-time employee to work for me. This rankles me no end. I have employees in ten other states and no other state requires this.

John Fund wrote about this in the Wall Street Journal on Friday. He cites Andy Puzder, the CEO of Hardee’s Restaurants, who reports it takes six months to two years to get a permit to build a new Carl’s Jr. Restaurant in California versus six weeks in Texas. Likewise, California is one of only three states that demand overtime pay after an eight hour day rather than after a 40 hour week.

Fund quotes Assemblyman Dan Logue, a member of the visiting California delegation,  “We came [to Texas] to learn why [our companies] would pick up their roots and move in order to grow their businesses.” Fund notes the ironic fact that hours after the California legislators met with Texas Governor Perry, Fujitsu Frontech, announced it was abandoning California. Fund further quotes business relocation expert Joe Vranich on the growing business exodus from California. “[Fujitsu Fuontech] is the 70th business to leave this year. That’s an average of 4.7 per week, up from 3.9 a week last year.” CEO Magazine reports California is the worst state for job and business growth and Texas is the best state.

I am flummoxed as to why not only states like California, but also New Jersey, Illinois, my beloved New York, and a couple of others, persist in what can only be described as an institutional, political and cultural hostility to business and entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs are the goose that can and must continue to lay golden eggs for the states we are based in if employment and the national economy are to recover.

If you want to read more on this topic, I wrote another post about it back on April 13, 2010 after a visit to my Texas office. Just scroll back. It is an unalloyed paean of love to the pro-entrepreneurial culture of Texas. States that want to fiscally survive our present economic downturn should look at the Texas model closely.

Fred Allen said, “California is a nice place to live–if you happen to be an orange.” It’s certainly less and less nice if you happen to be an entrepreneur. Thanks, Fred.

Ian Schafer, CEO of Deep Focus, a digital agency in New York recently was quoted in the NY Times about the amplification effect of the Internet and social media. He said, “It’s an age when anybody can communicate to an audience…You put something out and it may well be re-tweeted thousands of times.” (NY Times-3/15/11-Stuart Elliott)

Yes, indeed. Here are a few recent stories. Last month Gilbert Gottfried, the voice of the obnoxious duck in Aflac ads, posted a number of crude jokes on his Tweeter feed (@RealGilbert) about the earthquake disaster in Japan. Japan accounts for 75% of Aflac’s business. Of course, Mr. Gottfried was fired summarily, but the damage was done. In a related vein, Kenneth Cole got in hot water on February 2, when he tweeted (with blood in the streets of Egypt), “Millions are in an uproar in Cairo. Rumor is they heard our new spring collection is now available online.” Within minutes Cole’s insensitive glibness was transmitted in thousands of tweets around the globe (scroll back to February 8 blog). Or take Chrysler. An employee of their social media agency took it on himself to post on the official Chrysler twitter site (@ChryslerAutos), “I find it ironic that Detroit is known as the motor city and yet no one here knows how to [expletive deleted] drive.” The agency was let go.

I blogged two weeks ago about Howard Schultz’ new memoir, “Onward.” On Valentines Day, 2007, Schultz wrote a devastating internal memo to his top executives about Starbucks “losing its soul” in the quest for profit. The confidential memo, meant for only Schultz’ top executives, was quickly leaked. It crashed the stock, caused a crisis of confidence among employees, and created a PR nightmare. Schultz eventually turned this crisis to his advantage (a story well worth reading for any entrepreneur), but he recounts being visited by his former head of global communications Wanda Herndon, as he sat shell-shocked in his office. He recounts:

“Did you hear about the memo?” I said, still emanating disbelief. Wanda said yes, she knew about it…I shook my head and spoke about how hurt I was about the breach of trust. “Howard,” she said in the matter-of-fact tone I’d come to expect and appreciate. “Nothing is confidential. This is the new reality.” (Onward: How Starbucks fought for Its Life without Losing Its Soul, Rodale Press, 2011, p. 28)

In such a world, discretion is increasingly a byword for many top corporate executives. My own outsourced executive sales company, Corporate Rain International, has noticed an increased insulation and caution among large company executives we approach for our clients. And with good reason. The examples of damaging privacy leaks cannot be gainsayed. An assurance of prudence and judgment is a tonality that must be part of any contemporary high-level executive communication.

To quote Hillary Clinton, “In almost every profession–whether it’s law or journalism, finance or medicine or academia or running a small business–people rely on confidential communications to do their jobs. We count on the space of trust that confidentiality provides. When someone breaches that trust, we are all the worse.” (www.BrainyQuote.com)

Perhaps that is the unfortunate reality of our brave new media world.

Thank you, Hillary.

Atlas is shrugging–finally. Ayn Rand‘s masterpiece, Atlas Shrugged, will make its debut as a motion picture next Friday. About damn time.

I was surprised and pleased to see a trailer for Rand’s great novel last week. It is a rare thing these days to view a Hollywood movie that celebrates rather than denigrates the virtues of entrepreneurship, capitalism and laissez-faire economics, while also delineating the dangers of command economics and the faceless tyranny of excessive government regulation. Here’s hoping this belated debut will do justice to Rand’s compelling and contemporarily pertinent tale.

Reading Atlas Shrugged was a seminal event in my own philosophical journey from quasi-socialist to a fiscally conservative entrepreneur. I come from an extremely liberal family. Norman Thomas, leader of the American Socialist Party, gave a presentation in my family’s living room in 1961 and my father was an acquaintance and fellow-traveler of Hubert Humphrey. During college and after I was directly involved in Democratic politics for left-wing candidates like Andrew Young, George McGovern and Jimmy Carter.

I was not alone in being jolted by Ayn Rand’s almost 1200 page novel. In 1991 the Library of Congress and the Book-of-the-Month club did a joint survey and found that Atlas Shrugged ranked second only to the Bible among books that made a difference in people’s lives. As of Friday, the novel was still ranked number 79 by Amazon. It remains a hot seller almost 60 years after its publication–and this for a frequently dense and philosophical novel of similar length to Tolstoy’s War and Peace.

Martin Fridson, who reviewed the film this week in Barron’s (April 11, 2011, p. 23), reports the film is finally being produced by entrepreneur John Aglialoro, who acquired the film rights back in 1992. That it has taken him 19 years to get the film up speaks volumes to the Hollywood disdain for anything smacking of approbation for the courage and zeal of the entrepreneur. Looked at from afar, it appears to me that there is an unspoken reverse McCarthyism to contemporary Hollywood that cannot countenance a celebration of business. With few exceptions (Robert Duvall, Clint Eastwood, Jon Voigt, Kelsey Grammar come to mind), there exists a lockstep uniformity and a smug condescension, if not downright hostility, to any positive view of the benighted businessman.

In an article in the October 11, 2010 New Yorker, James Surowiecki quotes Edward Jay Epstein as saying, “Businessmen are now part of Hollywood’s ‘Axis of Evil.’”  Surowiecki says businessmen are now default villains playing the roles once occupied by Nazis, Russians and tin-pot dictators.

Perhaps Atlas Shrugged will be a first crack in that pattern. The movie has a low budget (less that $20,000,000) and is being produced without major stars. Nevertheless, Fridson states, “Rand’s advocates will regard this film as an eloquent statement of her call for individual freedom. Moviegoers interested mainly in entertainment will appreciate its locomotive-like pace, and will be moved by searing images of America in a devastating depression in 2016.” Hmm. I hope that’s not predictive and I hope and pray the film will do the book justice.

Thank you, Martin Fridson.

P.S. On a note of splendid irony, Atlas Shrugged will open on traditional Tax Day, April 15, 2011.

Love.

That’s the first word in uber-entrepreneur Howard Schultz new memoir Onward: How Starbucks Fought For Its Life Without Losing Its Soul. That’s also the word I took away from an event I attended at the Inc. Business Owners Council meeting in New York, which Mr. Schultz addressed on March 30 in New York.

Mr. Schultz’ writing positively reeks of love. And I mean that in the nicest possible way. I’ve only read half his book, but here’s a quote from the first page:

There is a word that comes to my mind when I think about our company and our people. That word is “love.”  I love Starbucks because everything we’ve tried to do is steeped in humanity. Respect and dignity. Passion and laughter. Compassion, community, and responsibility. Authenticity.

I can’t imagine a more endearing and noble foundational statement for any entrepreneur. It is also very clear that Schultz has effectively walked his idealistic talk, when you hear him in person.

I do have at least two quibbles with his book. One is his annoying proclivity for self-aggrandizement when he constantly refers to his personal intimacy with seemingly every big shot CEO in the US, as well as numerous performers and celebrities–his dawn bike rides with Michael Dell, his references to long conversations with the likes of Bono, K.D. Lang, Norman Lear, Jeffrey Katzenberg, et al. To my taste he includes just too much non-essential name dropping. (“And then I spoke to my good friend [plug in CEO or celebrity.” or “I immediately called my long-term intimate pal [plug in the CEO or celebrity.”) It’s a bit much for me. My other cavil is that the book does simply go on too long about the technicalities of coffee. At least for me. But perhaps that is unfair. Schultz has a deep passion which informs his excessive detail about the ins and outs of coffee entrepreneurship.

My favorite thing about Schultz is his very personal love for his company in the context of the global community. He is a convincing evangelist. He embraces his company as a lover. He also offers Starbucks as a mediator of meaning, an impassioned global citizen, and even a vehicle of salvation. He is unquestionably deeply in love with Starbucks. It is probably very difficult for his wife.

Howard Schulz describes the Starbucks mission as the following: “To inspire and nurture the human spirit one person, one cup, and one neighborhood at a time.” How lovely. More thoughts about this next week.

Thank you, Howard.

When you’re in a rush slow down.

I’m a fairly hyper guy. That’s not an uncommon state for any entrepreneurial salesman. The day I am not up to my ass in alligators is the exception. However, though it may be counter intuitive to the credo of most entrepreneurs. I’ve personally found a multitasking frenzy ain’t the answer to this conundrum.

Perhaps I’m just slow and a dullard, but what occurs when I rush to get everything done in the seemingly inadequate time frames I’m presented with, is that I pay a price. And this  is particularly true in the micro niche of my specialty, executive selling, where I find refinement, service and attention to detail especially important.

The personal price I pay for speed is sometimes accuracy, sometimes quality, sometimes verboseness, sometimes oversimplification–but there is always a diminution in quality, exactitude and in depth of communication. That loss of precision is particularly a negative in presenting a compelling sales tonality to a corporate leader. Casual mistakes can sink you with these folks.

Finding time not to speed through things is a question of prioritization and time allocation. Any important project, RFP, or business communication needs to marinate. I personally have to allow the space for this.

One of my concerns about our burgeoning social media is simply the time it sucks up. How many online miracles and digital wonderments can I absorb? I personally find an overabundance of data makes important things fuzzy and harder to find. It actually impedes good decision-making  and my business intuition. For me information overload withers efficiency. So personally, if I have to eliminate my attentiveness to Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn, that is a prioritization that creates time for me to find empathy, understanding, and subtlety in all my sales outreach. I simply decide not to speed through to cover everything our new media seems to demand I be up on. For me speed is the enemy of doing the core executive sales chores well.

(I’d love to get feedback on this one.)

The wisdom of the ages has cautions for the time-pressured entrepreneur. In the sixth century B.C. Confucius said, “Desire to have things done quickly prevents their being done thoroughly.” Or take Chaucer, who says in The Merchant’s Tale, “Ther n’is no werkman whatever he be/That may beth werken wel and hastily.”  Or Shakespeare in Romeo and Juliet, “Wisely, and slow. They stumble that run fast.”

Thank you Confucius, Chaucer, and Shakespeare.

There’s an art to business writing, an art that begins with good writing.

I was caught by an article on March 3, 2011 in the Wall Street Journal titled, “Students Struggle For Words” (Diana Middleton, page B8). It documents the growing complaints by employers of the inadequate writing skills on the part of newly minted MBAs. Anecdotal evidence includes complaints about business school graduates rambling, using pretentiously technical language, or careless and overly-casual emails.

There is some hard evidence to back up these complaints. Ms. Middleton cites evidence from the Graduate Management Admission Council, which administers the Graduate Management Admissions Test. GMAT essay scores have fallen from 4.7 out of 6 to 4.4 in the last four years. Or take Sharon Washington, executive director of the National Writing Project in Berkeley, says our high schools and undergraduate programs have de-emphasized writing and constant digital communication has eroded writing skills (LOL, WTF, OMG, BRB, etc.)

Arthur Levitt, former Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission and Bloomberg contributor, has been on a jihad to bring plain English back to business.  He says much business writing is incomprehensible. “It lacks color and nuance, and it’s not terribly interesting to read.”

There is one quality I find essential in written communication with real decision makers at corporations. That quality is simplicity.

Executive face time has immense value. My firm, Corporate Rain International, only does one thing which is to create serious introductions for our clients with strategic corporate leaders. I strongly believe that, short of a personal introduction, the best way to initially reach out to corporate decision makers is a snail mail letter of utter simplicity. Ideally this letter on your best stationary should be able to be scanned in four seconds by a busy executive and be focused on ROI. Prolixity is to be avoided at all cost.

A written letter shows respect, personal seriousness, and class. While simplicity is the byword of the introductory letter, that does not mean you should limit the use of exact vocabulary. Don’t dumb it down. High level executives are usually educated, sophisticated people who respect the subtle and gradated use of language. However, the primary point of business writing is to simply get to the point with grace and exactitude. (For more on this scroll back to Dec. 7, 2010 Letters and Executive Sales.)

And perhaps most important of all is to actually have something of worth and originality to communicate in the first place. As Sholem Asch writes, “Writing comes more easily if you have something to say.” (New York Herald Tribune, 11/6/55)

Thanks, Sholem.

Lonely.

God, that word sounds pathetic. It’s not the first thing that comes to mind when pondering the entrepreneur. In fact, I don’t believe I’ve ever read an article about loneliness and the entrepreneur. Yet I know it’s a reality that exists. I know it certainly exists for me.

Most folks think of owners and CEOs as hard driving, autonomous, tough and energetic. Kind of mini-masters of the universe. And most of my business peers are that, in their very different ways. However, I believe there is a closeted yearning in most of us to connect communally, safely, discretely.

I remember sixteen years ago when I started my executive sales outsourcing firm, Corporate Rain International, a man named Fred Klein, a very successful lawyer, serial investor, and entrepreneur, invited me to join his group Gotham City Networking. I attended for about a year. Fred was quite kind in introducing me to his colleagues and friends. Though I got too busy to attend, I was deeply grateful from the time I was a member. (It also helped me feel less like a fraud as a parvenu businessman.) Fred was a generous nurturer and his group reflected this.

I started thinking about this again last fall when I reluctantly joined Lewis Schiff’s Inc. Small Business Council. While Lewis’ seminars sounded very useful (and were) I was quite reluctant to join. Mostly for time reasons. But I did. The reward I gleaned from this has been very different from what I expected. That reward has been a growing concatenation of real friendships and allayed loneliness. An easing of a hunger I was not even aware of.

Friendships, for entrepreneurs, are hard. We’re busy. Most of us have primary commitments to our families and homes in our little free time and we can’t even keep up current friendships. Most of our human contact is within our own firms. It is simply not practicable to have real open friendships with your employees, even your top executives. Being a boss requires a certain distance.

One of my all-time favorite TV series is The Sopranos. Tony Soprano is a kind of an entrepreneur when you think about it. I remember an early episode where Tony is worried about being yessed to death by his gang. He asks his wife Carmela what she thinks. She replies, “[Your subordinates] go around complementing you on your new shoes, telling you you’re not going bald, not getting fat. Do you think they really care? You’re the boss! They’re scared of you. They have to kiss your ass and laugh at your stupid jokes.” Unfortunately, Carmela is utterly right.

An easeful, peer community of shared assumptions and base experience is increasingly rare in our balkanized society. Yet the soulful amelioration of business aloneness is not a need that an owner should repress or shove aside lightly.

To quote Mother Theresa, “The most terrible poverty is loneliness.” Thank you, Mother Theresa.

I was having lunch with one of my colleagues from the Inc. Small Business Council last week. He owns a very successful and growing marketing company but he expressed frustration with solving the HR conundrum. He was opening new offices and was trying to organically develop leadership and staff that would stick with him; that would want to cherish and help mold his company over a goodly period of time. He expressed concern that what he experienced from his younger employees was a ubiquitous generational sense of unearned entitlement and expectation of immediate gratification.

This problem is a growing one, if not an endemic one, for ambitious entrepreneurs. That is, the work ethic of the rising workforce.

To this point, Michael Goodwin of the NY Post recently wrote an article headlined, “‘Gimme’ Culture Imperils Nation.” (February 23, 2011)  He argues compellingly that the US has an increasingly spoiled workforce. He states:

“[Entitlement culture] is contagious and so ingrained in how we live and think that we no longer think twice before demanding total satisfaction and express outrage when we don’t get it. We are entitled to it now because we want it, whatever it is. If somebody else has it first, then we have been cheated and are doubly furious.”

John Krakauer, in his book “Into the Wild,” says, “It is easy, when you are young, to believe that what you desire is no less than what you deserve, to assume that if you want something badly enough, it is your God-given right to have it.”

For my own executive outsourced sales company, Corporate Rain International, I decided many years ago to follow a non-traditional route of only using sales executives of a certain age. Without exception my sales executives are between the ages of 35 and 60. I’ve always preferred older, experienced sales executives because of their corporate experience from the client’s side and because of their  unteachable treasure of a “lived life.” All of us after a certain point in life have had some hard knocks and have experienced many things. I know this breeds empathy in a sales executive and ability to see from the client’s point of view. The other advantage of older employees is simply the stronger generational work ethic referred to by Michael Goodwin.

Mark Twain said, “Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living; the world owes you nothing: it was here first.” Thanks, Mark.

The great secret of sales is that being good is the selfish thing to do.

I’m sure goodness is the last thing that pops into the popular imagination when anyone thinks of sales. Sales and goodness are immiscible, to most people’s way of thinking. Effective sales is as much a moral proposition as working for Greenpeace, the March of Dimes, or the Catholic Church. (Well, maybe more than the Catholic Church given the fallen nature of some of the priesthood.) Sales is a vocation that should be a calling every bit as “other” centered as any of the so-called helping professions like ministry, social work, psychiatry or nursing.

The cliche of the sales ethos is most memorably summed up by Michael Douglas playing the smarmy M&A corporate snake oil purveyor Gordon Gecko in Wall Street. “Greed is good.” (My personal favorite testosterone-fueled salesman is Alec Baldwin as Blake in Glengarry Glen Ross personifying a stone-cold amoral hunter–a fierce closer, a killer and a “winner” at any and all costs.) Or the TV car salesman riding on the back of a hippopotamus, screaming “Deals! Deals! Deals!” into the screen.

Vince Lombardi is famous for saying, “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.” Much as I admire Vince Lombardi, I don’t agree with the tone of his statement even in football, and certainly not in life. But I can assure you as a salesman for my own executive sales company Corporate Rain International, the way of winning in entrepreneurial sales is simply the path of service, truth and genuine care for potential clients or buyers. The really good salesmen I know are people who truly care about their clients. And by this I mean a soul deep caring, as to a fellow inhabitant of God’s universe, not the ersatch empathy or facsimile fellow feeling of the manipulator.

The “winning” of the salesman, and a true “selfishness” leading to long-term sales success, lies in really being good, bone deep good. Or as close as we can expect to be as imperfect beings. Just as physicians owe their service first to their patients, so salesmen owe their truth and passionate caring to their client at a soul deep level. This is not a treacly, wussy, or pollyannaish idealism. It is a winning and selfish practicing of goodness.

In fact selfish salesmanship, in the larger picture, is serving all members of society by the way you do business. Capitalism itself, in it’s best form, is simply dealing with customers and suppliers in mutually beneficial exchanges of goods, services and money. That’s how I try to see myself as a capitalist. That’s how I see myself as a entrepreneur. That’s how I see myself as a salesman.

Selfish.

I was caught by a headline in the WSJ last week, titled, “Get Out Of My Way, You Jerk!” (2/15/11-Shirley S. Wang) The article is about the sidewalk equivalent of “road rage.” In the article, Dr. Leon James of the University of Hawaii, discusses the danger of the intermittent explosive disorder termed “sidewalk rage.” He has actually devised a way to measure this phenomenon called the Pedestrian Aggressiveness Syndrome Scale.

I’m a busy New Yorker. And New York is a walking town. I’ve lived here over 30 years and I am an aficionado of practical ways of navigating Manhattan most efficiently. I still ride the subways regularly, just as I did in my salad days as an actor. (I find that most times subways are the fastest, surest transport in New York.)

But I am also a wily and strategic walker when I am in New York. I have certainly experienced “sidewalk rage,” which is a dangerous thing for any salesman prior to a meeting or presentation. It just throws you out of sync and can leave you emotionally unfocused and concentration impaired. So, in addition to well-known techniques of deep breathing and letting go in such circumstances, I use some little practical tricks to remediate my semi-chronic vulnerability to this state, particularly when I’m running late. Here’s just one.

You are rarely not in a crowd when in mid-town Manhattan. So, when I am late as I come off Metro North at Grand Central Station, I pick the largest, fastest-moving man I can find and follow closely (about three feet behind) in his wake. When he veers in a different direction from my destination I switch to the next large, fast man going my way, much in the manner of a football running back following his left guard through the line. I avoid the awkwardness of a strict open field run and its real risk of knocking over old ladies and small children in my frantic urgency to make my next appointment.

Or, as John Florio says in SecondFruits, “If you will be a traveler, have always the eyes of a falcon, the ears of an ass, the face of an ape, the mouth of a hog, the shoulder of a camel, the legs of a stag…”

Thanks, John.

Here’s an only half facetious comparison of a business friendly state with one that is not so much.  A Texas client of Corporate Rain shared it with me.  It is why I think long and hard about what states I have exposure to these days.

California

The Governor of California is jogging with his dog along a nature trail.

A coyote jumps out and attacks the Governor’s dog, then bites the Governor.

1. The Governor starts to intervene, but reflects upon the movie “Bambi” and then realizes he should stop because the coyote is only doing what is natural.

2. He calls  animal control. Animal Control captures the coyote and bills the State $200 testing it for diseases and $500 for relocating it.

3. He calls a veterinarian. The vet collects the dead dog and bills the State $200 testing it for diseases.

4. The Governor goes to hospital and spends $3,500 getting checked for diseases from the coyote and on getting his bite wound bandaged.

5. The running trail gets shut down for 6 months while Fish & Game conducts a $100,000 survey to make sure the area is now free of dangerous animals.

6. The Governor spends $50,000 in state funds implementing a “coyote awareness program” for residents of the area.

7. The State Legislature spends $2 million to study how to better treat rabies and how to permanently eradicate the disease throughout the world.

8. The Governor’s security agent is put on leave, with full pay and benefits,  for not stopping the attack. The State spends $150,000 to hire and train a new agent with additional special training for the nature of coyotes.

9. PETA protests the coyote’s relocation and files a $5 million suit against the State.

Texas

The Governor of Texas is jogging with his dog along a nature trail. A coyote jumps out and attacks his dog.

1. The Governor shoots the coyote with his State-issued pistol and keeps jogging. The Governor has spent $0.50 on a .45 ACP hollow point cartridge.

2. The Buzzards eat the dead coyote.

And that, my friends, is why California is broke and Texas is not.

Talk about unintended consequences.

No one projects a more cool, groovy, or fabulous personal brand than Kenneth Cole. I know almost nothing about fashion, but do casually keep up with the high-profile life of Kenneth Cole since he was a fellow graduate of my Alma mater Emory University in Atlanta in the early ’70s. But his latest blog makes me question my own academic pedigree. What was he thinking?

Well, probably he was thinking that he had made another clever and oh so courant bon mot promoting his brand on one of the cutting-edge new technologies, Twitter.

In case you haven’t heard, Kenneth Cole personally posted the following tweet at 10:30 on Thursday, February 2, 2011: “Millions are in an uproar in Cairo. Rumor is they heard our new spring collection is now available online…K.C.“  This was posted in the context of violence and death, including western journalists, in Egypt.

Here are just a few response tweets:

1.  arrington – WTF is wrong with you, @KennethCole?
2.  SoullaLindo – Bad taste @Kenneth Cole. Bad. Taste.
3.  palbi-palbi – @kennethcole is the asshole of the day.

Or take PR executive Kathleen Schmidt, who goes by the user name BookGirl96. She jokes,”I wouldn’t want to be in Kenneth Cole’s shoes right now.”  Haha. Ah, Kenneth. Hoist on your own petard.

It is easy to pile on, doing back flips in an orgy of schadenfreude over the perhaps overly smug and glib cleverness of Mr. Cole. (In fairness, he has apologized.)  But, the bigger issue is, one of unintended dangers in usage of any number of exploding new apps and Internet genius. I have personally spoken with thought leaders at cutting-edge technology companies (BzzAgent, Zappos.com, Think Interactive, Oddcast, Didit, Blue Ribbon Consulting, Blue Wolf Group, et al), many of whom have been clients of my firm Corporate Rain International, who, to a man, speak with an almost supercilious dismissal of expressed caveats about the downside of our new technological nirvana.

I’ve  written about my personal misgivings in several  previous blogs (see 1/11, 7/27 and 7/20) and I won’t repeat the litany today, except to say there is an Icarus-like danger in insufficiently examined hubristic flights of faith in our wondrous new media. Hence, Kenneth Cole last Thursday.

To quote Ogden Nash (Verses from 1929 On), “Here’s a good rule of thumb/Too clever is dumb.” Thank you, Ogden.

I was so immensely touched by a movie I saw last week called “The King’s Speech.” It’s about King George VI, who accidentally became King of England upon the abdication of his older brother Edward VIII in 1936 on the eve of WWII.

George VI was deemed imminently unsuitable to become British monarch because of his debilitating and humiliating stutter. It was unimaginable that this man could inspire and lead his people with such a handicap. The film chronicles George’s attempt to overcome this severe and very public embarrassment.

For me George VI’s story is a tale that informs and inspires me in my own attempts to lead my company from my own flawed foundation that is the heritage of being human.

Corporate leaders are all stutterers in one form or another. It is an audacious act to create a company despite the inadequacies that, in their variegated ways, are the fundamental heritage of all people and why I have always felt the foundational virtue of entrepreneurship is simply courage.

Colin Firth, who portrays George with an admirable combination of determined fortitude and raw emotional nakedness that will surely win an Academy Award this year, describes watching archival footage depicting George VI’s stutter. “You see the neck and mouth go. I found it heartbreaking, literally tear-jerking. Something really hit me watching that. I saw the vulnerability and immense courage, all wrapped up in one moment.” (Interview in the Wall Street Journal by David Mermelstein–January 19, 2011)

The quality of effective corporate leadership that I most admire combines a practical modesty with a frontiersman’s ability to step fearlessly into the unknown. Perhaps entrepreneurship is truly the last frontier, now that all physical frontiers have been explored and conquered.

One of the problems of my own generation–that of the baby boomers–is that we have perhaps come to think too highly of ourselves. We seem to have lost the innate humility that comes from an acknowledgment of our fallen, flawed nature, what we unapologetically used to call sin, the state of being less than God. Ideal corporate leadership is mindful of the practical reality of human limitation and imperfection.

“The King’s Speech” gives a piquant reminder of the limitations in each of us as corporate leaders, as well as the earned dignity imbued from both the acceptance of that imperfect human state and its vanquishment where possible. Healthy entrepreneurial leadership exists in a balanced place  between narcissistic overconfidence and an immobilizing despair at our inevitable insufficiencies.

Dag Hammarskjold says in his spiritual autobiography “Markings,” “Humility is just as much the opposite of self-abasement as it is of self-exaltation.” Thank you, Dag.

I was stuck in the dentist’s chair for an hour and a half last Tuesday. This was perfect for a bleak winter’s day in New York. I came in depressed and anxious about my business and some personal issues. After hearing the dentist’s usual homily on my dental sins (poor brushing, insufficient flossing, erratic check-ups), I grimly settled in to endure my dental cleaning penance.

I like my dentist Marvin. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of American popular music which he plays while drilling away. I learn a lot from him. Also, I tremendously enjoy his excellent laughing gas. (Last week’s aroma was piña colada. Yahoo.)

For my appointment, Dr. Marv’s musical play list was from radio broadcasts of the 1930′s. Enlivening and enjoyable, as always. In my existentially saturnine mood I found myself listening to a song I’d never heard, called, “If You Want To Have The Rainbow, Then You Have To Have The Rain.” It was a lovely, light depression-era ditty about looking on the bright side of life. Nothing especially deep. Yet it got me thinking positively again and jolted me out of my stultifying, self-pitying funk. It restored me to gratitude and clarity.

I treasure those blessed moments of unexpected captive stillness that can sometimes quiet the frenetic, unreasoning pace of daily business life. They can be both a palliative and a meditative grace. Even five minutes stuck waiting on a line or 30 minutes on the train can imbue a renewed centeredness and insight. These moments are a gift and make me a clearer, freer, happier man–and, I am sure, a more sure-handed and prosperous entrepreneur. I am so grateful when these captive moments find me, pull me up short, and bring respite and perspective to the headlong rush that is the essence of most of my entrepreneurial days.

German poet Gottfried Benn (Statische Gedichte) says,

“To represent some part,
Busy-ness,
Traveling to, and from,
Is the distinguishing stamp of a world
Which does not see well.”

Thank you, Gottfried.

Spiderman: Turn Off The Dark is extraordinary. It seems like a brilliant idea. It is original. It is complex. It is cool. It’s cutting-edge. It is a $65,000,000 (and climbing) disaster.

This supposedly paradigm-changing musical, with opening now postponed for the fourth time to March, is based on the comic book and movie character and is conceived and composed by Bono and the Edge from U2 and directed by the gifted Julie Taymor. It was anticipated by many as the hit of the Broadway season.

What it actually is is a tuneless, undramatic high-flying ice show. It has no opening number, a laughable song about shoe-shopping, the leads can’t act, and it needs a totally new book.

It has been plagued by numerous serious injuries and an undependable set. To cite just one example, Spiderman double, Christopher Tierney, recently fell 30 feet, suffering skull fractures, broken ribs, broken wrists and internal bleeding. One night Spiderman was left floating and spinning for 20 minutes over the audience. The show is frequently stopped to fix malfunctioning sets and technology.

The musical is a sell-out for the present, but not because folks are going to see a Broadway show. They are going because they hope to see violence, mayhem and disaster. Like going to a hockey game to see the fights or going to the Roman Coliseum to see the Christians devoured by the lions. The drama, actually, consists of a ghoulish schadenfreude external to the essence of the play.

But schadenfreude has a limited half-life, ROI-wise. This project needs to be abandoned. It will not fly, no pun intended.

In terms of sales it is also important to know when to abandon the chase. No matter how right something looks in theory, one key to successful sales is knowing when to cut your losses and move on. As chief salesman for my company Corporate Rain, I certainly have had to learn to cut bait on even the most promising, exciting projects when they hopelessly begin to devour too much money, time, and creative energy. It is often a fine line between a focused determination to make an idea or project work and an inefficient investment of the time and effort poured into an abyss. A lot of a well-honed, healthy sales instinct is knowing when to persist and when to let go.

As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

Thank you, Ralph Waldo.

There was an extraordinary article in the NY Times in early December (December 6, 2010-David Segal). The article reports the arrest of Vitaly Borker, who perpetrated sales fraud through his Brooklyn-based web site DecorMyEyes.com. He did this by manipulating Google technology and subsequently intimidating and threatening his customers.

Mr. Borker’s fraud involved sales of fake designer eyeglasses with the express intent of generating negative Internet publicity. Mr. Borker purposely set about enhancing his Google profile by escalating the many complaints he received through threats and through cyberbullying of his Internet clients. This in turn generated more Internet complaints and bad publicity. Thus, counterintuitively, he boosted his sales of DecorMyEyes because Google’s algorithm was unable to distinguish between praise and complaints. The large number of negative postings translated into buzz which pushed DecorMyEyes high in search results and boosted sales. Amazing. Immoral and reprehensible, but quite brilliant actually.

Being a certified Luddite and technology dinosaur, I am of course drawn to the negative implications of accidental technological consequences. (Don’t get me wrong. I am grateful for the efficiencies and wonderment of cutting-edge technology. My virtual executive sales firm, Corporate Rain International, could not exist without high-level technology much beyond my ken.) However, there is a danger in placing too much faith in the new magicalism of technology.

Sales remains basically a human function. People hire who they personally like and trust. There can be a dangerous seduction for the salesman in becoming too wedded to his PowerPoint, his GoToMeeting, and his Salesforce. These technologies and many of their cousins and brothers, can add a template coldness, a common-denominator oversimplification to the sales process. Brilliant technology can also breed an emotional distance and creative rigidity in the salesman. Much of a salesman’s work, by necessity, involves rejection.  This rejection can feel very personally painful. It takes energy and courage to forthrightly deal with keeping yourself open to the sometimes harrowing, but healthy and honest, personal sales process.

There are at least two treacherous seductions of technology that come quickly to my mind. One is simply just getting too enamored of the groovy. It feels cool to be using the latest app, whether it provides a real sales efficiency or not. But the other real danger is that technology can breed both spiritual and work-a-day laziness. For example, last week I took a sales meeting about a new sales technology. The salesman wanted to share the technical brilliance of his product with an extended PowerPoint. But, when I asked him to simply first tell me in practical terms the outcome per my specific issues, he got a bit defensive and uncomfortable, like the proverbial deer in the headlights. He knew how his product worked but couldn’t or wouldn’t help me cross the customized bridge I needed to judge his product’s practical efficacy for me.

Likewise, I consider Mr. Borker’s scheme, as reported in the NY Times, to be a crime ultimately grounded in laziness, albeit with a very clever understanding of manipulating the Internet. Successful sales remains essentially a human interaction that can be and is enhanced by technology, but technology is a tool and will always remain a tool for the real work of good salesmanship, not its essence.

Charles M. Allen said, “If the human race wants to go to hell in a hand basket, technology can help it get there by jet. It won’t change the desire or the direction, but it can greatly speed the passage.”

Or, as my friend Tom Chenault, CEO of Chenault Systems in Dallas, Texas says,  “Sometimes good technology just makes the same old mess go around faster and faster.”

Thanks, Charles. Thanks, Tom.

According to the Wall Street Journal (December 15, 2010) Americans now spend more on tort litigation than they do on new cars.

What a waste. What a waste of energy and creativity that must be siphoned into unproductive litigation or insurance and administrative protection. What a profound nonsensical silliness is our system that so richly rewards a parasitic institution which so effectively and legally preys on small and large business alike.

Surely the rest of the world must laugh at this institutionalized suck on our corporate efficiency. The courts are full of such frivolous items as the $54 million dollar pair of pants that a Washington D.C. cleaner supposedly ruined in 2007. Yet such nutty nuisance lawsuits can hit any one of us at any time.

The simple answer to all this is loser pays, a system like England and most of the rest of the sane world has. The problem is the power of the tort lobby, of course, which makes the second largest political contributions in the U.S. to keep our system less profitable and less productive. The tort bar is a true national villain: It is a profoundly anti-business, anti-efficiency, anti-employment and purely self-enriching force.

However, there is hope and (as most creative governmental ideas these days) this hope is coming from the states. For example, Texas is proposing a British-style, loser pays rule which would require the plaintiff to pick up the legal costs of their targets if they lose their suits.

Texas has had its gimlet eye on the tort bar already, with reforms in 2003 and 2005. Again, the Wall Street Journal states in an editorial of December 15, “Before the reform, Texas was a kind of holy place on the tort bar pilgrimage. Now it is a Mecca [particularly] for doctors…” but increasingly for small business in general. So yee-haw. God bless Texas, an increasingly bright and seminal beacon of business enlightenment and legal sanity.

So as not to end the year with another grumpy screed, I am happy to note that business does appear to be improving. Most economic indicators are pointing up for the next year, almost across the board. I’m certainly seeing a spike up at Corporate Rain International. So God bless us each and every one as we embark on 2011.

Watch out. Our next financial crisis is impending, brothers and sisters. That crisis, that looming black cloud, that lurking bête noire, is state bankruptcy. And it could be more cataclysmic than all the adjustments demanded by federal mandates passed for us in the last two years.

While there is general relief in our entrepreneurial community about the extension of the Bush tax cuts, the increasing distress of states is a floating iceberg for entrepreneurs, mostly obscured from view, but dangerous nonetheless. What is coming is potentially so bad that it is worth considering abandoning the most egregiously troubled of our states.

This incipient threat is on the doorstep and is getting insufficient attention. Where it will descend first will be California, New Jersey, Illinois, and my beloved New York. Many others will follow in their wake. Pensions, salaries and debt are overwhelming for these states. They are desperate for money. The most obvious place for states to get money is our small business community. We are simply the easiest, largest, most vulnerable money pool for them to go after.

And it is not just the states themselves. It is also their cities, their school districts, and their multifarious independent taxing authorities.

Here’s a story for you. It concerns a company I know well. My own.

Six years ago my firm received a small bill from the unemployment insurance office of New York claiming I should pay NY unemployment insurance for four out-of-state consultants I was occasionally using. I appealed the assessment and fine and won my appeal after three in-person administrative court appearances. Much to my surprise I was notified months later that my case was overturned on appeal, without me even being informed of the appeal. When I called the state to protest this high-handed, unfair action they basically told me, “Tough. That’s the way we do it.” My option, they kindly informed me, was to spend big dollars and time appealing my small debt through the regular courts. I paid. That is the kind of justice by bureaucratic fiat that small business can expect as states grow increasingly desperate.

In truth there are only a few states that actually try to nurture small business, Texas being chief among them. In a recent editorial in the NY Post (Dec. 10, 2010), Ray Keating of the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council notes the conclusions of the “Small Business Survival Index 2010.” Keating states that, in many states, politicians have spent decades creating over regulation, high taxes, and wasteful public spending that has outrageously raised the cost of economic risk-taking and chased away business. “What we have in these states is one vast anti-enterprise zone.” My theory is that it can only get worse–lots worse–when states hit the panic button.

Call me paranoid. But watch out. As Brooks Atkinson put it in Once Around The Sun, “Bureaucracies are designed to perform public business. But as soon as a bureaucracy is established, it develops an autonomous spiritual life and comes to regard the public as the enemy.”

Amen, Brother Brooks.

I went to the opening of a marvelous business movie this weekend. It’s called The Company Men. Go see it.

The film is filled with uniformly wonderful acting by the likes of Tommy Lee Jones, Ben Affleck, Craig T. Nelson, Kevin Costner, Chris Cooper and Maria Bello, among others. As an old failed actor, as well as an entrepreneur, I was knocked out by such a generous and artistic ensemble effort. The movie made me feel particularly grateful for the gift entrepreneurship has bestowed on me.

To describe it briefly, The Company Men is a sad and somber film that poignantly dramatizes the human costs of corporate downsizing and white-collar redundancy in our current fragile economy. It is a recounting of how the lives of three seemingly impregnable and successful company executives are jolted by the unexpected elimination of their jobs. It communicates eloquently the ashen hollowness and stomach wrenching sadness of a sudden overturning of life-long assumptions and the tragic repercussions that result.

But my personal reaction to this film was overwhelmingly one of deep thankfulness that the accidents of my life have made me a small business owner. With all the struggles most of us have encountered just surviving in the last couple of years, there is a great gift that is bestowed by entrepreneurship. And that gift is freedom. That gift is the unique dignity offered by personally creating something from nothing.

It’s a changing world. The dependable sinecures of corporate employment are disappearing. The gold watch corporate culture is no more, often replaced by a cold, perhaps corrupt, Kafkaesque bottom-line dystopia. As challenging as it is to awake each day to once again have to slay the small business dragons of ROI, of sailing the business seas alone, or of the never absent risk of bankruptcy, dealing with employees, the government, and the IRS–entrepreneurship is a spiritual and existential gift.

(This was brought home to me very personally in the last two years as I’ve had to helplessly watch my own wife Patti, a pre-motherhood successful corporate executive, go through the harrowing and humbling process of trying to reenter the corporate job market. Though her process finally has proved fruitful, the toll on family, relationships and self-esteem has been heavy indeed. Not unlike the protagonists of The Company Men.)

The most heroic figure in this small film epic of corporate callousness is the character played by Kevin Costner. Costner’s character owns a small construction firm. He’s an entrepreneur. He struggles. Yet he is free in a way none of his big shot corporate friends will ever be. He is a man of faith and innercenteredness (without the fatuous sentimentality of his earlier character in the movie Field of Dreams.)

Albert Einstein said, “Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.” (Out of My Later Years-1950) This is the special gift that entrepreneurship gives to its committed practitioners.

Thank you, Albert.

Here’s a little dinosaur wisdom: If you want to initiate new business with real corporate decision makers, write a letter. Send it snail mail, just like Grandma.

Yup. That’s my brilliant marketing suggestion for the week. Send this letter with a real stamp, ideally an attractive commemorative. Do not use labels for the address, but only direct printing on the envelope. Be sure to use expensive stationary. Spend the money. It’s a very minor expense and it makes a major statement. The very touch of your letter connotes seriousness and respect for yourself and your potential client. It creates a sensual branding statement.

Ideally the body of the letter should absurdly, insultingly oversimplify the wonder of your company. It should be able to be scanned essentially in five seconds by a busy executive. The letter should go something like this:

1. Request a meeting on a specific date. (The date means nothing. It’s simply a technique for focusing the reader’s mind.)
2. Describe very briefly what you do, some authenticating clients and any salient defining information (awards, differentiators, rankings, quotes from major press, etc.).
3. Most importantly, one short paragraph should have two case studies of one sentence each–emphasizing money, ROI, or percentages of increased sales or savings. Pure green eye shade stuff.
4. No creativity. None of the unique qualitative reasons to use your firm. Then bold maybe four phrases in the letter.

That’s it. The letter should include no collateral and make as little time demand as possible on a busy corporate executive. The point of all this is simply to create a hint, a fragrance, a trope, a memory that he or she got something serious from you. Then you or your representative, of course, must follow up, referencing the letter. But that’s a discussion for another day.

There is one thing a corporate decision-maker is looking for. That thing is clear ROI, whether in the form of earnings, savings, or efficiency. If you can make a compelling, differentiated, classy appeal, your chances of penetration distinctly improve.

Despite all the magical new technology and social messaging, real executive rain-making must be personalized. I feel it is insulting to try to initiate with a busy corporate executive without the weighted intonation of a letter. Quite aside from issues of spamming and information overload, a personal letter is innately imbued with the assumption of a high-level courtesy and a bespoke respect between equals. The most important fact about selling to decision-making corporate executives is simply this: They like to deal with their peers. They like to be deal with people of equal gravitas and authority.

Singer/songwriter Peter Allen wrote a song many years ago called “Everything Old Is New Again.” Ironically, snail mail’s very decline in the face of the Internet’s communication maelstrom, makes it increasingly more effective and noticeable when it is used.

For, as John Donne said in his poem “To Sir Henry Wotton” (1633), “Sir, more than kisses, letters mingle souls.” Thank you, John.

Lewis Schiff’s Inc. Small Business Council had its fall meeting last week in New York. The speaker on this occasion was the redoubtable Norm Brodsky, CEO of CitiStorage and small business guru. This was my first personal exposure to Brodsky, though I had heard of him through colleagues over the years.

Brodsky is a lovely guy–compelling, plain-spoken, generous. In answer to a Schiff question about his greatest entrepreneurial gifts he listed only one: “I can see the future.” And he proceeded to share a number of astute analyses of the future for small business, all of which warrant notice.

But one of his observations especially caught my attention–that being that it’s over for accomplished, well-remunerated, “at liberty” corporate employees in their 50′s and 60′s. Brodsky stated simply and bluntly that they mostly will not be rehired. Ever. Older workers are an unfortunate part of a permanent change in the employment paradigm, resulting from corporate belt-tightening and long-term recession. One of the results of this (along with many older folks simply falling through the cracks) will be a large increase in single proprietorships and consultants as these people scramble to cobble together a living.

I think Brodsky is unfortunately prescient in his dour predictions for older workers. But his view on this prompted the practical, Gordon Gekko-ish, opportunistic, Darwinian part of my entrepreneurial mind to ask, “How do I profit from this demographic catastrophe?”

I have long and vociferously recommended to my clients and fellow entrepreneurs that they tap this underutilized subset of the employment pool. For years I have almost never employed an associate under 35 for my virtual executive sales company Corporate Rain International. Older employees have judgment, rich life experience (including the experience of hard knocks and failure, as well as success), proven skill sets, existential perspective, a work ethic, an ability to read people and sophistication on many levels. These unquantifiable qualities can only be learned over time. They cannot be taught in school.

With the unemployment situation as dire as it is for the over 50 crowd, the hiring of these folks should become increasingly cost efficient. Highly skilled, experienced older executives and managers should be increasingly highly available and affordable in this brave new world. Why not use them? I have for years. And with the coming tsunami of what may well be the dismantling of our increasingly unaffordable welfare state, the need for employment by older workers can only increase, with a concomitant downward pressure on costs for the entrepreneur.

The time for the utilization of the older employee is coming. And it should. As French existential novelist Albert Camus said, (Notebooks, 1935-42) “You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.”

Thanks Albert.

There was a nice column on business networking in the Wall Street Journal last weekend (November 13, 2010 by Anne Kadet). Anne states, “On any given night, New Yorkers have their pick of 50-odd networking events. Last week, for instance, you could have mingled with Long Island Techies, Hispanic business owners, professional comedians or ‘Mommies with Babies and Businesses.’ But if you’re not a regular in on the networking circuit, you have to wonder:  Does anything ever come of all this sound and fury?”

My own general feeling is that most networking is a distracting, energy vitiating waste of time. (Admittedly I’ve never felt very good at it, kinda like I was never very comfortable at picking up girls in bars.) There is only one form of networking that makes sense to me and that is networking with my peers; that is, networking with fellow CEOs, business owners, and entrepreneurs where relaxed conversations can occur allowing development of relationships in a general atmosphere of collegiality.

But, with that caveat, I wanted to recommend an article my partner David Downey, President of Corporate Rain International, sent me last week authored by an entrepreneur named Greg Peters from Ann Arbor, Michigan. Greg is the founder of The Reluctant Networker and he sets out some rules for networking in terms of law enforcement. His clever article is entitled Don’t Violate These Networking Laws and in it he lists some “misdemeanor” tickets he would give to misguided networkers.

Parking Ticket. This would be issued to anyone at a networking event who chooses to grab a seat at a table without first completing their networking goals. This is a relatively minor offense, but if you get too many of them your networking license can be revoked.

Speeding. Anyone who tried to ask for some benefit which exceeded the relationship that they had established so far would be in danger of receiving one of these bad boys.  The most egregious offenders would be the folks who ask for a high-level referral five minutes after meeting someone.

Passing in a No Passing Zone. Handing out your card when the other person didn’t specifically ask for it is another of those minor offenses that the networking police are watching for.

Not coming to a complete stop. The social butterflies (or social  climbers) who are always looking for someone better to talk to (or be seen talking to) collect the largest number of these citations. Part of the networking officers’ training is to watch for the tell-tale “looking over the other person’s shoulder” which usually indicates an infraction in progress.

Networking while trying to influence. NWI’s are the nice way of saying that instead of networking and trying to establish new long-term relationships, the perpetrator in question was trying to sell. This is definitely one of the more serious violations.

Illegal “You” turn. The networker who earns this ticket has a problem. They only want to talk about themselves. Whenever the conversation drifts to the other person, they try to turn the “you” back into “me.” Violators of this particular statute soon discover that they are alone on the road since no one can hang around for long with the conversational whiplash their networking can cause.

Thank you, Greg Peters.

Both actors and entrepreneurs are huge risk-takers: The actor takes emotional risk. The entrepreneur takes financial risk.

I was an actor, among other things, for many years before I ever considered being an entrepreneur. I don’t think I’d be in business without the gifts I gleaned from that experience.

Acting is not a lucrative proposition for most of its practitioners. A ridiculously small percentage of the members of SAG, AFTRA and Actor’s Equity make an actual living acting. It is a hard life. Not at all the romantic, indulgent, cossetted life portrayed on Entertainment Tonight and Hollywood Extra.

But there are non-financial rewards to acting that apply very directly to business. First, you learn the skills of listening and human observation. Good actors are first and foremost good reactors. Two (and a corollary to one), acting teaches you human empathy and understanding at he deepest psychological levels, not just for yourself, but for a  multifaria of people. Three, acting teaches honesty, even when you are playing a dishonest character. It teaches you to understand motivation on many levels. And, therefore, four, it helps you to read people quickly and accurately in life. Five, without actually living the lives of people very different from yourself, you can come to understand what motivates and moves them in even the most quotidian of actions.

Furthermore, the very fact of needing to survive forces actors to take jobs that broaden human and economic understanding. When not working as an actor (which was most of the time when I was a actor), I have personally worked as a bartender, a tennis pro, a cook, a teacher and an assistant dean of students. I was even employed part-time as a nude model for art classes at the School of Visual Arts and Cooper Union in New York. I have actor friends who survived with jobs as variegated as dog walking, prostitution, and cab driving. (One of the oddest survival jobs I ever heard of was that of “stretcher.” This job consisted of hanging young men up and pulling on their legs to make them temporarily tall enough to qualify as policemen or firefighters. I heard Martin Sheen describe this as one of his survival jobs on Jay Leno one night.)

But I think the greatest gift of my failed acting career, to me as an entrepreneur and salesman, was learning to handle rejection. An actor faces very personal rejection day after day in the auditioning process. Compared to that, the simple vicissitudes of selling for my firm, Corporate Rain, are a piece of cake. The process of business selling, with all its to be expected rejection, is as nothing compared to the much more personal rejection of the actor’s daily process.

Finally, the actor’s life is a training in courage. Entrepreneurship is a very personal act of risk-taking. A good actor’s craft is quite akin to this and an excellent form of emotional weight-lifting in preparation for the everyday unpredictability and Darwinian fearsomeness of business.

As Tallulah Bankhead said, “It’s one of the tragic ironies of the theatre that only one man in it can count on steady work–the night watchman.”

Thank you, Tallulah.

Sometimes you need to fire your client. God, that’s a hard one for me.

After 16 years at the helm of my company Corporate Rain International and over 700 clients, I’ve only given a client the pink slip four times (and once it was simply for their sake because they were really too busy and successful to use what my company was doing for them.) However, in terms of long-term branding and business reputation, it is a road that must be taken occasionally.

It was real hard to let a client go in the wake of 2008. With fear, uncertainty, and outright panic widespread it was particularly painful to give any client the heave-ho. But even in the worst of times there is a point of demarcation that must not be crossed.

In my case that line of demarcation is first and foremost discourtesy to or abuse of my staff. My employees and associates are ultimately my first priority. They are more important to me than my clients. This is certainly counter intuitive for many of my small business colleagues. For example, The Guardian Life Index: What Matters Most to America’s Small Business Owners recently reported that customers are priority numero uno for the vast majority of entrepreneurs. This is certainly understandable given the cost and time commitment that goes into generating new business. However, my feeling is that I can get new clients, but maintaining an ethical, culturally consistent employee base is ultimately more important to the long-term health of my company. In fact, the customer is not “always right” when a basic incongruity emerges in corporate culture between your client and your company. Then it is better to gently disengage.

Crain’s New York (October 29, 2010) reports that CEO Kevin Labick of digital consulting firm Empathy Lab recently fired a huge retail client. He recounts a litany of offenses that ranged from treating staff disrespectfully to late payments to nickel-and-diming small matters clearly stipulated in the contract. Such a nuisance is a time waster and a distraction from long-term goals and the branded reputability of any small firm. Also, to hark back to last week’s blog, you may be judged by your client’s values and reputation, as much as your own.

Ecclesiastica in the Apocrypha states, “Have regard for your name, since it will remain for you longer than a great store of gold.”

Thank you, Ecclesiasticus.

Never lie down with dogs. You may get fleas.

There is a crucial differentiation to be made for any entrepreneur in the company he keeps. It defines a businessman and his firm every bit as much as his business plan and marketing. I say that not as some sort of clinch-jawed, nose-in-the-air snob, but as a practical man of business. From the inception of any enterprise it is important to conceptualize the long-term defining nature and implications of commercial partnerships and associations. Those companies and people you service and associate with will have implications for your own and your company’s reputation.

Both in terms of process and execution, it is a time saver and efficiency producer to assume that the ur-values of your company and those you serve are the same. It is always an anxious thing to try to fit a square peg into a round hole. That creates a strain. Even if it is a subconscious tension, a simple adumbration of uneasiness, conflicting or incongruent corporate value systems will impinge on the focused energy needed for collegial business success.

The corollary to this, obviously, is, as an entrepreneur, it is important to know who you are personally and what your company’s core value is. Without self-knowledge how is one to even know what constitutes a congruent client? A corporate culture is influenced by the cultures of those whom you choose to serve, as well as by your internal dynamics.

Ray L. Hunt, Dallas oil billionaire, former head of the Dallas Fed, and philanthropist, gave a very fine speech to the Dallas Chamber of Commerce a couple of weeks ago. In his speech he outlines 5 Principals of Business Excellence, which are well worth reporting on another time. But he concludes with this observation–”Quality attracts quality.”

Clients and employee associates are drawn to a tone, an ethos, an aura. For long-term success you need to define, establish, and hold dear a set of core beliefs that permeate your organization. “If you build it, he will come.” to quote Ray Liotta as Shoeless Joe Jackson in Field of Dreams. If you build it right and present it effectively you will create long-term clients among kindred spirits. And you will not attract those you should not align with. Which is appropriate, apt, and an important business value.

Thank you, Ray L. Hunt.

I was reading a Maureen Dowd op-ed in the NY Times on October 5th. It was enjoyably full of her scathing, bitchy observations, on this occasion commenting on a recent “Get Motivated!” seminar at the Verizon Center in Washington. As usual, Dowd was funny and more than a little mean. And right on.

My general feeling about these massive feel-good inspirational gatherings is that they’re a bunch of hooey. Not wrong in their stated insights, just shallow and quite temporary in their efficacy. Kind of like a business pep rally. Certainly not my cup of tea.

However, amidst Ms. Dowd’s cynical reportage on talks by Terry Bradshaw, Rudy Giuliani, Steve Forbes, Dan Rather and Rick Belluzo, I was caught by some business advice shared by General Colin Powell. His advice? Simply to be nice and particularly to be nice to the little people like the folks who clean your office and park your car. He also avers the value of small details. For instance, Powell reports writing thank you notes on personalized 4-by-6 inch cards. “I write with a fountain pen. Never a Sharpie. Never a ball point pen. A fountain pen.” Dowd reports.

It seems to me Colin Powell is quite on to a real truth here. It’s the little things that set the tone for sales–little considerations, little details. Focusing on the small decencies creates an ambiance of service and real carefulness in business dealings. It becomes reflected in the larger actions of a company.

To expand on General Powell’s concern for the small things, I always recommend to my sales outsourcing clients at Corporate Rain that any missive or serious communication they send out go on high-quality stationary and be sent by snail mail, ideally with a commemorative stamp. This is sometimes cause for eye-rolling impatience by some of my cutting-edge clients enamored of the wonders of tweeting, friending and linking-in. But there is a method to my antediluvian madness. Yes, it takes extra time and money to communicate in such qualitative ways, but the very effort communicates care and valuation on a subconscious level. There is a sensual subconscious statement that is communicated by the very feel of high-quality stationary. It creates an aura of seriousness, reflecting both respect for your client and the general business process. It unspokenly says exactly the manner you would represent a client and effectively serve.

Additionally, the very fact that the personal letter is increasingly not used gives special notice to those who use it qualitatively. It is not a dinosaur inefficiency. It is a notable differentiator that, in the long-term, makes a branding statement, as well as creating a subrosa gravitas.

I’m insecure, dammit. I sure wish I wasn’t. Pathetic, huh, for a guy posing as an expert in such a testosterone-fueled, masculine-imaged, aggressive profession as sales. But when I started my career as an entrepreneurial salesman my hands used to shake when I met with the c-suite folk I was pitching. That doesn’t happen any more, but the inner feeling of not being quite enough is an ineluctable closeted demon still lurking somewhere beneath a late-blooming polished professional.

That said, I know everyone suffers at least occasional feelings of powerlessness and low self-esteem. To this point, I was caught recently by an interesting article about the work of Professor Amy J.C. Cuddy of the Harvard Business School. In an article titled “Power Posing: Brief Nonverbal Displays Affect Neuroendocrine Levels and Risk Tolerance“, Professor Cuddy reveals that holding “power poses” for brief periods stimulates higher levels of testosterone (the hormone linked to power and dominance) and lower levels of cortisol (the stress hormone that can help cause hypertension and impaired immune functioning).

Reporting on Cuddy’s research Julia Hanna, Associate Editor of the HBS Alumni Bulletin, states,

“Controlling for subjects’ baseline levels of both [testosterone and cortisol], Cuddy and her coauthors found that high-power poses decreased cortisol by about 25% and increased testosterone by about 19% for both men and women. In contrast, low-power poses increased cortisol about 17% and decreased testosterone about 10%. Not surprisingly, high-power posers of both sexes also reported greater feelings of being powerful and in charge.”

I’m trying one of Cuddy’s power poses right now in my office at Corporate Rain International. I have my feet up on my desk, hands behind my head and it does seem to have some emotionally salubrious, empowering effect. (Begone low self-esteem!  Get thee to a nunnery!  I abjure your presence!)

At any rate these power poses might at least prove a useful, practical preparation for those fragile, not-at-your best days when you still have to sally forth to kill the sales dragon.

William Hazlitt says in “Characteristics” (1823), “As is our confidence, so is our capacity.” Thank you, William.

The past three years have been among the most trying and dispiriting for business in American history. The numbers recently have turned murky again, arousing fears of a double dip recession, permanent high levels of unemployment, and the passing of the American baton of entrepreneurial and economic pre-eminence to China, India and Brazil, where the passion for success and growth seem to have blossomed while ours has waned. According to Robert Schiller, Yale’s famous and most visible economist, things will not get materially and emotionally better until “animal spirits” return to the market. We all know exactly what Schiller means.

The trouble is that animal spirits cannot be arbitrarily conjured into existence. Unlike dogs who merely need a nice day to spontaneously experience their own animal spirits, we humans need reasons to feel enthusiastic and to then commit to plans and actions. The current administration may have saved the economic system from its own worst excesses and self-delusions–the infinite expandability of leverage–but in many ways it has acted in inhibitory, controlling and arbitrary ways when it comes to a return to growth, employment and consequently, optimistic actions.

One could argue that the government in Washington has used this financial crisis to “socialize” as many sectors of American life as possible. That means more control, more regulation and a consequent reduction in entrepreneurial options. That depresses those responsible for turning their desires into action. People like me.

It is essential that small businesses look to the future as a time of renewed, worthwhile endeavors and not submit in anger and frustration to the current anti-business atmosphere. Acceptance is defeat.

Tim Askew has expressed the desire to periodically invite fellow entrepreneurs and small business colleagues to contribute to this weekly blog. This week’s guest blogger is Robert Millman. Robert is the owner of Wine Executive Seminars. He tastes and rates over 5000 wines per year. In addition to his successful small business, he is also a professor of philosophy at Pace University.

There was a very nice personality profile of William Shatner in the New York Times last month (September 9, 2010–Pat Jordan). Shatner, of course, came to fame in 1966 in Star Trek. He speaks with a charming combination of resignation and bemusement about how his life has been ruled by his type-casting as Captain Kirk. This role defined Shatner more than any actor’s role I can think of. He got wildly rich on stock options from his 1997 commercial for discount travel company Priceline, playing a preposterously pompous exaggeration of his real pomposity as Kirk. “I.  Am. Captain. James. Kirk.” There is a sweetness in Shatner’s wry acceptance of his lot.

The article on Shatner got me thinking about sales and type-casting. Type-casting is something that only very successful actors need to worry about. Nevertheless, it’s a thing that anyone touching on sales should think about. To wit, successful sales pitches can lead to sales failure if one falls captive to them.

One of the things I noticed early in my life as an accidental salesman was that if I started pushing myself too hard or too long without a break I sometimes drifted into a kind of catatonic gibbering, gobbling Tim Askew imitation, lacking spontaneity and any sense of being humanly present. The words were the same, only uttered by a ghostly empty shell. I learned to take regular breaks and look for opportunities to change my patterns of speaking, listening, and being. I became very willing to fuck it up, if that kept me in a place of reality and spontaneity. This allowed me to remain free, happy, unbored and compelling in my work. Real.

These days, in my own executive sales outsourcing company Corporate Rain International, I prefer that my associates not work over 25 hours/ week formally selling, unless there is a client emergency. You just do better if you stay fresh.  I even tell them not to worry about selling success, just to tell the truth simply and fiercely. Though I know hundreds of sales books disagree, I honestly don’t personally see sales as much more than that.

Call me simple. Thanks, Mr. Shatner.

Monetizing the debt. Learn that phrase. It is your future.

Last week I attended the estimable International Economic Alliance meeting at the Harvard Club in NYC. The day was chaired and keynoted by Paul Volcker. (Of course, Mr. Volcker is a legend for his conquest of U.S. inflation in the late ’70s and 80′s.) At the end of his opening remarks, Mr. Volcker was interviewed by David Asman of Fox Business Channel. Mr. Asman opened his interview by handing Paul Volcker a single 100 trillion dollar bill from Zimbabwe. That’s right–a 100 trillion dollar bill. It was a good way to kick off a discussion of the direction of our current economic health.

It behooves each of us in the small business community to keep an eagle eye on macro-trends nationally and internationally. The agile entrepreneur should make money in good times and bad, but it requires realistically thinking ahead of the curve. Which brings me to my topic: monetizing the debt.

The massive debts now being accumulated by our government will not be repaid. I 100% guarantee it. Neither the Republicans, the Democrats, or, frankly, the American electorate will conjure up the hard-eyed, honest, morally-direct courage to deal with our debt. This pusillanimous evasion of responsibility can have but one result: monetizing the debt. (The only alternative being national bankruptcy.)

What is monetizing the debt? The simplest description of monetizing the debt is this: Massive Inflation. Think Zimbabwe and the Weimar Republic. Essentially our debt becomes less because our money is worth less. (My apologies to my clients at HBS and Columbia Business School for the wild oversimplification. I ain’t an academic.) What does monetizing the debt amount to? A huge hidden tax on us all.

As I see it, the Fed and the present government have begun an inevitable and conscious, but unspoken, march toward monetization. Another word for monetization is “quantitative easing” which technically means printing extra currency to buy bonds from banks, who will hopefully lend it to peons like us entrepreneurs. (They’re not lending to us, however.) My belief is that the printing presses will run non-stop indefinitely. This will eventually collapse the dollar, solve our debt problem, cause our interest rates to skyrocket to Carter-era highs (and above), and cause a fundamental change in business assumptions. It is only a question of when. As Joe Willie Namath of the NY Jets said memorably before Super Bowl III, “I guarantee it.”

But this need not spell disaster for the nimble entrepreneur. (I certainly pray it doesn’t for my executive sales outsourcing company Corporate Rain.) It is simply another calculation to anticipate and add to a business plan. How can inflation increase the value of my company and the desirability of my product?

I don’t pretend to know when this tsunami of monetization will hit us, but Helicopter Ben Bernanke is running those printing presses like a madman. As the Wall Street Journal said in a lead editorial on Thursday, September 23, “Central bankers who wish for more inflation usually get their wish, and the result is rarely benign.”

Thank you, Wall Street Journal.

In her book, Stephen Sondheim: A Life, Meryle Secrest quotes composer Steven Sondheim on his friend and colleague Leonard Bernstein’s consistent failure to produce any significant music after his great masterpiece “West Side Story.” Sondheim says Bernstein developed “a bad case of importantitis.” That is, anything he touched, by self- definition, had to have the weight and portent of the great.

Importantitis can sure be a killer of creativity and corporate health for the entrepreneur, as well as for the artist. I was reminded about this by the dizzying fall from grace of Mark Hurd at Hewlett Packard, a man of achievement and power brought low by ethics violations and the apparent attitude that he was above the rules. (Or who can forget Leona Helmsley‘s famous statement that the rules apply only to “the little people.”)

Jonah Lehrer recently wrote an article on this in the Wall Street Journal called “The Power Trip” (August 14, 2010). Lehrer notes what psychologists call the “paradox of power.” That is, the very traits which help leaders rise to power disappear once they ascend. Instead of being courteous, honest and outgoing they often become impulsive, reckless and rude—subject to hubristic overreach and Icarus-like arrogance. He quotes extensively from University of California, Berkely psychologist Dacher Keltner‘s scientific findings from studies of power and success. Dr. Keltner states, “When you give people power, they basically start acting like fools. They flirt inappropriately, tease in a hostile fashion, and become totally impulsive.” Dr. Keltner goes on the compare the feeling of power to brain damage, stating that people with great power tend to behave like neurological patients with a damaged orbito-frontal lobe, a brain area essential for empathy and decision-making.

An entrepreneur is usually a boss. He is a person of power, if only in his own very small pond. As such, I believe it is crucial to avoid importantitis. At my own outsourced executive sales firm, Corporate Rain International, I try to guard against this in several ways. One is I never stop cold-calling. At this point I could have other people take over this task completely for me. But I want to experience what my associates and employees experience for clients each day, which includes a great deal of rejection. Another way Is that I genuinely try to never employ anyone who isn’t better than myself, and then I listen to their input.

In a recent article, Patrick Caddell, a Democratic pollster, observes there is an increasing inability of executives to admit mistakes, even including both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and how unuseful a quality this is in an executive. He says, “As we’ve seen again and again over the past few years, admitting a mistake is almost constitutionally impossible for today’s corporate chiefs and even harder for politicians.”

Thomas Bailey Aldrich states in “Ponkapog Papers” (1903), “The possession of unlimited power will make a despot of almost any man. There is a possible Nero in the gentlest human creature that walks.” Thanks, Thomas.

Today I want to hark back briefly to last week’s blog.

I received some utterly disbelieving correspondence from small business colleagues last week concerning the business mandates in ObamaCare (as well as FinRe) legislation. Well, accept it. It’s for real. Citing again last week’s prime example, it is utterly true that starting in 2011 all businesses must file separate 1099 forms with the IRS to report any purchases totaling more than $600. $600 for paper clips? File a 1099. $600 for a new computer? File a 1099. $600 for toner? File a 1099. $600 for Christmas cards? File a 1099. $600 for coffee? Yup. File a 1099. The National Federation of Independent Business says this will impact 40 million businesses. Congress should call ObamaCare “The Accountants’ Full Employment Act.”

The reason for this onerous bureaucratic burden is that the Congressional backers of ObamaCare hypothesize a ten year realization of new revenue of $17 billion from tax cheats. Well, I pay my taxes and I am all for those lousy tax cheats paying theirs. But, damn, the lost productivity from such madness will be phenomenal. Surely, there’s a better way to raise funds without impeding the free enterprise system.

Suffice it to say that this egregious single example of Congressional overreach (ObamaCare) is one of a plethora of expensive disincentives and distractions for most of us in growing our businesses or adding employees. If unemployment is to decline and this recession is to recede they will do so in tandem with the fortunes of entrepreneurs and small business. Why hamstring us like this? Regardless of your political persuasion, this level of bureaucratic interference is impractical and counterproductive.

As Rev. Henry Ward Beecher said in 1887, “The worst thing in the world, next to anarchy, is government.” Amen, Brother Henry.

Well, here we go again. I’m worried. I don’t wish to be a small business Noriel Roubini or any kind of pessimist, but I continue to fear the economic myopia reflected in legislation recently enacted by Congress.

There is a little good news since I last wrote in this trope (see May 18, 2010, “Chicken Little and Entrepreneurship“). The major media are finally beginning to pay attention to the small business conundrum. Even the Obama administration is beginning to recognize the essential role of entrepreneurship in job creation and ending recession. Banks are finally at least giving lip service to loosening lending. But it ain’t nearly enough to assuage a looming bleakness that augurs nothing but ill for the small business community, with concomitant implications for the macro economy.

What is of increasing alarm to me is the issue of mandates. Let me list just a couple.

1. A requirement that all businesses must file 1099 forms with the IRS to report any purchases totaling more than $600 in a year. This is a gigantic added paperwork burden.
2. The unspecified rules and paperwork can now be imposed unilaterally and without explicit Congressional approval by well over 300 new bureaucratic entities legislated in ObamaCare.

The vagueness of all this is bloody scary. It creates a nightmarish chiaroscuro of uncertainty for business in general and the small businessman in particular. How do you plan, how do you budget, and how do you hire in such a hostile and fluid atmosphere?

I believe the current administration genuinely would now like to belatedly give small business a boost to aid the dismal employment picture. But there is a problem with this. The Obama government has lost the faith of most small businessmen not only because of hostile legislation, but also because of populist rhetoric that paints business as the venal enemy of the greater good. Explicit verbal attacks have been made on doctors, insurers, drug makers, oilmen, bankers, automakers, casinos, hoteliers, etc. It makes most of us feel like we have a big target on our chest.

Our trust that the government is on our side must somehow be restored. The heedlessly imposed new rules and mandates must give way to a practical and real sympathy to how business actually works. Bureaucratic mandates are a creativity killer for the entrepreneur and the capitalist risk-taker.

The Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher reports survey results that neatly sum up where most small business is in a recent speech to the San Antonio Chamber of Commerce. He says:

“…the politicians and officials who craft and enforce the rules are doing so in a capricious manner that makes long-term planning difficult, if not impossible. [Businessmen] are increasingly distressed by the lack of consistent  direction coming from Washington….So they are calling time-outs and heading for the sidelines while they wait for the referees to settle the rules of the game.”

Gore Vidal said in his 1968 book Sex, Death and Money, “There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem.” Or an entrepreneur. Thanks, Gore.

Today I’m depressed. I don’t want to be a salesman. I don’t want to be an entrepreneur. I don’t want to write this blog. My words seem to come out blank, dead, fake, arbitrary, forced.

A colleague of mine tells me he thinks this blog is a waste of my time–that it serves no business purpose for my company, that it is insufficiently defined, anomic, opinionated, political and quixotic. Whew. All things, I guess, an effective business blog should not be.

Well. Golly. Damn. In truth I’m an old, failed actor/singer who accidentally became an entrepreneur and a salesman. I write about what I know from my personal search for meaning in the capitalist maelstrom. If business isn’t a gas, an illumination, and an everyday revelation encompassing all aspects of existence, how boring. How stultifying. How deadening. How killingly inhuman. How dull.

Some days you just have to stop for a moment. So I just won’t talk about sales or business today. Let me explore something else today. Let me simply talk about something sweet and lovely. Let me tell you about Maude Maggart. Maude Maggart (www.maudemaggart.com) has nothing to do with entrepreneurship or sales or small business in a down economy. Maude Maggart is utterly unrelated to my sales outsourcing business Corporate Rain. Maude Maggart is a cabaret singer. I’m writing about her because she is, for me, restorative, centering, truthful, elevating, moving. A terrific tonic for the summer blues.

Go see Maude Maggart if you get a chance. She’s quite special. I saw her at the Algonquin Hotel in NYC, after hearing her on Jonathan Schwartz’ nonpareil music program on WNYC. She has a remarkable combination of the unblinking truthfulness of the later Rosemary Clooney and the elegant femininity of Jeanette MacDonald. She sings the American Songbook, both well-known and obscure, with authority and personal integrity. She sings with a depth, an understanding, and a sympathy for the human condition, that is surprising in a young woman. Like any fine artist, she illuminates truth and brings wholeness and clarity in her wake.

And why should we in business not strive to do the same for