Making Rain

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 our clients, our employees and our world?

Thank you, Maude Maggart.

Politeness, courtesy, niceness, manners. These are qualities I find increasingly missing in sales and most other aspects of business. People increasingly just don’t see the need to bother with this stuff.

I was reminded of this as I read Peggy Noonan’s fine, zeitgeist attuned article in the WSJ last Saturday titled, “We Pay Them To Be Rude To Us“. Ms. Noonan states,  “American culture is, one way or another, business culture and our business is service. Once we were a great industrial nation. Now we are a service economy.” She says the social implications of this are making us confused and crazy. “We wear away the superego and get straight to the id, and what we see isn’t pretty.” She describes a revolution in manners. “We tore [manners] down as too fancy, or sexist, or ageist, or revealing of class biases. Just when we needed more than ever the formality and agreed-upon rules of manners to act as guard rails, we threw them aside. And now no one knows how to act anymore.”

When I was a young actor (mostly unemployed) many years ago, before I became an accidental entrepreneur, I often supported myself as a catering waiter for high-society in New York. I worked mostly for a company called Glorious Food, the most elegant caterer then around.

Glorious Food parties were run by a very traditional and exacting maître d’ named Serge. Serge was an old school martinet who was about doing everything with precise properness. Training to become a waiter for Glorious Food involved a long seminar where you were trained how to set a traditional table, fold napkins, correctly serve, etc. Basically, I thought this was a bunch of hooey.

But one day I found myself sitting next to the daunting Serge and got to talking to him about why we did all this minutia so precisely. He quite cogently explained to me that, as silly or unnecessary as it might seem to an American (slight disdain with a French accent), there were very good and practically efficacious reasons for why the dessert spoon is placed over the desert fork, or why the white and red wine and water glasses were in a specific configuration. Basically it made things easier for the server and the servee. It was not arbitrary or phony. It was well thought out and imminently practical.

There is a reason for manners and courtesy and it is not just to be nice. The purpose of manners is to give us a practical structure to deal with each other. It is not bullshit. It is the glue of civilization and the utilitarian road map for dealing in everyday business. Manners and polite address are not superficial. They are essential. The importance of plain good manners is increasingly not taught or explained with any depth. Too bad. It is an important tool increasingly missing in the modern salesman’s repertoire.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said in his essay “Behavior” from The Conduct of Life (1860), “Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each once a stroke of genius or of love, now repeated and hardened into usage.” Thanks, Ralph.

Meetings. Ugh.

My idea of hell is to be forced to spend eternity in a meeting. I’ll do anything to avoid meetings. In fact, I doubt there are too many of us who love meetings. A former client says I should have myself checked out for ADD/ADHD since my daughter struggles with the condition and people who have ADD/ADHD have particular problems sitting in meetings. However, I think the greatest issue for me and a lot of fellow entrepreneurs is that we are hard driving, impatient, autonomous people.

Entrepreneurs are courageous. They are calculated risk-takers with the potential to have their heads handed to them every day. To even attempt the audacious act of entrepreneurship presupposes a strong will, a healthy ego, and the instincts of a jungle carnivore. These characteristics are, perhaps, not the ideal for mediating useful meetings.

I was reminded of this when I attended a seminar hosted by Lewis Schiff on Open Book Management (OBM) last week at a gathering of the Inc. Small Business Council. OBM is a term invented by John Case In the early ’90s. But the concept’s chief evangelist is Jack Stack, who has written and spoken extensively on the concept. To oversimplify, OBM’s core assumption is that most firms perform best when it’s employees see themselves as partners rather than hired hands. All company financials are shared by employees. Employers are challenged to improve profitability, and all share in new company efficiency and prosperity. Ideally. The assumptions are not very different from Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs), except there remains a single boss and owner.

I was fascinated by the concept of Open Book Management in theory since I have always tried to run my own outsourced executive sales firm, Corporate Rain International, collegiality–as a community of high-level peers. (I certainly try to never hire anyone who isn’t better than me.) That said, OMB is a bridge too far for me at present for several compelling reasons. But the one that strikes utter terror into my small businessman’s soul is the potentially endless meetings educating and sharing and discussing management decisions and finances. This potentiality alone is enough to send me fleeing the seductions of OMB.

As Eileen Shanahan acerbically states (as quoted by Harold Faber in The NY Times Magazine–3/17/68), “The length of a meeting rises with the square of the number of people present.” Or to quote that great business philosopher Mel Brooks. “It’s good to be King!“

I loathe PowerPoint presentations. There’s just about nothing in business I more dread.

In this I seem to be in a minority. PowerPoint is acknowledged to be the most popular tool for creating slide show presentations and an essential sales tool for many of my entrepreneurial colleagues. From what I read in Microsoft documents on the Internet there are well over 300 million PowerPoint users in the world, including over 30 million per day and over a million going on right now. My guess is the majority of these are boring their listeners to death.

I don’t use PowerPoint (or any of its alternative cousins). Here’s why: I want people to listen to me, the wonderful me. Now, admittedly, my outsourced sales company, Corporate Rain International, lends itself to a more simple presentation than, say, a complex, rococo technology sale. My company is primarily about a bespoke service and quality of strategic sales execution into the C-suite. But, even when selling computer hardware, software or other technological wonderment, buyers hire who they know and like. Anything that clouds or vitiates the urgency of that personal selling relationship is counterproductive.

The simple truth is the more efficaciously naked you can be emotionally, the more compelling you become as a salesman. PowerPoint puts a layer between the salesman and the client that I prefer not to have. This makes selling a more personal and courageous, as well as compelling, act.

Of course, I don’t mean to be absurdly reductionist in my intuitive salesman’s dislike of PowerPoint. Obviously there are necessary moments for the graphic and visual. But, even when necessary, it should be kept simple, as should almost everything in sales.

In an article in Wired from 2003 (subtitled “Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.“), Edward Tufte comments about PowerPoint:

“Imagine a widely used and expensive prescription drug that promised to make us beautiful but didn’t. Instead the drug had frequent, serious side effects: It induced stupidity, turned everyone into bores, wasted time and degraded the quality and credibility of communication.”

That rather neatly sums up my sales instincts on the use of PowerPoint.

Last week (July 27 blog) I noted that there is growing scientific evidence that people who excessively multitask and watch busy multimedia presentations retain much less than those who take in information in a more sedate and focused manner. In my opinion, PowerPoint is another exemplar of this phenomenon.

Painter Hans Hofman in Search for the Real (1967) states, “The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.” Thanks, Hans.

I wanted to briefly follow up last week’s ruminations on the mind altering implications of new media technologies. As I noted at the end of last week’s post (July 20), my instinct is that if you try to do everything, you do nothing. I am frequently as much of a crazed multi-tasking fool as any other executive, as I rush through the hydra-headed challenges and crises of being the CEO of my own firm Corporate Rain International. Yet this flittery, fast-paced daily race often leaves me with the breathless sense that I am missing the bigger picture, of seeing the trees but not the forest.

Russell A. Poldrack, Director of the Imaging Research Center at the University of Texas, states:

“Our research shows that multitasking can have an insidious effect on learning, changing the brain systems that are involved so that even if one can learn while multitasking, the nature of that learning is altered to be less flexible.”

Or consider the work of Dr. Patricia Greenfield, a professor of developmental psychology at UCLA. She warns in a Science article last year that our growing use of the Internet, with all its advantages of speed and accessibility, seems to be weakening our “higher order cognitive processes [including] abstract vocabulary, mindfulness, reflection, inductive problem solving, critical thinking and imagination.”

Likewise, William Powers new book, Hamlet’s Blackberry, putatively argues convincingly that the distractions of manic connectivity can lead to a lack of productivity. Though I have not yet read his book, Mr. Powers apparently warns that an excess of digital activity reduces mental life to “a blizzard of snapshots” (WSJ review-David Harsanyi-June 30, 2010).

Nicholas Carr, in The Shallows (see last week’s post), begins his excellent book with a quote from HAL, the super computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey. HAL’s mind is being slowly erased at the end of the film and HAL plaintively says, “My mind is going. I can feel it.” Carr goes on to expound, “Over the last few years, I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory….Once I was a scuba diver in a sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.” Well put.  Thank you, Nicholas.

I love P.T. Barnum. Yes, he was a bit of a scoundrel and a con man. But very wise and seminal and modern in his practical thinking about business.

One of Barnum’s maxims I recently came across appeared in his essay “The Art of Money Getting or Golden Rules for Money Making” (1880). Barnum says: “When a man’s undivided attention is centered on one object, his mind will constantly be suggesting improvements of value, which would escape him if his brain was occupied by a dozen different subjects at once.” Barnum’s advice is most applicable to my present inundation-of-new-media conundrum.

One of the reasons I write this business blog is simply to clear some contemplative time for myself each week. It helps me coalesce my anomic ideas into something coherent. In a sense, I don’t know what I think till I write it down.

On July 6th I posted about the value of lifestyle and life balance accommodations for my employees. As a boss and a creative entrepreneur, clearing open-ended, spacious time for quiet contemplation without agenda is crucial for my emotional health and life balance.

Which brings me to Nicholas Carr‘s new book, “The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brain.” Mr. Carr’s book sounds the alarm about the discomfiting implications of our manic connectivity, our addictive cyber hyperactivity. Carr points to significant neuroscientific evidence suggesting that the Net, with it’s constant distractions and velocity, is turning us into “scattered and superficial thinkers.” Carr states in The Wall Street Journal: “Over the last few years, I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory.” He cites extensive science in support of his thesis.

People who read text studded with links, the studies show, comprehend less than those who read traditional linear text. People who watch busy multimedia presentations remember less than those who take in information in a more sedate and focused manner. People who are continually distracted by emails, alerts and other messages understand less than those who are able to concentrate. And people who juggle many tasks are less creative and less productive than those who do one thing at a time….Only when we pay deep attention to a new piece of information are we able to associate it “meaningfully and systematically with knowledge already well established in memory” writes the Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel.

I will admit to being instinctively a bit of a Luddite. I’m not a techie, though my company, Corporate Rain International, is a cutting-edge technology-driven company. I hire technologists. I hope my instinctive caveats about our accelerating cyber-phantasmagoria are unwarranted. I try not to let the fear of the unknown interfere with a practical business reality. However, for myself it is important not to compulsively try to connect with every magic of the Internet (tweeting, texting, friending, linking, etc.)

The Roman philosopher Seneca said succinctly, “To be everywhere is to be nowhere.” I must agree. Thank you, Seneca.

I’ve just finished Harlan Coben’s novel Caught. It’s lots of fun, as are most of Coben’s novels. This one has a particularly labyrinthine and rococo plot involving the disappearance of a beautiful teenage girl, a disastrous scavenger hunt at Princeton, a drunken driver, a vanished corpse, a planted GPS, etc. All making an enjoyable and entrancing thriller, if you’re looking for a good beach read.

I have enjoyed Mr. Coben for many years. (We both love musical comedy, for one thing.) His characters are silly, heroic, original, kinky and quite contemporary.  But one subplot jolted me and aroused my anxiety as a small business entrepreneur.  This subplot shows the Internet being used to totally ravage the reputation, business and careers of five accomplished men who were roommates in college. I was struck with a stomach-clenching fear as this subplot unfolded. Could this happen to me or my company Corporate Rain International?

I don’t know. But, to judge from Coben’s fiction and cyber conjecture, it’s not at all out of the realm of the possible for any small business owner to unfairly take a reputation hit from a concerted effort to besmirch. Or perhaps this is just entrepreneurial paranoia.

Ah well. It’s part of the small businessman’s job to worry each day about the hypothetical, as well as the real, even if it is from the phantasmagoric imagination of Harlan Coben. As Pierre Beaumarchais noted in The Barber of Seville (1775), “I would rather worry without need than live without heed.” Thank you, Pierre.

Stay home. Be happy. Increase the efficiency of your company.

Last week I wrote about the under-appreciated value of the older employee. This week let’s consider the virtual employee. Both of these non-traditional HR solutions have buttressed the value and efficacy of my executive sales outsourcing firm Corporate Rain International for 16 years and I heartily recommend our approach. It’s the way business is increasingly going, whether you like it or not, but more importantly, it can lead to a cornucopia of personnel riches for the entrepreneur and a large boost to corporate esprit de corps.

Traditionally, the most valuable employees are those who arrive at their desks early and remain there after everyone else goes home. And they often are great workers. However, these single-minded office hard-drivers are not necessarily what the evolving worker wants to model himself on.

The Kenexa Research Institute of Minneapolis, Minnesota has done extensive research on the telecommuting employee. Surprisingly, in a poll of 10,000 US workers, 73% of remote and home-based workers were happy with their company as a place to work, compared with 64% for traditional office workers. Furthermore, 70% of the telecommuters said they were “proud to tell people I work for my company,” in contrast to 64% for traditional office workers. Jack Wiley of Kenexa states:

“When companies allow employees to work remotely or from home, they are explicitly communicating to them that  ‘I trust you to be dedicated to the accomplishment of the work, even if I’m not able to observe you doing it.’ It boils down to respect. I respect you and I have confidence in your commitment to the work—to do this under the conditions and at the time you feel will be most productive for you.” (WSJ-September 11, 2007)

Lifestyles and people’s needs are changing. I believe most contemporary employees are looking for a freer, less top-down work atmosphere. Jack Wiley of Kenexa notes that the most important thing an employee wants from an employer (besides compensation) is appreciation for the work they contribute and to be treated respectfully.

Flexibility is an increasingly valued commodity for employees. Many of my executive sales associates are very out-of-the-box in their needs and values. They are not people who necessarily want a traditional career. For example, Corporate Rain has sales executives who are raising venture capital on the side. Also, mothers who have held high-level corporate positions, but no longer want to be in that particular rat-race. We  have two associates writing books on the side, as well as associates who consult independently in fields like PR, HR, Non-profit, ROI augmentation, and the production of beer. We even have had a former VP of Jack Welch who owns a trout farm in North Carolina!

These are non-traditional employees who value the lifestyle flexibility offered by my firm. Most of these folks are of a quality I could never afford but for the fact that Corporate Rain offers unique support for flexible lifestyle enhancement. (My company is also a company of equals. In many ways, it’s intentionally as close to a Communist company as you can get and still be a going capitalist concern. But that’s a discussion for another day. Maybe next week.)

Employees’ changing values and desires will change the office world. Edward Deci and Richard Ryan of the University of Rochester are exemplars of a new school of “happiness” research. They have found that employees do their best work when motivated from within, when they have control of their time and decisions, and when they feel a deep sense of purpose. (Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior–Plenum–1985)

So, why not happiness, freedom, AND work? Thomas Jefferson, who died on July 4, 1826 (as did John Adams), said, “It is neither wealth nor splendor, but tranquility and occupation, which give happiness.” (Letter to Mrs. A. S. Marks–1788) Thanks, Thomas.

American society worships youth. Our society devalues age. This is humanly and entrepreneurially wasteful. This is not ROI practical. It is also not demographically realistic.

It has become a clichéd joke, but 60 really is the new 40 and 70 really is the new 50. We all are simply living longer and healthier lives.

Betty Friedan, the founder of NOW, wrote a book in 1994 called The Fountain of Age (Reed Business Information). Friedan presents the thesis that life after 55 is by far the most fecund and useful for most people. She produces research studies and considerable anecdotal evidence that the “Third Age” (after growing up and then generating a career and a family) is the age of creativity.

I know my own executive sales outsourcing firm, Corporate Rain International, has vastly profited over the years by resting the core of our practice on the backs of associates between the ages of 35 and 65. (Admittedly this has been made easier by the fact that Corporate Rain is a virtual company. Our executives mostly work out of their home offices all over the country.) In our case we need high-level people who can speak on a basis of equal business stature with top decision-makers at corporations. The authority to do this type of business development effectively is not something that can be taught to a younger employee academically. Subtle instinct and articulate gravitas can only come through the experience and hard knocks of a lived life. Hence the enormous value of older employees.

I’ve heard the business reasons for hiring the young–that the young have more energy, they are more open to the new (not set in their ways), they work for less money, they are healthier, more technologically savvy…and they’re prettier. I’ve found most of these arguments to be specious on balance. In fact, what the older employee offers is an unteachable wisdom, knowledge, perspective and patience.  These unquantifiable qualities come mostly from a lived life. From the travails of existence itself come humility, sensitivity and compassion. These are certainly very useful qualities in service-oriented, high-end sales. I anticipate each of my associates will be independent, authoritative points of interaction in support of our clients. They must be constantly making independent, nuanced decisions, in addition to consistently embodying the service ethic and spiritual generosity that I expect out of my representatives.

I have found the older employee to have more loyalty and staying power. And the generational work ethic is better. I know this makes me sound like a creaky curmudgeon, but it is, I believe, a clear-eyed, practical observation. Furthermore, in exchange for certain life-style tradeoffs and flexibility, these employees are more financially practicable than one might think. (I intend to talk about life-style and employment next week.) Also, most of the work of my firm is sedentary, not requiring the vaster physical prowess of the young.

Additionally, it’s just ridiculously wasteful to prematurely abandon the aging employee, like an old Inuit floating off to die on an iceberg.

Social security begins at 62. In practical terms this age must be raised. The average lifespan of a 40 year old male is 77.1 years and the average lifespan of the 40 year old female is 81.9 years. Government retirement support will have to be scaled back to deal with the coming financial tsunami of unfunded entitlements. There is no reason for your employees not to come from this overlooked pool of more seasoned employees, especially if they’re not required to dig ditches.

Financier Bernard Baruch said in 1955, “To me, old age is always fifteen years older than I am.” Makes sense to me. Thanks, Bernard.

I watched President Obama’s Oval Office speech on June 15 concerning the eternally gushing oil well in the Gulf of Mexico. And it reminded me of my long-held instinct about the importance of stillness to the salesman.

My feeling about this is a close corollary to my blogs on Silence (March 2, 2010) and Simplicity (November 24, 2009 & December 1, 2009). But the value of stillness is one more of drama than of essence.

President Obama’s speech, in addition to being vague and confusingly convoluted, was uncomfortably twitchy, physically frenetic. It was an uneasy and distracting thing for me to watch. How ’bout you?

In the Wall Street Journal of June 19, 2010 Peggy Noonan describes the speech thusly:

“Throughout the speech the president gestured showily, distractingly, with his hands. Politicians do this now because they’re told by media specialists that it helps them look natural. They don’t look natural, they look like Ann Bancroft gesticulating to Patty Duke in ‘The Miracle Worker.’”

When dealing with a catastrophe, people want assurance about the immediate crisis, not a hypothetically global analysis of the environment.  One way a good salesman–and Obama was a salesman for his administration last Wednesday evening–assures a client is by not over-doing it. A good salesman abjures excess fussiness and flummery. He gets to the point with cleanness and clarity. If you try to sell everything you sell nothing.

One technical example of this is Ms. Noonan’s apt description above of Obama’s excessive use of his hands. It seemed like every other word was emphasized with a hand chop. If every phrase is so emphasized, there is only a distracting mannerism with no meaning. It vitiates everything. More is not better.

Better is to say less and say the important things with a still simplicity, especially when trying to make your client feel secure. For the salesman it’s ideal to say what’s important and then be still.  Stillness does not mean a deenergized inertia. It means a focused, quiet, rooted presence. Effective stillness comes when you are secure. It is the ideal completion of the dramatic arc of the sale.

Mark Twain once said, “The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.” Thanks, Mark.

Our lovely Great Recession has been a boon for my executive sales outsourcing firm Corporate Rain International. Yup. Despite alarming small business trends I’ve discussed lately, Corporate Rain has become a tighter, stronger, more profitable, more effective organization. So, in many ways, I personally feel gratitude for the current economic malaise.

Fear is a useful tool for change. White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel has famously said a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. That’s true. So here’s how we’ve used the last two anni horribiles at Corporate Rain to become a better company with a steadily improving top and bottom line.

First of all, we’ve brought on an experienced COO with new responsibilities for streamlining and efficiencies, with broad authority to institute change. As founder of my firm I’ve had to let go responsibilities I’m not gifted at, an act made easier through urgency. We have cut inefficient personnel and process. Staff responsibilities have been reviewed and realigned. Our line-up of  executives and associates have never been stronger or more effective. Every expenditure is analyzed, no matter how minor. (My COO insisted I justify a $10 light bulb purchase last week. Annoying, but probably all to the good.)

Second, we have discovered at least two serious new revenue streams, which we had simply not bothered to pursue pre-recession. These new verticals are recession proof and make our long-term financial planning easier.

Third, when we have had extra staffing band-width, we have used our resources and experience on a pro bono basis to support a variety of charities including Texas Voice Project For Parkinson’s Disease, Alzheimer’s Association, By The Hand Club For Kids, and the Wilkinson Center, helping these institutions with free ongoing business development, research, and planning. We also sit on the boards of some of these organizations. On an individual basis I am deeply proud that most of our employees do active volunteer work individually, as well.

In addition to writing my alarmist concern about the current state of small business, I and Corporate Rain’s President David Downey have had personal meetings with elected officials in three different states and Washington D.C. to discuss both charitable issues and current small business problems. We have corporately committed to active participation with the boards of three different non-profits.

I do have a mystical instinct that karmic reward does follow energy given back to the universe. Without sounding too granola hippyish, bad times offer an even greater opportunity for an open spirit of entrepreneurial generosity. This recession presents a particularly useful chance to walk the walk of principles and ideals. And it’s really ultimately a selfish thing as it ennobles the tone of your company and engenders pride and happiness in employees. If nothing else, a tone of service and helpfulness osmoses into all your everyday interactions. It spawns trust and collegiality in potential clients.

So, while I cannot deny alarm and even morbidity in my concern about the current macro small business climate, there are so many daily positives that can come out of economic gloom. At least that has been the case for us.

Though we live in a fraught and difficult entrepreneurial atmosphere, there is really no bad time for doing good business.

General Douglas MacArthur said, “There is no security on this earth; there is only opportunity.” Thank you, Douglas.

Here’s my general feeling about new hiring these days. No way, José. The choice for my 30 employee firm, Corporate Rain International, is to not hire now unless we absolutely have to.

Why? For me and most of my small business colleagues, clients, and friends, the present Great Recession is a stunning entrepreneurial ambush. It’s a flabbergasting rule changer and assumption challenger. However, the conventional wisdom is that we’ve now turned a corner and that the entrepreneurial class is and should be beginning to make new hires.  As I mentioned on May 18 (Chicken Little and Entrepreneurship), I remain less that sanguine about a robust recovery, with it’s concomitant implications for a hiring ramp-up.

The news is technically positive. The Wall Street Journal reported on June 4 that unemployment is down to 9.7%. Payroll giant ADP reports private sector jobs increased 55,000 last month and the number of claims for unemployment went down by 10,000. Ford and GM are rehiring some autoworkers. Payrolls climbed 431,000 and pending home sales rose 6%. White House Head Economist Christina Romer spoke on Friday of “continuing signs of labor market recovery.” But before popping the recovery champagne, I have some very cautionary thoughts.

No one likes bad news. But beneath the patina of good news mentioned above (and emphasized in government press releases) there are lots of corrosive caveats. The first of these is purely factual. How much of this employment news is really true?

John Crudele of the NY Post has been on an editorial jihad about the undependable and illusory nature of governmental employment figures for some time, pointing out that much of what is accepted as factual truth about employment, new company formation, and economic activity is really hypothetical, and often quite optimistic, guesswork. In his column of June 3, titled, “Census Workers Share Their Horror Stories”, he shares anecdotal evidence that, among other things, the Census office hiring figures may be inflated. He states, “A couple of weeks ago I found out that Census was repeatedly hiring and firing workers without any apparent reason. I questioned if this was being done to artificially boost the nation’s employment figures since the Labor Department considers it a new job created whenever someone is hired to work as little as one hour in a month. Was Census churning jobs to make the economy look healthier than it really is?” Good question, John.

But even assuming governmental figures for employment were not disingenuous, 411,000 of the recent new payroll jobs were indeed with the Census Bureau, creating very short-term governmental employment. After predictions of a 200,000 gain in private sector jobs last month, the actual figure was 41,000. That’s not good. Despite lots of governmental cheer leading and happy talk, the private sector is just not coming back.

Pardon my pessimism, friends, but I feel more strongly than ever that small business is the canary in the coal mine that presages nothing good for the US economy. President Obama seems genuinely bemused as to why we small businessmen refuse to start hiring. Hasn’t he stimulated the economy out the wazoo? Yes. Probably excessively so. But little of this largesse has been directed toward the entrepreneur.

No less than Bill Gross of PIMCO, being interviewed on Bloomberg Radio (8:45 AM-June 4), stated job growth in the private sector is moribund, and that without temporary governmental stimulus unemployment would be over 11%. Even überliberal Robert Reich wrote a cautionary op-ed in The New York Times on Wednesday, June 2 titled “Entrepreneur or Unemployed?” which challenges optimistic assumptions about supposed increased entrepreneurial activity. Reich asks, “So why all this entrepreneurship last year?…In a word [it's actually] unemployment. Booted off company payrolls, millions of Americans had no choice but to try selling themselves. Another term for ‘entrepreneur’ is ‘self-employed.” Reich reports that layoffs have surged while hiring has almost disappeared. And these are permanent job losses, replaced by labor-saving technologies, outsourcing or contract labor. He predicts a 50% likelihood we will slip back into recession.

In addition to our current entrepreneurial conundrums, there are growing long-term disincentives that militate against small business hiring.

• The major disincentive is potential large costs of tax and bureaucracy associated with the new health care legislation. But, even worse, is the uncertainty this cryptic 2,000 page monstrosity has created. What the hell is really in it? I sure don’t know. I don’t think even the people in our government know. It’s bloody scary for a businessman.

• Second, how does private business hope to compete for employees with the increasingly bloated salaries of public sector workers? Westchester County Association executive Amy Allen, in the June issue of Westchester magazine, points out that the average public sector salary in my region of New York is about 6% above the average salary in the private sector. And this is before figuring in large pensions and health care for life. According to the Cato Institute, the average federal civilian salary with benefits is $119,982 compared with $59,909 for the average private sector worker. Wow.

• Third, states like New York are near bankruptcy. To solve their financial conundrum I predict these states will fall on small business with more taxes and more red tape–like lions on a lamb. Small business is vulnerable and weak compared to big business and public sector unions. I sure hope and pray I’m wrong on this one.

My cri du coeur is that the small business issue be addressed more insistently, more forcefully by the press and media, as well as government. Pay attention to us! All is not well out here in little business land. It would be utter imprudent madness for most of us to hire and rehire employees in the present environment.

Hire more workers?  Hell no.

People want to fall in love. A good salesman should let them.

To explain what I mean by this, let me step backwards for a moment. The root of quality selling must always be in having something valid, something true, something genuinely helpful to sell. If you don’t have this, don’t even begin to try to sell. If you try to sell that in which you have no passionate belief or something that is false you are dead. You are a servant of the devil. You are an apostle of the unsavory. You are Bernie Madoff. You are a fraud and incipient thief, as well as a killer of your own soul.

Perhaps this is obvious, but, in truth, good selling begins with a moral choice to purvey a real value and it is essential to know this in advance.

But assuming the real value of your selling proposition, salesmanship is really nothing more than helping people be selfish, helping people do the right thing for themselves.

The salesman’s job is to guide people to “fall in love” with that which can raise them up. The salesman’s job is to help a business client succumb to that which, in varying degrees, offers ROI salvation for himself and his firm.

It cannot be denied that most of us associate falling in love with erotic desire. Indeed, like a new lover, a salesman’s job is to make the truth sexy. A passionately told truth is and should be a heart-fluttering aphrodisiac.

Dr. M. Scott Peck, in his profoundly insightful book The Road Less Traveled (1978-Simon & Schuster-p. 90) talks extensively about the nature of love. He states, “…falling in love is a trick that our genes pull on our otherwise perceptive mind to hoodwink or trap us into marriage.” But, for Peck, falling in love is also a tool for initially breaking down barriers separating us all from a deeper love, a deeper truth and an agapic potentiality.

A good salesman, like a good lover, combines a conscious employment of qualities like looks, charm, wardrobe, and, most importantly, a well-honed charisma of expressed faith in a product. Charisma emanates from a fervid inner truth and an embedded belief. A focused salesman leaves a palpable frisson in his wake and should awake an ardent longing in a potential client to do what is in the client’s best interest anyway. Effective salesmen are evangelists of “the good.”

The English philosopher Bertrand Russell, in The Impact of Science on Society, states simply, “If you feel love, you have a motive for existence, a reason for action.” Thank you, Bertrand.

Here’s a simple, short thought for this week: No is good. No is the salesman’s friend. No produces efficiency.

I frequently tell my friends that rejection is my middle name. For myself and any salesman rejection will surely be the result of many, if not most, of your interactions. Certainly for high-end sales initiation, the specialty of my firm Corporate Rain International, that is the case. When we’re doing great for clients often we will still be getting 85% rejection.

I was struck by a recent blog posted by Anthony Tjan and published by the Harvard Business Review (April 21, 2010). Mr. Tjan is managing partner and founder of the venture capital firm Cue Ball and is not a salesman per se. But his thoughts are very applicable to sales. He states, “A yes is obviously the answer you always hope to get, but the ability to get to no, especially if it is a quick one, is critical to maximizing efficiency and effectiveness. The sooner you get a no, the faster you’ll be able to look for that next yes.” Utterly true.

Beware of ditherers and vacillators. They will eat you up. They are the real enemies of efficient sales. There are ways to cut to the chase without brusqueness, discourtesy, or antagonizing a real prospect. For example, one simple thing I try to do early on in discussions with new potential clients is ascertain if my firm’s costs are manageable. Corporate Rain is a high-end service. With greatest courtesy I always want to make sure a potential client can simply afford my firm before getting in too deeply. This respects his time as well as mine.

But when your proposition is rejected it is important to keep focused on your core values. When I am rejected I strive to become even more courteous than when a sale seemed possible. I try to keep my mind focused on service, even when there is no business to be had. This brands a seamless tone of helpfulness, good humor and collegiality that carries over to the next sales event, hopefully a more successful event.

But getting to no is a real sales value in itself. Mr. Tjan quotes a friend of his as saying, “…a fast no is better than a long maybe.” Indeed.

So God bless no. Rejection can be a good and necessary part of sales. It is not a negative. It is a helpful efficiency. Handling rejection positively is a part of any healthy ongoing sales effort.

The Greek philosopher Diogenes (412-323 B.C.) was once noticed begging from a statue. When asked the reason for this pointless action, he replied, “I am exercising the art of being rejected.” As should all good salesmen.

Thank you, Diogenes.

Chicken Little famously said, “The sky is falling!  The sky is falling!” Well, for small business it may be true.

Small business is much more troubled than is being acknowledged. Small business is also not being sufficiently covered in the national press. It is the canary in the coal mine, despite 3 1/2 quarters of continuing real growth in G.D.P.

I can tell you categorically, brothers and sisters, that small business is not recovering like the macro-economy supposedly is. While my own firm is chugging along OK, the bulk of the clientele my small company serves is other small companies, and the fear and uncertainty I encounter every day in my clients and colleague entrepreneurs is palpable. No one wants to take risk. No one wants to substantially invest in the future.

You may say I am one small business guy at a little pip-squeak company spreading counter intuitive anecdote and calumny. One of my friends calls me the “the Nouriel Roubini of small business” because of my bleak outlook. I prefer to think of myself as a cold-eyed realist. I do not enjoy writing jeremiads or screeds. Nevertheless, I fear small business is entering a permarecession. Here is why.

1.  No one wants to lend money to risk-taking entrepreneurs.  Despite the so-called rebound of the economy, entrepreneurial accommodation from banks and venture capital ain’t happenin.’

2.  Health care mandates will keep small business small and profit diminished. I don’t know a single entrepreneur–not one–who evinces a full-voice enthusiasm to expand his workforce in this environment.

3.  Federal taxes is acomin’ in. This is on two levels. The new statist fiats by Washington on health care will have to be paid for. But other increases in taxation will fall hard on small businesses and, also, individually on small businessmen. Why invest in your company? Investment is disincentivised. So entrepreneurial passion and creativity becomes muted.

4.  State taxes will also increase. A lot. This includes property, sales and income taxes, plus continuing fee augments. This is particularly true for the Greece of America called California. And, unfortunately, it will soon be true of my beloved New York (Greece, Jr.). Business, of course, will migrate to seven or eight tax friendly states that I don’t live in. (See April 13, 2010 blog, “Texas and Entrepreneurship“)

5.  Bureaucracy will increase exponentially. I can assure you small business is already groaning under the demands of governmental paperwork. I see no option but for this to augment vastly.

6.  Unemployment, now between 9.7-10%, must eventually be felt by business as loss in demand.

7.  The present “recovery” is a government financed phenomenon. Keynesian to the max. When it stops, as it inevitably must, either a double-dip recession will ensue or a Jimmy Carter, Japan-style stagflation will appear. Small business (or big business for that matter) will not be robust enough to buttress employment when government ceases goosing the public sector and union jobs. Apres moi, le deluge, mes amis. The piper will be paid.

8.  The Fed has shot its wad. It cannot save us again.

9.  Because both Republicans and Democrats lack the political will to honestly exercise fiscal sanity, a huge new tax called inflation will sooner or later monetize the debt. I guarantee it. We will not become the Weimar Republic or Zimbabwe, but it will not be good.

Oh, dear. I seem to have gone on a bit. Mercifully, I will stop. There must be an end to such mordancy. I don’t like being a small business Paul Revere of the dour. But this is my view from the street.

Our country will not recover if small business does not do better. On a positive note, I’m glad to see there was some press attention yesterday to the small business conundrum. Meredith Whitney wrote on page 21A of the Wall Street Journal (May 17, 2010) a piece titled “The Small Business Credit Crunch.”  She states, “Unless real focus is afforded to reengaging small business in this country, we will have a tragic and dangerous unemployment level for an extended period of time.” The same WSJ edition has an article on page R4 titled “Tightening the Credit Screws“, about the difficulty of small business finance. And Robert Schiller, economics professor at Yale, discussed a long-term double-dip recession scenario in the Sunday New York Times (May 16, 2010).  He states, “I use a definition of a double-dip recession that doesn’t emphasize the short term.  Instead I see it as beginning with a recession in which unemployment rises to a high level then falls at a disappointingly slow rate.“  In describing certain parallels of the present to The Great Depression, Schiller describes a “…feeling of uncertainty that discouraged entrepreneurship, lending and spending, and, most important, hiring.”

Hmm.  Sounds familiar.

Horace Greeley, the nineteenth century editor of the New York Tribune, famously said, “Go west, young man!” I wish to update that maxim to, “Go to Texas, young man!”

Why? I’ll tell you why. Texas likes entrepreneurs, goddamn it. It welcomes them. It smoothes their way. It wants them. It loves them. You may say, “Doesn’t every state want our wonderful, productive, job-creating, creative business class?” No. Every state apparently does not.

I was in Dallas last month on business for my company, Corporate Rain. And I was pleasantly surprised by the palpable warmth extended to me in many ways as a non-resident small businessman looking to expand into this peculiar and unique state. I came home to New York feeling that Texas offers a paradigm and guidepost of what can surely make all our struggling states more internationally competitive.

Case in point, The Dallas Morning News (Sunday, March 14, 2010) printed a revealing, succinct article by staff writer Cheryl Hall about this phenomenon. Ms. Hall cites Michael Cox former chief economist for the Federal Reserve of Dallas (presently head of The O’Neil Center for Global  Markets at SMU). Mr. Cox apparently has a slogan for companies seeking to recruit elite workers from New York and California: MOVE TO TEXAS AND GET A FREE BMW. Ms. Hall confirms that this is no exaggeration; that professionals living in the Northeast and California “pay the equivalent of a year’s worth of expensive car payments in annual personal income tax”, which Texas doesn’t have. Professor Cox states, “Every six years Dallas adds a million people.” Since taking over as Director of the SMU O’Neil Center, Cox has created compelling statistics that point to Dallas/Ft. Worth as the new “it” economy for common sense American businessmen.

I live in Westchester County, New York. I personally love living here. I love the opera, the theatre, the art, the Yankees, the Mets, and the Jets, the wooded beauty, the distinctive seasons, the intellectual ferment, the buzzing frisson of sweaty go-go New York energy. But Westchester County bears the heaviest tax burden of any county in the United States. The State of New York is effectively bankrupt and controlled by featherbedding unions, selfishly interested only in maintaining staggeringly excessive benefits at any cost–mostly on the back of energetic productive small business. Why would any entrepreneur in his right mind come here?

Furthermore, even with New York’s incomparable cultural footprint, Dallas, particularly, is quietly growing its competitive cultural presence including a startling new world class opera house, the architecturally notable AT&T Performing Arts Center and the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Hall (home to the Dallas Symphony, led by charismatic young conductor, Jaap van Zweden), and strong civic support of museums, theatres, parks, wildlife, environment, and education. Dallas is not New York, but it is stealthily becoming a quality of life, as well as an entrepreneurial, oasis. They’ve even elected a lesbian sheriff. Really.

On February 18, 2010, Forbes Magazine released its list of America’s most miserable cities. It’s not just Detroit and Newark on this list anymore. It’s also New York City, Chicago, and Cleveland. I assure you, my friends, we entrepreneurs will leave the New Yorks, the Californias, the Massachusetts, the Michigans, the Illinois, the New Jerseys, in droves. Eventually, entrepreneurs will shake the dust of these mad states from our sandals.

I won’t leave New York. I am willing to continue to pay the uncompetitive price of living in New York because I love it and it’s worth it to me. But for a young entrepreneur in New York or California it makes no sense to stay in these states when Texas and other sensible states beckon with lower taxes, reasonable government cost and efficiency, and rational labor costs.

The actor Fess Parker died while I was in Texas. Fess Parker was famous for portraying Davey Crockett in a Walt Disney TV series during the mid-fifties. (I still remember my Davey Crockett coonskin cap, which I wore religiously for a while.) Crockett, in a speech he made when he resigned his Tennessee legislative seat, memorably concluded his parting Jeremiad with the immortal words, “You may all go to Hell, and I will go to Texas.”

Well put, Davey. Good advice. Thank you.

As many of you know, I was an actor and singer for many years. Not a common background for a businessman. But I learned a lot that applies to my life as an accidental entrepreneur. (I’d better, since I have no formal training in business at all.)

Business friends and clients sometimes send their sons and daughters to me for advice if their progeny want to go into show business. These kids almost always ask what’s the most important thing about making it as a performer. My answer? LUCK. There are a multitude of truly talented young artists and, honestly, I find luck the key differentiator in their success. However, the secret is to be ready for luck to happen, when and if it does happen.

The same is utterly true of entrepreneurship. Successful entrepreneurs are driven and courageous. They are a passionate, hard-working breed. I truly love entrepreneurs. They are infinitely not boring people. But, despite their admirable, if disparate, natures and work habits, I still believe the key element in their success is luck.

How does luck happen? In my opinion it comes to those who are most comfortable in their own skins. It comes most easily to those who live and breathe their unique selfness.  There is an achieved existential integrity to people who have luck. They are themselves. Becoming a real “self” is, of course, a life-long process, but it is just as important as marketing, business plans, spread sheets, technological know-how and everything else they teach you in B-School.

There is wisdom in the phrase, “It’s better to be lucky than smart.” Luck defies encapsulation and control. It is an ineffable and recondite goddess. But it seems to me it comes to those who are soulfully open to acceptance of fate’s surprises. I believe it happens to people who’ve somehow developed an innate subconscious integrity that allows them to pivot adroitly and automatically in response to any happenstance.

I was lucky last week. On the train. I bumped into a neighbor, a man I’ve known passingly for a good while. We got to chatting about neighbor things and, quite incidentally, I mentioned that my firm, Corporate Rain, sets up elite sales initiation pipelines for corporate clients. Well. It turns out my neighbor represents a major foreign country and is responsible for helping his country’s firms penetrate the US market. Who’d ‘ave thunk it?  The next day he had me in front of nine CEO’s at his consulate’s boardroom. Within five days, three of these companies were clients. God bless Metro North.

Napoleon Bonaparte talked about luck. In his Maxims he said, “When a man is a favorite of fortune she never takes him unawares and, however astonishing her favors may be, she finds him ready.”

Thank you, Napoleon.

Back in the early eighties I was watching Johnny Carson one night. The actress Shelley Winters was Johnny’s guest. Shelley Winters flounced herself out and sat her fat amplitude into the guest chair. Johnny Carson was obviously fond of her, as he frequently had her on. Johnny, as I recall began with something like, “So, Shelley, how’ve you been lately?” Shelley Winters paused a moment, gave a great sigh and said, “Well John, the problem with me is that wherever I go, I go too.” It was funny but also sad. Winters was a notorious neurotic whose problems with drugs and men often played out very publicly. Nevertheless, there was a compelling sincerity to her lostness that was poignant and illuminating.  She was deeply authentic in a morose and melancholic way.

Shelley Winters was a most troubled woman, but, in reality, it should be a good thing that “wherever I go, I go too.” It goes to the soul of what I feel is crucial in good salesmen—authenticity. It seems to me that personal authenticity should always be a primary and ongoing quest of the salesman for at least two reasons. One, it makes for long-term personal health. Two, it results in successful sales.

People like what is real and they trust it instinctively. And there are a million different equally valid ways to be real.  It’s a lifelong task to imbue a rooted, unconscious integrity, a “real selfness”, to all interactions.

I have always been and continue to be distrustful of people who talk about magical sales techniques. Sales folk who turn for silver bullet solutions from various sales gurus ultimately will be disappointed. Because, like any other vocation, happiness and effectiveness for the salesman is only rendered dynamic and sound when placed on a bedrock of self-knowledge and integrated personal values—that is, an earned and lived integrity.

President George Bush, Sr. was visiting a nursing home in 1992 and, in his tour of the home, he met an Alzheimer’s patient who he asked, “Do you know who I am?” The patient’s answer was, “No, but if you go down the hall there’s a nurse who can tell you.” If only it were that simple.

There is a famous German novella I read in college called Kleider Machen Leute by Gottfried Keller. (It is usually translated as “Clothes Make the Man”.)  It’s about a poor tailor who takes a coach journey and, through an odd set of circumstances, he is dressed in a fur trimmed cloak much above his real ability to afford and his station in life. He is mistaken for a rich man and the results of this misidentity and various people’s reactions guide the tale.

This novella is highly applicable to entrepreneurs. I believe many of us entrepreneurs don’t think enough about clothes in business. And we should. Here’s why.

Most of us spend large amounts on branding, marketing, and advertising creating the apt image for our firms. Yet it constantly amazes me how little thought owners give to how they present themselves sartorially.  It is relatively inexpensive personal branding we’re talking about here.

This most certainly does not mean an entrepreneur needs to be a fashion plate. Any styling from the funerial to the flamboyant can be appropriate, but it should be consistent with your chosen messaging and branding. Making strong, identifying statements through your attire can create a defined presence before you say a word. It can telegraph a context and corporate definition.

I’ve had clients who accomplish this bespoke branding very well in t-shirts. Some of my creative clients will choose bold colors. If you sell beer you might want to look like a guy who is comfortable in a bar. I am sure Anna Wintour spends extensive time each day ensuring her personal clothes visually affirm her authoritative fashion leadership as editor of Vogue Magazine. Personally, I try to look like a banker. My company Corporate Ran International is mostly known for creating high-quality meetings with real financial corporate decision-makers. My clients often entrust me with their most proprietary information and secrets. So, even though my personal history and proclivities are quite bohemian, I want to create assurance of stability and discretion. I do this partially by investing in expensive, highly tailored suits and by insisting that my associates always dress high when meeting with Corporate Rain clients.

You don’t need a personal makeover to brand yourself through your apparel. You do need to know what you have to offer and who you are. Then sartorial branding becomes simple common sense.

As the Greek stoic philosopher Epictetus states, “Know first who you are; and then adorn yourself accordingly.”

Thank you, Epictetus.

My employees are more important to me than my clients. Yup. Even more important than my clients.

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that I can almost always gauge the health of a firm when I walk into a reception area. If the receptionist is happy, professional, and can tell you the basics about the firm, it is almost always a healthy company.

Employees are very much the real heart and soul of most service enterprises and, certainly, of my own company Corporate Rain International. This is not to say I don’t love my clients. I do. I work for them with passion and zeal. I worry about them at night. I like them personally. They often become my friends. However, I can get clients. What is harder is developing a cadre of associates that truly brands and inculcates my firm’s ethics, quality, and essence in their very being. That is Corporate Rain’s real value and capital, and why companies hire and stay with my firm.

Ken Makovsky

I was reminded of this in recently reading Ken Makovsky’s excellent blog “My Three Cents” (January 27, 2010 – www.makovsky.com/blog). He states, “Employees are the face of the company.  They are the ambassadors who make a difference.” Makovsky goes on to cite a study in The New York Times that found strong sales growth was closely correlated with employees who thought more highly of their company than did society at large. Ken Makovsky is profoundly correct.  I’ve always believed every employee should be a rainmaker and a P.R. touch point.

Dr. Steven Balder of NYU (In Crain’s New York Business) has noted that great workplaces have in common a sense of community that  is built upon respect for the employee.  He says,  “People are seeking more than just a job.  [Good companies] are validating people and making them feel respected.” He goes on to state that such firms are much better suited to survive the current recession. (I personally  try to be bluntly honest with my own associates in explaining my company’s financial basics, as we work our way through this “Great Recession”.) There is mutual respect and a sense of a communal shared risk in embracing this process. A culture of respect and equality activates the acceptance of entrepreneurial vision and leadership and the empowerment of collaborative, creative, vibrant business enterprise.

If you are interested in reading further on this subject try The Power of Respect by Deborah Norville, the anchor of Inside Edition.  She concludes her useful book with these words:

“If you run a business, why wouldn’t you want your employees to be more creative, to be more loyal, to give that little extra to their job—especially when all it takes to encourage it is to let people do their jobs with a little acknowledgment of what they do and recognition of their efforts….Consideration, deference, and inclusiveness require nothing but a respectful mindset.”

Thank you, Deborah.

Lida Askew with daughter Kathy

My mother, Lida Askew, died yesterday of Parkinson’s Disease. She was 83. My four sisters and I took turns holding her desiccated body and stroking her waxen features as she slowly shut down. The end was a gentle, hospice assisted descent into the sweet arms of…whatever comes next.

My mother was a good old girl who lived a full, useful life and she died without regret. She enjoyed her life to the end.  She enjoyed herself even while confined to a wheelchair and shaking with Parkinson’s. But, particularly interestingly, hers was a most conscious and generous death.

My mother was very decidedly not an entrepreneur. In fact, I think she looked a bit askance at my late in life embrace of capitalism. But she was a tremendous long-term planner, and, as such, an inspiration to me in thinking about succession in my own life and in the life of my company. She foresaw and directed every aspect of her own end. This included a very rationated, specific splitting and dispensation of her estate to prevent family friction, as well as detailed instructions on how she wished to die–that is, in her own bed and not in the hospital. She was very precise about pulling plugs and not extending her life artificially. (My sister Kathy has chronicled this process in her excellent blog www.thenewelder.com.)

I want to have the forethought to create an equal grace around the succession and inheritance issues of my firm Corporate Rain International. I don’t know much about those issues yet, but I want to be just as smoothly efficacious and wise in thinking about my employees, my clients, my family, and myself when things end. In her modest way, my mother created a splendid suggestive road map.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how I deal with very bad days. Harking back to that posting, I remember being depressed and distraught one day years ago and turning to my mother for solace and advice. (I think it was about a failed love affair). She was appropriately sympathetic, of course. That’s a mother’s job. Then she said, “But you know, Timothy, there’s little I can say that will cheer you up.  There’s only one thing I know to do on really bleak, dark days. The only thing I know to do on such hopeless days is spend that time cleaning my toilets.”

Thank you, my dear mother.  Goodbye.

Silence. It’s certainly not the first thing that pops into mind when you think of sales. However, I’ve got laryngitis this week and have to largely shut up, so the topic is on my mind.

My forced quietude, while frustrating, has had a positive effect on me personally and, strangely, a salutary outcome on my limited sales interactions. I find myself very focused on being succinct and making my words count. Also, I find myself sharply concentrated on listening. It’s quite centering. When I do speak I am to the point and responsive to the particularity of my clients and associates. I simply don’t have the voice for bullshit.

I admit to occasional prolixity. It’s hard for me not to throw in the whole kitchen sink when I’m talking about my wonderful company Corporate Rain International. I love my company. I’m passionate about it. Yet my health coerced stillness reminds me that silence is a necessary and efficacious value in sales, as in life.

Quite aside from my laryngitis this week, I’ve always found a judicious use of planned silence a help with everything. There are two things I personally try to do each week to create moments of stillness. Simple, but helpful to me. One is I go to church. That one hour of quiet thought and physical non-activity, sans cell phones, children, chatter, etc., is clarifying and revivifying (quite aside from deeper issues of truth and faith). Two is I try to take a half day every week to go to the movies by myself, where I can be alone in the anonymous dark. I try to pick undemanding “B” movies (think American Pie, Jennifer Aniston, Police Academy VI, etc). Sometimes I go right to sleep, but frequently new thoughts come when I let go with no agenda. (Of course, if you’re a better man than me, a formal discipline of meditation, yoga and prayer is lots better.)

Maybe that’s enough for today. But here’s an interesting thought about silence from the avant guard composer John Cage. In his 1961 book “Silence” he says, “There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.”

Thanks, John.

Here’s a name for you: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Try pronouncing that one! (It’s a Hungarian moniker. Sounds like cheek-sent-me-high-ee.) Dr. Csikzentmihalyi is professor of Psychology at one of my alma maters, Claremont Graduate University in California, where he is professor of Psychology and Management and heads the Quality of Life Research Center. He doesn’t write directly about sales, per se. But he does speak to the issue of meaning in business eloquently and scientifically. And there are certainly corollary implications for sales in his work.

His work centers around the study of happiness, personal efficaciousness, and creativity. To wildly oversimplify Dr. Csikzentmihalyi’s work, he writes about what makes for value and meaning and happiness in business and work. Among other things, he tackles the question of what makes a business life worth living and what makes life worth living.

I have just begun to scratch the surface of his work and I won’t insult Dr. Csikzentmihalyi with further shallow oversimplification from my limited understanding and exposure, but he writes well, accessibly, and with the humility and humor of a true seeker. For example, to give just a hint of his tonality and concerns, in his book “Good Business“, he quotes Norman Augustino, the former CEO of Lockheed Martin:

“I’ve always wanted to be successful. My definition of being successful is contributing something to the world…and being happy while doing it….You have to enjoy what you’re doing. You won’t be very good if you don’t. And secondly, you have to feel you are contributing something worthwhile…If either of these ingredients are absent, there’s probably some lack of meaning in your work.”

I’m not an intellectual or an academic, like Dr. Csikszentmihalyi. This blog is meant to be practical, intuitive, annectdotal, and non-whitepaperish. It’s not the Harvard Business Review. But one of my recurring themes and passionate beliefs is that there is a great underestimation of the importance of meaning in the salesman’s life. Good salesmen and women are not testosterone driven, Darwinian manipulators, as they so often are portrayed. I believe deeply that lucre and achievement of material well-being are over emphasized in discussions of incentivizing sales folk.

My niche outsourced sales company, Corporate Rain, has mostly succeeded for sixteen years by projecting an institutional concern for ethics and meaning equally with profit. Maybe it’s a lucky accident, but it surely has made for a trope of centered happiness in myself and, I believe, in my sales associates and employees.

If you’re interested in reading more on this subject, I recommend a new book called “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us” by Daniel H. Pink.

I recently was forwarded a posting from www.madmenshow.com by Robin Greene, who blogs frequently and well on sales initiation (with her partner, Sheryl Tuttle) at New Business Pipeline. Robin’s forwarded blog was a love bouquet to Don Draper of Mad Men as the best salesman of all time on television. However, the blog concluded with a list of, to quote, “…the best salesmen, con artists, sweet-talkers, swindlers, and bullshitters in movies.” Wow.

The juxtaposition and equivalency of salesmen, con artists, sweet- talkers, swindlers, and bullshitters is breathtaking. And yet it fully reflects the popular view of salesmen as somewhat lower than whale shit. The list includes such luminaries as Gordon Gecko (portrayed by Michael Douglas in Wall Street), Blake (portrayed by Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross), Freddy Benson & Lawrence Jamieson (portrayed by Steve Martin and Michael Caine, respectively, in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels), Roy Waller (portrayed by Nicholas Cage in Matchstick Men), etc. You get the idea. A veritable concatenation of the villainous and the predatory.

Certainly when I began my late-in-life adventure as a salesman and entrepreneur, my idealistic and somewhat bohemian family didn’t quite know what to say. They probably thought I had become apostate to all that was fine and good. A Faustian sellout to filthy lucre. A crazed lemming descending into the rat hole of venality.

But what makes a good salesman in reality is the opposite of the amoral knaves of popular myth. You simply don’t win in the long term by fooling people. You win through sincere care and concern. That is a naive but very real truth.

Unlike the popular cliches about salesmen, long-term sales success comes from focusing on service and candor in all aspects of the sales process. A liar and a villain is eventually known by his works. Gordon Gecko aside, you don’t successfully sell with deception and legerdemain.

Mary McCarthy famously said of Lillian Hellman, “Every word she writes is a lie–and that includes ‘and’ and ‘the’.” In terms of his conclusions, that pretty much describes the depth of my disagreement with Paul Krugman, columnist for the New York Times.

I disagree with just about every opinion Paul Krugman voices. I am a believer in the free market, he seems to be a committed socialist. I am  a fiscal conservative with a fierce belief in balanced budgets, he an unapologetic Keynesian. I feel the current health care reform bill will be catastrophic for small business and employment, he feels it is salvific. (Note his most recent op-ed in the December 4 New York Times.)

Nevertheless, I view Paul Krugman as by far the most useful popular economic writer out there. He has a real didactic gift for simply explaining his process, analyses, and conclusions. I would love to have him as a professor (which he is at Princeton University). He’s a damn good (and unpretentious) writer.  He’s just a terrific explainer. He illuminates the most byzantine financial matters with a clarifying ease that is most helpful to me as an entrepreneur seeking to understand the world macro-economic picture.

I bring this up because I increasingly notice people of both liberal and conservative persuasions are losing a fair-minded and objective openness to quality argumentation.

It is a practical value for an entrepreneur to constantly be open to new thoughts, to consider the discomforting. For me, one way to enforce this discipline is to actively read and engage with those I disagree with. I really try to keep my firm, Corporate Rain, a forum for open discussion with colleagues and employees. Healthy dialogue and disagreement in a corporate community is creative and energizing. It fosters a frisson of aliveness and passion.

That said, ultimately there is only one boss, and, in the immortal word of Mel Brooks, “It’s good to be  King.”

Still thinking about simplicity this week. One thing I have found is that if I try to sell everything, I sell nothing. It’s just hard as hell for me to stop talking sometimes.

In a sense, this is a case of “Physician, heal thyself“, as I am constantly pounding my clients to focus their sales message into a simple essence. When it comes to my own selling it is a learned discipline to know when to stop. When it’s your baby, every descriptive detail is a gem of rare price. But the fact is that loquaciousness is the enemy of illumination.

It’s really true that less is more, most of the time. I was reminded of that last Sunday in church, of all places. My minister told the following story in his sermon to illustrate a biblical point, but the story works fine as a lesson about simplicity.

Two ranchers from Texas are bragging to each other about the size of their respective cattle-raising operations. One of them says, “Well, I’ve got 15,000 head of cattle out there on the range all wearing my ‘Flying A’ brand.”

“Flying A!” the other one sniffs. “My brand is the Bar T, Circle L, Cross Creek, Flying Z, Bent Fork, Double Back, North Canyon brand.”

“Wow!” says the first rancher. “How many cattle are you running?”

“Well,” the second rancher confesses grudgingly, “Not as many as you have. Most of mine don’t survive the branding.”

I am very wary of celebrity autobiographical tell-alls.  These tawdry tales are often filled with narcissistic self-pity or ironic condescension or self-congratulatory grandiosity clothed in ersatz humility.

Not so the new autobiography of Andre Agassi entitled “Open”.

One of my jobs when I was younger was tennis pro and I’ve continued to follow tennis over the years. Even before this remarkable autobiography, I admired the grace, artistry and passion of Andre Agassi.  I admired his calm, his court savvy, his fierce spirit.  Barbra Streisand called Agassi “the Zen Master”.  While I agree with Barbra Streisand about very little, I do agree with her about this.

Last Sunday (November 8, 2009), I was deeply touched by an excellent interview with Mr. Agassi conducted by Katie Couric on “60 Minutes”.  In addition to being a fine piece of broadcast journalism, it limned Agassi’s spiritual journey with a superb dramatic arc.  For me, it was compelling television.  But more than the skilled professionalism of the piece, what stood out for me was the authenticity of Andre Agassi.

The interview was hyped on the revelation that Agassi admits he used crystal meth for a year during his tennis career and lied about it to the powers that be.  However, this rather minor revelation of a young man’s sin, to me, was not what made the piece extraordinary.  What made the interview powerful was that without real guidance or education (Mr. Agassi never graduated high school), he willed himself to become a deeply and profoundly authentic person – a person he didn’t even know he was when he began his journey.  His pilgrimage from liar, fake and lost soul to authentic human wholeness struck me as particularly heroic in that it was largely internal, solitary and autodidactic.  A profoundly lonely but determined odyssey.  While direct and confessional, Mr. Agassi was clear-eyed and without self-pity.  Admirable.  Even astonishing — and even more astonishing for the fact that he chose his path from a place of unanchored anomie: ungrounded in faith or family.

So you may say “How can you know Andre Agassi is not just a big ol’ self-absorbed phony out hyping his book”?  Well, I guess I can only point to the judge, who, when asked to define pornography simply said “I may not be able to specifically define it, but I know it when I see it”.  Me too.  Which brings me, rather elliptically, to sales.

I’m a salesman and my company, Corporate Rain International, is a sales company that specializes in c-suite sales, mostly of services.  For me, the key to successful salesmanship is simply authenticity.  That soulful core is the pure essence of good salesmanship.  A good salesman is authentic.  He knows who he is.  He tells the unalloyed truth from a centered space and people respond.  I hope I am neither a naïf nor disingenuous when I state with absolute sincerity that authenticity is the key to selling.  But you have to be authentic before you can sell authentically.  Though not a salesman, Andre Agassi is a remarkable case study and example of achieved authenticity.

So thank you Andre Agassi for becoming yourself.  You are, as Barbra Streisand so aptly put it, “the Zen Master”. Bravo, Andre.

I ended my last post saying how uncomfortable change was for me.  For that very reason, I discipline myself to incorporate change on a regular basis.  I experiment with suggestions offered by my associates.  It keeps my 16 year old firm fresh and alive.  For that reason Corporate Rain International changes substantially every year.

I try to keep nothing sacrosanct.  Though it gives me a daily frisson of fear, it also keeps me fiercely alive.  Clients feel that intensity and it helps me as a salesman for my company.

My favorite example of creative change is The Beatles.  The Beatles essentially became a radically different band every year of their existence.  Every year, they abandoned sure repeatable success to push into a high-risk musical unknown.  Their work had integrity.  It was alive.

There is a paradigm for business in the example of The Beatles.  Things constantly change; never more so than now.  Flexibility and an active imagination are particularly useful to a sales entrepreneur in a constantly evolving marketplace. Even arbitrary creative destruction can have its place.  One of my favorite bits of aphoristic wisdom (which I associate with AA and 12-step programs) is “Insanity is defined as continually performing the same action and expecting different results”.  Obviously and utterly true.

Earlier in my life, I spent about 10 years as an actor.  One of my teachers was a man named Paul Austen.  One day in class he recounted a story about 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”.

So, even if it ain’t broke, it’s sometimes healthy to “fuck it up”.

I’m a salesman. That’s one of my primary jobs as CEO and Founder of my sixteen year old firm Corporate Rain. In my first blog I’m going to talk about sales and service. So here it is.

Service is not a term most of us associate with sales. Service brings to mind careers like the ministry, medicine, social work, teaching, counseling, coaching, research, philanthropy, psychotherapy—the pure helping professions.

Many folks think of salesmen as being as far away from service professions as you can get; maybe one notch above a thief, a murderer, or a politician. The adjectives used to describe salesman have traditionally not been flattering. That’s certainly the image that I had many years ago when one of my friends asked me to take on a freelance executive sales project. My immediate reaction? Ugh!

But sixteen years later here I am. A salesman. And it is, for me, quite the opposite of Ugh! In fact it is often a daily epiphany of insight and life-affirming wisdom as well as an opportunity for service.

Sales is, in fact, exactly the same as every other profession. It is a vocation that produces satisfaction and happiness for its practitioners (and brings worldly success) exactly to the degree it returns value to the world.

For me value is fundamentally lodged in truth. Sales value is not different than art. It illuminates, educates, informs, gives context, makes whole. It does this for its practitioners and it does this for its servitors. Not different from any vocation.

That’s today’s idle thought. See you again next week.