Making Rain

Here’s a headline from the New York Post last year. MOST WORKERS WOULD FIRE THEIR BOSS! According to a survey conducted by the website badbossology.com, almost 50% of workers would fire their boss. The poll is based on the responses of 1,118 employees who elected to fill out a questionnaire on the site.

While this might not be the most compelling scientific study ever conducted, it is buttressed by other more authoritative studies. For example, a recent Gallup Poll of more than one million employees found the biggest single reason cited for why people leave a company is a bad boss.

Bad bossism is one of the things I try to avoid by fostering a sense of community and equality within my firm. There are several ways I do this. One, I genuinely try to never hire anyone who isn’t better than me. Two, I hire people who are self-starters and who think like a boss; that is, who think in terms of the whole company and not just their part of it. Three, I practice an open door policy and actively encourage advice and creativity from everyone in the company, including secretaries and  interns. And, whenever possible, I try out these suggestions, giving full credit. Four, I avoid hiring yes men and timid souls who are not comfortable with autonomy and responsibility within the boundaries of ethics and appropriate business process. I sometimes tell clients of my firm Corporate Rain International that we are as close to a communist company as you can get and still be a functioning capitalist entity.

One night several years ago I was watching The Sopranos. In this particular episode Tony Soprano was worried he was being yessed to death by his subordinates. He asks his wife about it. She replies:

“They go around complementing you on your new shoes, tell 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.”

I recently read an interview (January 31, 2010–New York Times) with Mark Pincus, a serial entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Zynga, who speaks of turning each of his employees into mini-CEOs. He recounts, “One thing I did at my second company was to put white sticky sheets on the wall, and I put everyone’s name on one of the sheets, and I said, ‘By the end of the week, everybody needs to write what you’re CEO of.” That’s how it should be.

One of the ways I judge a company when I first walk into a new office is what the receptionist says when I ask him or her about the company. If they can tell you with clarity and verve what the company’s about, it is almost invariably a well-managed, integrated firm. In a sense every employee should ideally be a salesman and PR representative for the corporation by securely embodying and articulating the corporate trope.

We entrepreneurs are passionate, driven, intense people, often with big egos, so it’s not easy. But I feel it’s worth a patient effort to bring a tonality of genuine openness, collegiality, and dialogic creativity to business. Surely, this form of corporate communism is not antithetical even to the ubercapitalist spirit of Ayn Rand’s John Galt.

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 think President Obama may be making a very simple sales mistake in his self presentation of late.

This came to me as I was listening to him give a speech last week. He was talking about Afghanistan. I found myself getting annoyed and couldn’t put my finger on it. It wasn’t the content, which, on this occasion, I generally agreed with. It was something else.

As always it was a pleasure to hear the sonorous, rhythmic, euphonious incantations of this charismatic man. The phrasing was, as always, elegant and graceful.  But as I listened I realized what was bothering me. It seemed like every word was “I”, “me”, “mine”, “my administration”, or some other self-referential pronoun. This is not good salesmanship.

For me, good salesmanship cannot reflect such self-absorption. Eloquence and presentation can certainly dazzle initially. But a self focus eventually can result in a long term impression of solipsism or even jejune narcissism.

When selling a product or service what works is focusing on “the other”. What works is focusing on the “you”, “your need”, “your anxiety”, “your ROI“, a focus on how you can help your client (or your nation) to achieve.

This process requires a practical humility, a concentration on service, not celebrity. Most of the successful business entrepreneurs I know have this practical quality. This does not mean they are without enormous self-esteem. As CEO of my own company, Corporate Rain, I have always found the most selfish way to be is to be “unselfish”, to focus on the other.

For all his many gifts and attractive qualities, I think President Obama may ultimately prove a poor salesman for his agenda, if he doesn’t get the center of attention off himself.

Merry Christmas to all.

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.”

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.

These are surprising times.  Certainly more so than my company Corporate Rain or I have experienced in 16 years.  The business atmosphere is confused and inchoate, ungrounded in the old verities and unmoored to any universal consensus.  It’s bloody scary, but also enlivening.

More than ever change is the one thing you can count on in this veil of tears.  As a salesman I have never felt more the urgency of being alert to both daily and systemic change.  Variations on “Black Swan” events are startling me daily.

For example, I read in The New York Times on October 26 that McDonald’s opened a restaurant in The Louvre. The Louvre!  The great center of French culture and art welcomes this icon of mass produced American gastronomic mundanity.   France, the last bastion of epicurean snobbery welcomes McDonald’s, the ultimate common denominator for fast food, into its iconic institution of French exceptionalism.  It is startling, and from my assumptions, impossible.

Or take, for example, a recent experience of my friend Ken Makovsky, CEO of Makovsky and Company PR located in New York.  Ken is an exceptionally savvy PR thought leader (check out his excellent blog at blog.makovsky.com).  Yet he was blind-sided recently when he told me of taking his son to see the revival of Hair on Broadway.  For Ken, Hair was a beloved iconic demarcation; a heuristic road sign that fundamentally changed his life perspective.  He loved the music.  He loved the time.  He excitedly anticipated sharing Hair with his son.  Imagine his stunned disappointment when his son was indifferent and bored by the show saying, “It has a couple of good songs, but how can you be so interested in such a group of dirty, lazy people?”

Life surprises.  Never have we been in such a fast-moving world.  Radical change occurs suddenly.  Assumptions can become invalid at the speed of light.  G.M. is bankrupt. Who’d have thunk it?  Hair becomes a dated period piece about dirty, lazy hippies.

As an entrepreneur (and particularly as a salesman), I find it is a constant struggle not to become too wedded to my assumptions, to stay open to the wonder of the anti-predictive.  An ambiance of constant and rapid change is so uncomfortable.  Yet shifting sands are the existential ground on which we operate.

God, I hate change.  Yet my personal and corporate business survival increasingly depends on quick adaptability and nimbleness.