Making Rain

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.

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.

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.

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.