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.

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.

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.

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.”

There was a thoughtful essay by Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal last weekend (November 14/15).  She feels that much current political rhetoric from the Obama White House is both condescending and convoluted.  She speaks to the point that the public wants direct talk.  She says, “Politicians in general no longer assume that we all operate on the same intellectual level, with roughly the same amount of common sense”. She quotes the actor Jack Webb on the old TV show Dragnet, playing Detective Joe Friday, “All we want are the facts, ma’am”. Ms. Noonan recognizes there is a strong universal longing in the current political body politic for simple talk and clear explanation.

But, for me, there is a larger lesson in Ms. Noonan’s useful essay.  And it is one that is applicable to both sales and entrepreneurship.

I am asked almost daily to strategize sales campaigns for my clients at Corporate Rain International. (My company specializes in initiating the sales process with high-level executives).  Often the biggest part of my consultative job is convincing clients to simplify their message.  More than half of the initial sales job is articulating a clear value that can solve a problem (i.e. increase profit, reduce cost, gain market share, etc.) for a potential buyer.  The complex brilliance of my clients is often of little interest to their audience.  Winnowing down a simple core value can often seem a process of almost insulting oversimplification to a client who has poured their heart and soul and essence into a product or service.  Yet it is only the final result that is the compelling factor in initiating a dialogue leading to a sale.

A buyer is interested in an end result, an outcome.  (“All we want are the facts, ma’am”).  If the result is compelling and clear, the client will then be enthused to explore the rococo details of how the sausage is made.  Otherwise — not.