Dot Connector Blog

In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.

- Albert Einstein

Note from Regis: This is the second interview in Dot Connector’s Leadership Skills interview series. My goal is to bring you people who exemplify leadership skills needed for success.  Read Part II of this interview here.

Today’s interview is with Mark Stevens, best-selling author of Your Marketing Sucks, Your Management Sucks, and God is a Salesman. Mark is also CEO of MSCO, a results-driven management and marketing firm, and a popular media commentator on marketing, branding, management and sales. Mark is known for delivering business insights with blunt truths and unconventional wisdom.

In this interview, you’ll hear Mark’s thoughts on the rules of unconventional thinking and leadership, and how you can apply them to your own life.

Regis: We’re going to talk a lot today about the rules of unconventional thinking and following them as a leader. What does that mean to you?

Mark Stevens: I have divided life into two parts: I don’t want to follow anyone’s rules about anything, but I want to follow the law. So, the only place that I will follow a formula is to make sure that everything I am doing is legal. However, I don’t believe any single law imposed by convention.

When you live your life that way, you constantly find things that you are living your life by convention. I stop in my tracks and I say, “Whoa, you are doing this for what reason Mark?” And I realize that I am doing it because convention imposed it upon me at a certain point of my life. I started to follow it as if it was legal, or as if it was the only way you could do something.

Convention, from a leader standpoint, is so filled with horrible nonsense that can destroy leadership and destroy full enjoyment of a career and a life.

- Mark Stevens

For example, convention says that you have to have a balanced life: there has to be work, and there has to be play. I think they are intermingled. I don’t believe in that balance sheet. I believe if you have true passion for what you do, it’s all wrapped into one great, exciting, exhilarating ball. I don’t believe in putting down your mind in a corner over here, and putting it back on again Monday morning.

If you ask a million people, “Do you believe in a balanced life?” They say, “oh absolutely, you have to have a balanced life.” I don’t know what the hell balanced means! Then sometimes people will say “Well, you’re a workaholic.” People say “Oh no, I don’t want to be a workaholic.”

Well, what if I want to be a workaholic? What does that word workaholic mean? If I do what I love to do all the time, does that mean I am a workaholic? I am not hurting anybody. I am not driving out of control. I’m not hurting my body, which I have a right to do if I want to. These terms get applied to us. You know why they get applied to us? It’s because the lowest common denominator of people – who have the least drive, the least ambition, and the least determination to be successful – want us all at their level. So they invent these terms to keep us at their level.

It’s about not being a follower, not following convention, and not accepting the terminology of the lowest common denominator. If ask most managers, do you believe in this (idea), they’ll say I want to build a “consensus” around this. Well, I hate that word. I don’t understand what it means. Why do you have to build a consensus around it? I can’t imagine.

The metaphor I always use is, Steve Jobs wakes up in the middle of the night and says ‘I want to create an iPhone. But, let me go to the office first and see if I can build a consensus around it.’ I mean, no!

- Mark Stevens

A leader finds out something, and he or she goes back to the office and tries to bring his or her team into the mission – and certainly listens to feedback from others. But at the end of the day, every single person in the company, or the family, or whatever it is, says “that’s a bad idea I wouldn’t do that,” the leader does it (because he/she knows it’s the right idea).

During World War II, right after Pearl Harbor, FDR was advised to mount the US war against the axis powers based on sea power. The naval forces, and most of the military establishment, put a tremendous pressure on him to mount the power war, based on sea power and ground troops.

Then, a few small voices in the wilderness said “Make it air, make it air, make it air.” We had about fifty planes, I think. I am not exaggerating. It was very few. The US Air Force was tiny. The US Army was tiny. We had almost no Air Force. And then he said “No, I am going to go against the grain. I am going to build the greatest Air Force in the world. I am going to command the skies.” And that was the secret to our winning. Everybody in the Pentagon was completely against his decision, but he was the leader. So the popularity contest argument, which I hear all the time: “people don’t like it,” “I have to get buy in,” and blah blah blah blah. I hate that stuff. That is not a leader.

Regis: I couldn’t agree more. When we talk about leadership, we talk about different styles of leaders: the “quiet but strong” leader, the “authoritative” leader, the “leader that leads by example.” Is there a common thread you see between all of those types that qualifies someone as being an unconventional leader?

Mark Stevens: I think one common thread which you never read about in Harvard Business School, which by the way, I think teaches you all of the wrong things. I think it’s the best place to get most ill-prepared for a business career. If you want to use it for a network thing, fine, but it teaches you all the wrong things. You get taught by people who have never done business. I know the usual B.S. that these guys used to be, used to be, used to be, blah, blah, blah. But they’re not. They are not in the war. They are not in the game. They are sitting someplace teaching you something they have never done. They haven’t done for years and they were not very successful.

When one of my sons – he is on Wall Street now – when he went to Cornell as a finance major, his first finance professor the first day of class said to him, “I am your finance professor. I am not very good. If I was really good, I wouldn’t be here.” He turned out to be one of the three professors that my son truly enjoyed at Cornell. The guy was sensing all the B.S. and coming clean. He went on from there to be quite an interesting guy. I love that story.

Coming back to your question, one thing that I think is a common thread is that leaders don’t care what anybody else thinks of them. And that is a very hard place to get. I have people working at MSCO who come on, and I say, “that person over there, that girl or that guy has the potential to go all the way.” I really mentor them heavily. I invest in them. Because I say “They could be great, they could be creative, innovative, they could make something new happen in the world.” Then it turns out so often that their trajectory is cut short: not because they don’t have the intellectual fire power, and not because they don’t have the creativity, but because they are afraid of what other people think of them:

• They are afraid of what their fellow team members will think: “Oh, you are getting ahead of us” or “Oh, you think you are so important now.” You have to think you are important if you are a leader!
• In their personal lives, one of the people that want to hold them back says to them, “You are a workaholic.” (coming around to our theme before of “there isn’t enough balance in your life”)…and so they say, “Oh, I don’t want to be unpopular with my friends, and perceived as working too hard and being a workaholic, so I will pull back.”

I really don’t care what people think about me. I mean, I want my friends and my family to know that I am sensitive to them and love them. I want the people that I work with at my company and my clients to believe and know that I have their best interest at heart: that I will put out for them way beyond the traditional business relationship. But I don’t care if they don’t like me. I tell them what my political stance is. I tell them what I think of things. People say “You don’t say that to people in business.” But I do, I don’t care. Take me as I am or don’t take me.

Regis: Right, leadership is about having a lack of fear. I think you hear it a lot of time even in people’s vocabulary. You hear people talking about ideas, and they say “well, my fear is that…” and I just want to say “don’t be afraid, just try it!”

Mark Stevens: Exactly. I have young people say to me all the time. “Well, I can’t really express my opinion because I am young and the senior people in the company won’t like what I have to say.”

My answer to that is that with every success in life comes risk. It’s impossible to achieve success without risk. One of the risks you will have to take, whatever age you are, whatever business you are in, is that the people that you work with won’t like what you are saying.

- Mark Stevens

If they won’t give you a chance to strive because they don’t like your opinion or your forthrightness, you have to leave. Not tomorrow: I understand that there are economic realities, but you have to start to pave the way to go. You can’t tell me thirty years later that you have wasted your life in a company that has decided that it wants to have you be a person without a voice.

Regis: Well, that is exactly it. If I think about Quicken Loans, mortgages aren’t sexy, but the environment of being able to try ideas and not be afraid is what gets me up every day.

Mark Stevens: Every business is exciting and every business is the same. There is nothing more or less exciting about Quicken Loans mortgages than there is about creating chips at Intel. Because at the end of the day you can be creative in any business.

I always say that if I do one more business, because I have done a lot of businesses in my life, if I do one more business I want to do a manure company. I want to turn that into a cool kind of manure. I want to take the greatest frowned-upon commodity and make into something special.

- Mark Stevens

We had a client some years ago that sold asphalt. Now, asphalt at that time was selling for $9.00 a ton. Contractors would pull up their trucks and they would fill up their truck with asphalt and they would pay $9 a ton. What are you going to do to increase the margin of a business like that? How could you take a business like that and make it sexy?

Well, we actually worked with the company to create different strings of asphalt. One which was environmentally friendly and one which melted snow very quickly. So, we sold the second one to schools and places that where very sensitive to safety. And we sold the other one to early movers in the green movement. That asphalt sells for $50/ton and $60/ton. That gave me greater satisfaction than representing some of the “cooler” companies that we have worked for over the years.

I think that every business is immensely exciting and enjoyable. The mortgage to me is one of the great inventions in history and people take it for granted! The mortgage was an invention. We all think now that it came through divine intervention, that there was always a mortgage. But there wasn’t.

Some smart financial guy says ‘Wait a minute, okay there’s a house over there. Regis wants the house but he doesn’t have the cash for it. I will create this thing called a mortgage. Since I create this thing, Regis can move into that house that he cannot afford right now.’ What a genius thing that is!

- Mark Stevens

Regis: I love that! You are right on.

Mark Stevens: It was an act of genius that changed the world. Now we all think “Oh there were always mortgages.” But no. Somebody said “I have to find a way to get people to be able to have this thing that they could not have.”

Now, it’s interesting how the pendulum has swung and we took it too far. I have a new book coming out this fall called “Rich is a Religion.” One of the things it talks about is how people, started to say, “You know what? I will now use the industry to buy something I can not at all afford.” I don’t blame the mortgage crisis on anybody but people’s lack of discipline.

But let’s stop and realize that the industry you work in is one founded by an act of genius, that is waiting for the next act of genius.

- Mark Stevens

So what’s next best mortgage, what’s the next new mortgage idea? How can I move into a house and never pay any money and when I die my kids will pay for it? Now I don’t know what it will be, but that is where the beauty is!

Regis: The mortgage industry is in crisis. The Automotive industry is another that is having a really hard time right now. Jobs are cut, benefits are being peeled away, and salaries are frozen. Do you have advice specifically for leaders who are trying to challenge conventional thinking in these industries? When their team is under so much stress, how do you challenge thinking, inspire them, develop them, and challenge them during a crisis?

Mark Stevens: Well, let’s take the automotive industry. I have strong feelings about the US automotive industry in particular.

Here’s what I would do if I was appointed CEO of GM tomorrow, which is something I would like. I wouldn’t like to do it for the rest of my life, but I would like to do it only because I believe I know the path to success:

• The way I would demonstrate my leadership is gather everyone around virtually and actually. Obviously, It’s too big to bring everyone together all at once. But I would hold town hall meetings across the country. I would bring one of the GM cars with me and I would put it down in Yankee stadium, which I would rent and put all of the GM workers into the stadium and talk with them.

• I would say “This is our Pontiac, Chevy, whatever car, Malibu…. This car is a piece of junk. What do I mean by that? Let me show you the fit and finish of this car.” and I would run my hand across and say…“Can I get somebody in the bleachers to come down with me. Okay, you do it with me…run your hand along the side of the car where the trunk lid touches the body of the car. See how there is too much space there and where water could get it? This is called the fit and finish, you all know that. We don’t do a good job on that. Now I am going to show you a Toyota, which I brought with me also and show you the difference. Now there is absolutely nothing complex about making fit and finish it’s just a matter of caring, it’s a matter of doing it right.”

• I am starting off by telling all of you, as one of your team members, that we do a terrible job. The world hasn’t been cruel to us, we have been cruel to ourselves. The basic thing of fit and finish, there is nothing sophisticated, no sophisticated technology anything, just caring enough to make the component parts line up right, we don’t do. So we don’t deserve to be successful.

• So starting tomorrow, I am going to join the assembly line. I am going to work a week in this one, a week in this one, and I will stop everyday at 1:00 so I can do my CEO duties but I want to be part of the fix.

The reason I say this Regis is for a number of reasons.

1. All these beleaguered industries have been beleaguered in part because management is stuck itself into a bunker and said: “the world is unfair to us, we are fine, they are wrong, we are right and we don’t want to hear anything.” So, I would go out by admitting to my team we deserve this, but now we will go back together and fix it.
2. I think a great leader can’t fight the war from the rear guard. They have to go out in front. So I will work on the assembly line and I will figure out why we don’t have good fit and finish as a starting point, cause it’s a very easy thing to fix.
3. I think that coming clean – admitting mistakes – is a very big part of leading. We all respect that so much! Whether you liked Ronald Regan or not, the country was down on itself and he came in and said “We shouldn’t be down on ourselves. We should be proud of ourselves. We should be proud to be Americans. We have always been a proud nation, so we are going to be proud again.”

Going back to FDR, when he became President during the Great Depression, he said “I am going to ride around this country – a man with polio – but you’re not going to see that, you’re going to see me defiantly smoking a cigarette through a cigarette holder and wearing a cape…and I am telling you better days are here again. “

People don’t know this, but in one of FDR’s first fireside chats, after he had closed the banks, when he reopened them he said “okay I want you to start bringing your money back to the banks.” Now, we never lived in a time when you had to worry about the banks. Neither you nor I. Why would you bring your money to a bank if you were afraid it could go into a black hole? You wouldn’t! But if you look at the newsreels, people listened to Roosevelt, and they started to bring their money back. That was a tremendous sign of confidence in a leader.

So you admit it, and you act. Closing the banks was an act of leadership. You act, you don’t act beleaguered, you act like you are confident, which you are, and you back it up with your actions.

Stay tuned for more from Mark Stevens: In Part II, you’ll learn who has challenged Mark’s thinking, and what separates leaders from those who don’t want to lead. In Part III, you’ll learn why there is a “disconnect” between Marketing and Sales, and Mark’s thoughts on Social Media Marketing.

Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.

- Thomas Edison

Are you “freaked out” by the current recession? Do you let that constantly put you in a state of stress and anxiety, or do you use it to find new opportunities?

Taking a look at recession history, we learn that: according to economists, since 1854, the US has encountered 32 cycles of expansions and contractions, with an average of 17 months of contraction and 38 months of expansion. However, since 1980 there have been only eight periods of negative economic growth over one fiscal quarter or more, and three periods considered recessions.

A critical component to personal effectiveness is to constantly look at the situation you are in from a historical context. Once you have that context, you open your mind to new opportunities you previously would not have thought of.

Companies Started in a Recession

Check out this list of companies from recession history. Let this list inspire you to find opportunities to do something today that you are proud of!

1. GE
2. HP
3. Disney
4. Microsoft
5. method (soaps)
6. Cliff Bar

(Source: Fast Company)

There isn’t a single book in my library that has more dog-eared pages and highlighted phrases than Your Marketing Sucks, by Mark Stevens. If you believe that effective marketing is about making money, as I do, you need to read this book.

In this article, I’ll share my favorite ideas that you can use when developing your marketing plan, refreshing your marketing strategies, or improving the efficiency of your marketing mix – all directly from Your Marketing Sucks.

In Your Marketing Sucks, Mark Stevens discusses how to look at the money you spend in marketing as a direct investment with a direct return on investment (ROI). Referred to as extreme marketing, Stevens demands (and you should too) that every $1 you spend on marketing should bring back at least $1 in revenue.

What is “extreme marketing?”

Stevens says extreme marketing is “doing everything possible to guarantee that every marketing dollar you spend:

• Is set in a strategic context – meaning you know why you are spending it
• Is based on a plan constructed to make certain that every marketing tactic reinforces every other one (Regis says: think integration!)
• Brings back more than $1 in revenue”

The last point is the most important: for EVERY marketing dollar you spend, you need to know how much revenue it brings you.

Did you know? Brand marketers will generally tell you that you have to invest in the brand, and not think of things this way. That’s a cop-out for not thinking through how to quantify the impact of a brand campaign. Direct response marketers will generally tell you to only invest in marketing tactics where you can immediately track this metric. While ideal, that might not be true for everyone either.

Bottom-line: whatever situation or “marketing philosophy” you have, you HAVE to figure this out. It’s the way to bring accountability to your marketing, and really grow your business through it’s marketing efforts.

Extreme Marketing Plan:

In the section “How to Think About Extreme Marketing” Stevens outlines an excellent 7-step process…

1. Marketing is an integrated process (i.e. all of your marketing tactics – direct mail, website, pr, etc. – work TOGETHER to drive your business
2. Identify innovative initiatives that can command the attention in the marketplace
3. Integrate all of the elements of your marketing program
4. Stop all marketing tactics that do not produce a positive return on the money invested
5. Pick the low-hanging fruit (i.e. you don’t always have to invest more money to grow your business)
6. Don’t be linear (i.e. overlap marketing tactics for exponential returns)
7. Be persistent, relentless, inventive, counter-intuitive, challenging, combative, strategic, and tactical

You may have already guessed this, but #7 is my favorite step. Why? Because those are management tips, personal productivity tips, and marketing tips all in one – basically, they are how you should act every day as a leader!

What You Can Learn from Infomercials

Stevens has a great section on “Earning your infomercial MBA.” Now, before you cringe, think about it – some of the products we buy every day started as infomercials. And, who hasn’t stayed up late at least once in their life watching an infomercial on TV. They capture attention, they push the desire to buy, and they work for a lot of products.

The tips Stevens suggests in this section on infomercials can be applied to every marketing project:

1. Give your product a cool and compelling name
2. Remember, a picture is worth a thousand words
3. Provide the appearance of exceptional value
4. Expose the viewer to testimonials
5. (Added by Regis…) Create a sense of urgency in your message

I add #5 because I think it’s another effective tactic you can use (How many times has a phrase like: “Hurry, this offer ends…” or “If you call right now…” caught your attention?). Remember the principles of selling and conversion: Attention, Interest, Desire, Action or AIDA.

Marketing Leadership

In one of my favorite sections of the book, Stevens outlines lazy marketing leadership and effective marketing leadership, as follows:

4 Mistakes of Marketing Leaders

1. Creating a budget first, and goals second (Regis says: i.e. how can you decide how much money to spend if you haven’t defined how it will generate revenue for the business?)
2. Being a one-day wonder (Regis says: i.e. beware of the big vision that is never actually executed)
3. Delegate (Regis says: i.e. you can’t delegate effectively without monitoring progress – trust but verify)
4. The gullibility factor (Regis says: i.e. you can’t let people talk you out of your revenue per marketing dollar approach)

4 Attributes of Effective Marketing Leadership

1. The ability to paint a picture of what the marketing will accomplish (Regis says: i.e. set and execute goals that tie marketing to sales/revenue)
2. The determination to monitor the logistics and measure the results (Regis says: i.e. you have to monitor the performance of every marketing tactic)
3. The staying power to remain committed throughout the course of the campaign (Regis says: i.e. leadership is about perseverance, and marketing leadership is no exception)
4. The willingness to create a tight alignment between the president’s office and the marketing campaign (Regis says: i.e. the leader of your company is the chief strategist and marketing has to be a natural, integrated extension of her strategy)

Even though this is a fairly long post, we are literally scratching the surface of the ideas in this book. Definitely check it out, and if you’re feeling bold – and hopefully you are – then, try the “Marketing Moratorium 7-Day Planner” on page 215!

Other “Your Marketing Sucks” references:

• Hear 2.0: “Your Marketing Sucks – an interview with Mark Stevens“
• Mark Stevens Blog: “Unconventional Thinking Blog“

If I want to be as successful as I want to be, I have to be thinking about it all the time.

- Michael Phelps

(Source: lilivanilli)

Did you know? You may be relying on time-consuming menu options more than you need to when working with text on your Blackberry? By using some of these Blackberry tips for editing text, you can speed up the way you create emails and other content on your Blackberry.

Selecting Text

• Press shift once and then roll the trackwheel/trackball to select a line, or multiple lines, of text.
• Press and hold shift and roll the trackwheel to select text character by character. If you use a trackball, you can simply use #1 above and select the text character by character.

Cut, Copy and Paste Text

• When editing text, Shift + Del (the delete key) cuts text.
• Press Alt and click the trackwheel/trackball to copy text.
• Shift and click the trackwheel/trackball to paste text.

Shortcuts for Typing Text

• To insert the at sign (@) and period in an email address, press the Space bar for each when entering the email address.
• To capitalize a letter, simply hold the letter until the capitalized letter appears.
• In a number field (like a phone number field), just press the number keys to enter numbers. You do not need to press the Alt key to enter numbers, like you would in the body of an email.

If you have a favorite Blackberry tip for editing text, please feel free to share it in the comments!

Other Blackberry Help posts from Dot Connector:

• 6 Blackberry Tips for Reading Emails
• 5 Useful Blackberry Tips and Tricks to Boost Your Productivity

The years teach much which the days never knew.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson