Business - The Lovecat Way

Excerpted from
Love Is the Killer App: How to Win Business and Influence Friends
By Tim Sanders

Knowledge, network, compassion: These are the intangibles you share with those you have chosen as your partners. These are the values that can drive your career to the top or over the top-they'll take you wherever you want to go. They certainly have taken me where I wanted to go, because, as I'll explain, Show you the love is exactly what I do as a business lovecat.

I'm not alone in this. Over and over I have discovered that the people in the bizworld who are most successful, and happiest, are the lovecats. These are the people whom you always like the most, the ones who are most passionate from 9 to 5, or 8 to 10, or whatever their hours. They are the ones who are most generous with their knowledge, their address book, and their compassion.

Take a second and close your eyes. Visualize the happiest and the most successful bizpeople you've ever met. (Remember, I said "happiest ") Are they smart? Generous? Kind? More than nine out of ten times I hear "Yes!"

Every day, high-priced consultants are telling their executive-level manager clients that they must go out, build, and monetize their intangibles. But I don't think this concept of intangibles should belong just to people at the highest levels. It should belong to everyone, whether at the top of the management team or at an entry-level position.

The fact is, the old, loveless way won't get you anywhere in today's economy. Current bizpractice is too heavily influenced by books that tell you how to swim with the sharks or eat with the barracudas. These philosophies may occasionally promote a disingenuous appearance of caring, but they are actually grounded in an attitude of material gain. It's all about predatory marketing, capturing market share, first-mover advantage, preemptive marketing strategy, category killers. These are the mantras of the airport gift shop books that litter the minds of today's bizfolk.

I know this because I've read them all. Corporate page turners. You win, they lose, it's over. I've always warned consultant friends that they could get fired if their client CEO reads the wrong book on the plane: He stops to buy a tin of Altoids, picks up one of those cutthroat management tomes, and lands at O'Hare a changed man. He doesn't waste much time as he hoses two deals because he now thinks he sees things for what they really are, and they don't fit what he just read.

This bizcommunity currently describes its results in terms of winning and market-share recovery But that's the same value prop from ten years, maybe ten decades, ago. We all now know that reality is changing. And some very brave companies, such as Cisco Systems, already measure themselves by the quality of their relationships with their customers rather than by victories over their competitors. Salespeople make their bonuses based in large part on customer satisfaction instead of gross sales or profit. Cisco is applying love to the workplace and profiting from it-just as I, too, am profiting. The fact is, my own career would never have taken off without those basic intangibles.

When I was nine years old, the members of my congregation at our Clovis, New Mexico, church used to call me "the little reverend." I would become highly excited whenever I watched our congregation mesmerized by a sermon or homily I would memorize it, evangelize it, and experiment with it. To me, a minister moving the flock was as thrilling as any magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat. This was all done with emotions and words!

When you're only nine, and you grasp what the preacher is saying, the church lets you run with it. I'd hop up on the stage, recite the books of the Bible, play the piano, and sing. But before I did, I'd take a sermon on charity, for example, and chat about it like a young Steve Allen casually gabbing by his Steinway. One of my favorite topics centered on missionaries. My grandmother always gave them money whenever they came through town, even when times were tight. "Yet," I would thunder, "most of you out there are constantly rewarding yourselves with a big meal or a new car and never give a cent to these poor people Do you ever

reach into your purse or pocket and give away the few pennies they're asking for? Who is to say that our own personal mission is more important than the work of God?"

As I grew older, I channeled that mini-minister energy into other activities. I became a high school and collegiate debater, leading my junior-college team to several national championships. I then won a scholarship to Loyola University and a fellowship at the University of Arizona, and eventually a law school scholarship. But I turned it all down to carry my zeal into the entertainment business, where I worked as a musician

Because I found reggae superstar Bob Marley the ultimate minister-he used dazzling music to heal and teach-my first love was reggae. I traveled around the country with a band, living out of vans, playing whenever we could land a gig, until I settled in Dallas. There I got the bug for a mix of industrial music combined with Native American. By this time my wife, Jacqueline, had joined me in founding a new four-member band; I was the lead singer and also hacked out computer programming synchronized to the show.

Eventually Jacqueline and I tired of the musician's life, although we still perform today as a hobby.

I next went into marketing in the early 1990s at a video-production studio. I was good at sales but the process made me unhappy. I didn't know why at the time. I just felt stuck and wanted out Eventually I took off for a cable-television company where the work was interesting but the place itself wasn't There was no love there, just a great deal of fear and loathing. I spent five years as a sales manager in this disagreeable environment where the bosses felt all employees were liars unless proven otherwise; there was so much distrust that we weren't allowed to enter or leave the building with anything but purses and wallets, for fear of theft. As a sales manager, I held court over twenty salespeople. Since the owners always arrived late, every morning I had a brief bully pulpit on how to humanize the job. I tried to take that weird business and spin it up to help these people. Perhaps here I learned that even in a bad environment you can still have a good heart.

And, I was given a chance to learn about the Internet. The 4 AM cable program I was producing wasn't reaching an audience, so out of desperation I started studying a new phenomenon called streaming video (broadcasting video over the Internet). Through my research I met the people at Broadcast.com, a start-up that was blazing the streaming-video way, and in 1997 they offered me a job as an account executive.