Chapter 18
Persistence and Morality Pay
I live in Los Angeles.
Los Angeles is a great place; they've got race riots, earthquakes, bush fires, landslides, a population greater than the whole of Australia, and, of course, my favorite spot, Disneyland.
When I first moved to the United States over 20 years ago, I began building a business and a reputation from scratch.
In the United States, competition is fierce. What you did yesterday is not good enough tomorrow. People are incredibly innovative, and there are literally hundreds of thousands of great marketers who have spent their lives in this dynamic, competitive economy. At the time, the United States was just beginning a downturn, which led to the severe recession of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Corporations had cut their marketing budgets, so, suffice to say, it was not perfect timing to be opening a business in a new country.
However, outside forces are not an excuse for lack of performance. My first task was to greatly increase my marketing skills and become more innovative.
In the early 1990s, we were going through a particularly tough patch, and we got the opportunity to present on a multimillion-dollar project in New York. We formulated a concept, and I ran the idea past the company's sales and marketing manager over the phone. He liked the idea well enough, but in the financial climate of that time, it was going to be a board decision.
The board was meeting in New York in three weeks, and the sales and marketing manager ...
