Kick Butt. Do What's Right. Go Home.

What was the history of CNS then?
MM  Until Breathe Right happened in the early 1990s, CNS had been a small capital goods company. [Founded in 1982 to develop equipment for brain wave monitoring, CNS went public in a tiny $3.75 million IPO in 1987.] Many of the people at CNS had never had to create consumer demand for a product. They didn’t know how to create longevity for a brand.

Did you have buyer’s remorse?
MM  There was much more to do than I originally thought. But no, no buyer’s remorse. I was very conscious of the fact that there was a bunch of people for whom we needed to find something else to do. Because they were not going to be capable of getting 20 years of consumer-product experience in two weeks.

I get back to the office and call my boss at 7:30 at night. He's in Toronto. I tell him how the negotiations went, and he responds that 'you have single-handedly destroyed the company.'

What was the first critical decision you made?
MM  That we needed new sales leadership. We needed strong tactical business performance while we spent one to two years getting the long-term strategic pieces in place. The business cycle in consumer products and retail is about 18 months long—if you have something to sell. The company didn’t have anything in the pipeline. CNS needed a sales organization that could do the blocking and tackling to keep us buoyant while we got the marketing pieces in place, got the product development pieces in place.

Did you come to CNS with your management philosophy fully developed?
MM  What I came there to do was, first, prove to myself and anyone else who cared to see that if you put the right people together, focused on kicking butt in the real world, always did what’s right, and went home, that you could win.

Those elements came to me at various times of my life. For example, when my first child was born in 1990, I anguished over my role. Stay at home? Working mom? So, when I went back to work, I called my team together and said that ‘what we do here needs to be important enough that I’m going to come here every day and hang with you guys rather than be with my baby. So, we will go big or go home. That’s it.’

What else had you learned along the way?
MM  Similar experiences happen to everyone. It’s about whether you stop to pick up the lessons. One of the things that I don’t like about big business, or even business generally, is that we’ve all been taught that it’s okay to make little compromises. That such behavior is normal. But that’s BS. Every time we make compromises around what we believe is right, we make it harder to make the right choice the next time.

The most glaring example is when a company creates selling practices that go beyond shipping to actual end-user demand. Every time you create a 370-day year, you have to lap that with a year that is five days shorter the following year. So, suddenly what is created is artificial revenues, plus artificial pressures to lap a time period that doesn’t exist, and on and on.