Opinion
We need leaders to come up with ridiculous ideas and impossible solutions,
says Mark Van Ness, the founder of an innovative real estate company.
people, planet, profits
By charlene smith
sanctions pressure. He did the unthinkable, he released Nelson
Mandela and not only brought previously unimaginable prestige
to a pariah nation, but also became a model of how to avoid war.
Van Ness has had to find the resources adversity impels in small
and large ways. He was booted out of home at the age of 17 by his
Catholic parents for not going to church one Sunday. Fortunately
he had been working three jobs a day after school since he was 15:
working in the stock room of a tool manufacturing company when
he wasn’t going door-to-door as a Fuller brush salesman or working
in the evenings at a drive-through mini-market. By the age of 18, he
had already saved enough to make his first real estate investment!
Looking back, he is sanguine, “Growing up, one of the basic
values we learned was self-sufficiency. As the sixth of eight children,
I knew that if I wanted a car when I turned 16, I had to start saving
from the age of 11.”
But finding himself on the street was, not surprisingly, a lifedefining moment; faced with adversity, Mark began scanning his
environment. “I had a friend whose father was a property investor.
I liked his lifestyle – one day I would see him taking golf clubs out of
his car in the middle of day and another day he helped paint one of
his buildings, whereas my dad worked very long days.”
And so Mark went into real estate and after a few years formed
Sperry Van Ness with a colleague, whom he later bought out. The
business grew rapidly, and today its 150 offices transact several
billion dollars a year, but today’s success cloaks an important
story of challenge, setbacks and a process where shared values
helped create value. In 1990, three years after Sperry Van Ness
was formed, Mark decided to enshrine company values in what
)
6
5
4
(
W
e need, Mark Van Ness (WPO Southern
California) believes, greater synergy between
people, planet and profit, and it is clear old ideas
are simply not working. He is in good company
as a recent Harvard Business Journal and the new book Megatrends
2010 share this view. The world has reached what Malcolm Gladwell
would call a ‘tipping point’ in many areas. There is the global
financial crisis, the rapid melting of polar caps, increasing rates
of cancer at earlier ages and politicians globally who seem frozen
by a paucity of new ideas. A tipping point, in case you never read
Gladwell’s best-selling book, is an epidemiological term “given to
that moment in an epidemic when a virus reaches critical mass. It’s
the boiling point. It’s the moment on the graph when the line starts
to shoot straight upwards.”
It’s the moment when what has always worked develops terminal
failure syndrome.
It’s early in the morning, and property tycoon and social
entrepreneur, Mark Van Ness is sitting talking, he is wearing a
casual jersey and his hair is slightly ruffled. When he feels an idea
is important, he leans forward and frowns slightly. As he is now.
“When I was growing up I was exposed to silly ideas. I remember
my father coming home for dinner; he said he had a meeting with
someone who said they were replacing cash with blue plastic cards.
At the time everything was either cash or check. You should have
heard the laughter at the dinner table. My mother said there is no
way I will have a card with my money in it, it is absurd. Within 10
years it went from being a silly idea to the norm.”
He gives another example. “My school did a field trip to my
dad’s data-processing company, and a kid asked, can you program
a computer to play chess? He said, technically you could if you had
enough money and time, but there is no building in the world large
enough to house such a computer. The impossible soon became a
common toy!”
Crazy brilliance most often comes when we have our noses to the
wall and adversity baying at our back. It happened with Winston
Churchill when he became prime minister of Britain during the
Second World War; he was the man for the moment, he was able
to navigate through crisis in ways he could not quite achieve in
peacetime. Frederick W de Klerk did it in South Africa when the
economy of the country he was president of began splintering under
3
2
1
0
10,000BC 8000BC
6000BC 4000BC
2000BC
connect / uk good deals - the uk social investment conference: www.good-dealsuk.com connect / usa microfinance leadership: www.lebow.drexel.edu/Event/2948
22 \ Real Leaders
AD 1
1000
2000