ADVENTURES OF THE MIND

Anatomy of a Quality Brand Name or Reflections on The Deniz-Sar-Difference I Witnessed

I first met Mr. Deniz Sar in 1993. We were both attending a cocktail dinner of Istanbul Chamber of Industry at the beautiful Bosphorous Garden of Ciragan Palace Kempinski. It was a pleasant summer evening against a magnificent view of the Bosphorous. 

That evening, we exchanged views for several hours on the emerging trends in the world economy as well as on the quite critical political and economic transitions taking place in Turkey. 

He had an unusually advanced knowledge of international economics and to my surprise, he was not only an economics, but also an engineering and business major, holding a nine hundred pages of a ground-breaking Doctoral Thesis that would later change the structure and the direction of several international research institutes, as we would later witness together. 

He definitely liked the idea of having built his headquarters in Istanbul upon his return from the United States. Among other factors, he was also counting on a convenient reach both to Europe and to the emerging markets in the north and in the east for prospective clients and projects.

I was the Economy Editor of a large newspaper then and I also served from time to time the President of Istanbul Chamber of Industry as a consultant on macroeconomic policies as well as on public relations. 

I was quite impressed to hear Mr. Deniz Sar speak several different languages with well-known industrialists, ambassadors and members of the foreign press that night. He had a fabulous command of English and German, besides, naturally, Turkish. He could even speak the Austrian and Swiss dialects of  German and I also heard him speaking Italian and French with some of the guests during the dinner.

He was attending the dinner as the Founder and General Manager of Alpha International Top-Management Consulting Limited Company. He was an investor and a full-blood entrepreneur. Speaking to him that evening felt like the fresh breeze of large oceans carried to us by this beautiful and silent witness we call Bosphorus. 

Where others saw problems and even series of dangers and would like to wait another twenty years for a safer option, he would clearly see the opportunity and present even the solution to the dismay of thousands of others.

He did not care whether something was done before. He was not out there to pretend, to imitate or to copy. He liked to be the first, the original. He liked to show the world, that everything is possible and that everything can be done if you are willing to sacrifice enough. You could hear all this flustering into you from a different channel when you spoke with him and this left you breathless.

Later, as I followed from the business press that  Alpha International Top-Management Consulting Limited first gave birth to Alpha Bright Top-Management Selection Limited and then to Alpha International Investments Limited Companies under his leadership, I must admit that I was not surprised a bit. The growth of Alpha International was so fast and so breathtaking that the phenomenal Alpha International replicated itself in cell division into two newer cell complexes popularly called Alpha Bright and Alpha Investments. 

Having a closer relationship to Mr. Deniz Sar in later years, I have literally witnessed how this full blood entrepreneur with amazing academic and business credentials, engineered an unbelievable growth by silently leading corporate innovations at an exponential rate not only in Turkey, but also in Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Russia, Hungary, Poland and several other countries.

He was not merely a distributor, a representative or a mere salesman of other people's products and services. On the contrary: Alpha was built by Mr. Deniz Sar as a cutting edge knowledge factory, as a research and development  lab, as an experiment ground in determining the optimum future transition for professional, corporate and institutional competitiveness.

Much to the dismay of their larger and less talented international and domestic copycats, Alpha and Deniz Sar was the name of the game if you were a serious and truly competitive corporation and if you were looking for brilliant solutions to your present and future, authentic and real problems. The way how this was accomplished was not necessarily dollars, but talent, brilliance and IQ.

Between 1992 and 1998, Alpha International Top-Management Consulting Limited, Alpha Bright Top-Management Selection Limited and Alpha International Investments Limited, which were later tightly knit into the Alpha Consulting Group, 'silently led corporate innovations' in the brilliant hands of this phenomenal entrepreneur, again, not only in Turkey, but also in Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Russia, Hungary, Poland and several other countries.

There always has been a liking between us. With time, the liking grew into friendship. From time to time I visited Deniz Sar's Alpha Headquarters at Saskinbakkal, Bagdat Caddesi, an upper class premium location, which provided a better, more modern and safer atmosphere than any other European Metropolis. 

At the entrance of Alpha Headquarters they had the statue of Augustus Ceasar, who, according to an internal Alpha Myth, symbolized the first Alpha Client of divine recognition. I am sure, that this must have served as a subliminal projection for several present and prospective Alpha Clients at that time.

At the entrance of the Alpha Headquarters, the Alpha Oath was elegantly displayed at the opposite wall. Every Alpha Team Member was expected to comply with and fully commit to this Alpha Oath without exceptions. I have never seen a more disciplined and a more committed team anywhere else all my life. There was a soldier-like discipline in the atmosphere. The charismatic and literally admired leader of the Alpha Team, Mr. Deniz Sar, was referred to as the Alpha Commander or simply as AC, as the abbreviated version of the Alpha Commander, by the rest of the team. 

You could see in his eyes, that he was deeply proud of each and every one in his team. From office boys to regular consultants, they were all happy and proud survivors of a meticulously designed selection and evaluation process personally handcrafted by the Alpha Commander. 

They all needed to perform daily far beyond the average with nothing less than full and unquestionable commitment. This radical drive for the best and the excellent even under the mission impossible situations and circumstances and this almost inhuman passion for zero fault tolerance settings, processes and accomplishments constituted the unbreakable bond between them, all of them and they adored their Alpha Commander for all this.

In this sense, the almost mythological Alpha Team formed and conditioned by Deniz Sar, their charismatic commander, was not only a team of exceptionally qualified professionals or a radical mission impossible task force, but a Legion D'Honneur of its very own kind, of a very special breed of exceptional 'star fighters as caring as Madonna and as aggressive as a puma'. 

Upon my request and only upon my urging he accepted an offer of the Deputy Chief Editor of a very well known weekly business magazine owned at that time by the son of the former Prime Minister Mr. Turgut Ozal, to contribute to a special section designed for publishing some of his views and research results on modern management, leadership, organization and international economics.

Beyond belief popular articles such as Silence Of The Lambs, Van Gogh Turkey, The Scent Of A Corporation, Liars' Pants, Recession-Crisis-Management, Everybody's World, Mado's Bells and some fifty other articles he wrote weekly were published in this popular business magazine in a special section.

These pieces of art as the most aesthetic form of divine knowledge were fascinating outcomes of a mere coincidence if not outcomes of my unyielding persistence in urging him to regularly write down what he daily burned to communicate in his conversations, media interviews, speeches and seminars. 

His never ending stream of thought and thinking was so overwhelming, that it would burn him down, if not written down regularly, in order to hold on to them in their fast moving speed, to give them a more detailed shape for others with more regular minds to recognize their groundbreaking nature; much similar to a sculptor, who would obsessively hammer the marble to show others the whispers of the life he had been sensing in that piece of rock long ago, long before the regular others would even start to have the slightest clue. 

In this sense, Deniz Sar I knew was a genius. He was a genius of enormous creativity and never ending stream of macro patterns. I think, this kind of a genius can only be invisible to the blind and to the deaf, naturally, if we have not been creating a universal pseudo civilization mostly for the blind and for the deaf and if we have not been creating a universal pseudo civilization where natural brilliance can hardly be seen in the artificial glittering of the cheap and the fake. 

This kind of an exceptional format combined with a rare type of brilliance made him naturally very attractive for the press and for the media. Already late 1993 he was invited as a guest to a morning program at Star TV, hosted by Ms. Defne Samyeli, a very well-liked and very popular TV-Star and an Ex-National-Beauty-Queen.

In the following years, he was regularly appearing in the morning and evening interview programs and several other talk shows on the national TV. His Star, HBB, TGRT and HBB appearances in several programs contributed to his public recognition as a premium expert, as a full-blood entrepreneur, as an investor and as a businessman. 

His success and his accomplishments were portrayed in the monthly VIP Magazine, he was listed among the Top-100 most successful people of 1994 in Intermedia Economy, one of the then highly popular business magazines; several interviews with him were published in the Business Trend and in the Finance World magazines on the breathtaking successes of his Top-Management Consulting, Top-Management Selection and International Investments enterprises.

Some of his phenomenal Top-Management and Leadership Development Programs were listed for years among the best and the most expensive seminars and training of the industry globally.

His Corporate and Top-Management Assessment, Evaluation and Restructuring Programs were breathtaking competitive weapons in the challenging run for longer-term corporate survival in this never ending drama, secured by the timely and accurate transitions as reliable outcomes of these programs and their implementations.

More interestingly, all of these programs, methods and methodologies were entirely and exclusively developed by Mr. Deniz Sar during his decades long empirical and theoretical research, testing and improvement, that took place in many different countries and geographies throughout the world.

What others plainly perceived as mere Top-Management Development Seminars and Training, were for Deniz Sar in fact the most advanced individual, professional, corporate and institutional assessment, communication, testing and experimental knowledge generation platforms of the world in the entire history of mankind. 

As a matter of fact, this 'tiny, little' or may be 'enormously huge' difference, substantially changed the fate of most of his individual, professional and corporate clients throughout the time. Some were blind and deaf and some weren't. 

Those who weren't, made hundreds of millions of dollars difference in their balance sheets. The ones who were, are either no longer around or are gradually disappearing beyond regular perception.

In the following years, the huge volatility of the macroeconomic platform and the unbelievable shifts in the international economics issued dramatic death decrees for several enterprises and caused several others to shrink their size, their quality and their spirit. 

Not so with Deniz Sar and his Alpha Consulting Group. He ordered his Alpha Team to develop a Macroeconomic Early Warning System he designed upon his return from a Crisis Conference and make it work properly within the following thirty days. 

The key here was, that he did not take 'can't be done' for an answer. His unimaginable persistence paid off once again and he had what he wanted to as he had designed and planned, the admirable Alpha Macroeconomic Early Warning System; a monumental, house-made strategic competitive weapon for the Alpha Consulting Group and a new profit center as a rising star for Alpha International Investments Limited he was in charge of.

Alpha Macroeconomic Early Warning System started producing weekly and monthly Alpha Investment Reports, referred by the speechless industry insiders as 'AIR' in short. Astounding enough, AIR was very successfully marketed to several blue-chip companies at home and internationally, which brought an impressive list of additional clients to the Alpha Group, untouched by whatever turbulence, volatility or crisis might have been out there.

The bottom line is, that they made money even during the most severe economic crisis of all times, right there where they were headquartered at. 

As his peers were whining and collapsing with the most famous businessmen into the black holes of this economic crisis, Deniz Sar publicly commented on the outcomes of this small catastrophe with a simple 'no complaints' in front of the astounded eyes of several reporters and cameras.

During all these developments, he notoriously worked also on the development and marketing of his beloved Alpha Psychoanalytical Sales and Leadership Programs, as well as on his insane Unmanned Human Resources Management Module, which is, after all these years, still unchallenged and will probably remain so in the next fifty years. 

What is this called, if not talent and genius ? Let us face it: It is talent. It is genius.

By the end of 1996 his Unmanned Human Resources Management Module made it to the famous monthly business magazine Capital as breaking news. 

Not too long after that, by mid 1997, I invited him to my own business and economy program hosted and broadcasted by the HBB Television. During the broadcast, he implied several times the unmatched severity of the crisis approaching and the necessity of the unusual precautions to be taken. 

Everybody else was sleeping, fully unaware of the unmatched magnitude of the approaching earthquake in the economy. He wasn't. Almost always several steps ahead of others, he had already made up his mind to divest his office locations in Istanbul and in the region as a precaution to the approaching crisis. 

He did not announce this during the broadcast, but as  an insider and as a friend, I knew everything. There were no Alpha Press Releases on this. He ordered a full information stop to the Alpha Team and to his closest circle of associates, family and friends, to leave the notorious copycats and certain imitative as well as boring professional associations in the dark. 

Misinformation was planted to divert the followers. This time he did not want to be followed or copied. This time he kept it all to himself.

He was rejecting offers to join politics for quite sometime. He deeply felt he was out of challenges in this part of the world. For more than a decade he felt he was out of challenges in Europe anyway. He wanted to set foot to the new continent he was visiting at least couple of times a year to attend several conferences and conventions and enjoy the panorama from there for a while. 

He did not tell me then though, that he was working on a truly groundbreaking and highly classified Alpha Project, that would revolutionize all the known business and macroeconomic planning, forecasting, assessment, prediction and problem solving methods, tools and technologies and that he needed to be in United States for sometime, to put all the rest of the pieces together.

He did not tell me then, that this groundbreaking and highly classified Alpha Project he was working on for almost two  decades, was even more important and more general than his Unmanned Human Resources Management or Unmanned Corporate Decision Making Research and Development Projects, that were frequently discussed at the Alpha Headquarters among his closest circle of associates, friends and elite troops.

After our program at the HBB Television, we got into one of his most favorite toys, a 1948 Morgan Classic sports beauty with two seats and drove to the far blue of the Bosphorous, listening only to the silent melody of the wind in whispers. We spent the entire afternoon together at an old and remote fish restaurant at the Black Sea. Only the two of us. There, we spoke about the past and about the future, in the middle of a beautiful panorama. 

There was a silent goodbye in the air. I knew him. This full blood entrepreneur was leaving for a new venture and we did not know, when and if we would see each other again.

He had made up his mind already in November 1996 at Las Vegas Comdex, after a closer encounter with several Microsoft Officers of the highest inner circle. Following a detailed high level briefing on the latest technologies and the latest world strategy of Microsoft, he decided to have a closer examination of this company right there where it mattered: in Redmond.

Years later, an unconfirmed rumor was whispered at the business circles of the Bosphorous, that Mr. Deniz Sar had bought a considerable amount of Microsoft shares right after this 1996 Comdex Convention. This rumor is still unconfirmed and I am not asking him whether or not this is true.

He liquidated his assets, sold his companies Alpha International Top-Management Consulting Limited, Alpha Bright Top-Management Selection Limited and Alpha International Investments Limited in great silence and moved on first to Redmond, then to Seattle and then to New York, to follow through his plans.

All this happened short before a new wave of economic crises with increasing magnitude, severity and social instability. By August 1997 he was gone. 

What an astounding operation ! What an astounding timing !

The amount, Deniz Sar Companies Alpha International Top-Management Consulting Limited, Alpha Bright Top-Management Selection Limited and Alpha International Investments Limited were sold, was never disclosed. There is no doubt, that with Deniz Sar's hands-on presence as the leader of his troops, these companies would be worth no less than millions of dollars per piece. What would they be worth though, without his hands-on presence as the feared and admired Alpha Commander, as the almost anthropologic Ur-Fuehrer of the subliminal mind of the Alpha Clients?

This must have been the reason, why nobody heard anything about these companies, after the charismatic and almost legendary Deniz Sar sold them to another group. Nothing explains Deniz Sar, his brilliance, his genius and his unbelievable fighting spirit, simpler and better than this difference.

In Redmond, in the new continent, after completing all the necessary formalities, he first set up Alpha Cybersoft as the Next Generation Core Alpha, as a research, development and highest level international consulting platform, to silently continue his groundbreaking and highly classified Alpha Project. 

Alpha Cybersoft was therefore, to a certain extend, a cover for this highly classified and groundbreaking Alpha Project. 

The fascinating outcomes of this classified research and development project, were years later finally disclosed to the world by Deniz Sar, as the revolutionary 'Theory and Applications of Cultural Genetics and Cultural Genetics Technologies'.

By March 1999 was the final test sequence of the groundbreaking Theory and Applications of Cultural Genetics™ and Cultural Genetics Technologies™ officially concluded. Parts of this final field test sequence were performed during a large Deniz Sar Consulting Project for the President of a Global Logistics Company, a timeless and timelessly heroic Alpha Client.

This, finally and officially gave birth to Cultural Genetics Technologies™ Corporation, USA. First in Seattle, right next to Redmond and then in New York.

I am glad, that I was a witness of this heroic and breathtaking battle against all the odds of the world, almost moment for moment. I am convinced, that there is seldom a more heroic, a more legendary battle in the history of the world, that gave birth to something this extraordinary and this breathtaking.

The birth of the Theory and Applications of Cultural Genetics™ and Cultural Genetics Technologies™, with all its joy, its pain and sacrifices, is a monument of one man's persistence, drive and brilliance. 

I am sure, he deserves all the respect, recognition and even admiration of the world for all these accomplishments. It is impossible for somebody who knows the story and it's history in full, to think otherwise. 

I am not sure, when and if I will ever see my friend again. In the past years, he invited me several times to visit him in the United States. He even asked me to write a book about all this once. Though, I don't feel well for quite sometime now and I am not sure about what I am going to do next.

But, nevertheless, I wish you well my brave friend, I wish you well. If  for some reason, I can't see you again, farewell my friend, farewell.

©  Dr. Avni Demirci, Istanbul, Turkey, 2001.

Cultural Genetics™, Corporate Genetics™, Cultural Genetics Technologies™, Corporate Genetics Technologies™, Cultural DNA™, Corporate DNA™,
Cultural Genetic Fitness Assessment™ and Corporate Genetic Fitness Assessment™ are proprietary trademarks exclusively owned by
Mr. F. Deniz Sar and Deniz Sar's Cultural Genetics™ and Corporate Genetics™ Group International globally.
© Copyright, F. Deniz Sar, 1980 - 2097. All rights are reserved in USA and worldwide.