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InFlight recently sat down with Victor Ancale, author of the runaway bestseller Relentless Growth: How Cancer Cells' Success Strategies Can Work for You and Your Business (Addison-Wesley).

InFlight: You've had an exciting year. What has been the most satisfying element of your success?

Ancale: The most satisfying thing, no question, has been the personal relationships I've developed with the CEOs of some of our largest corporations: General Motors, Disney, RJR Nabisco. They realize that their revenues can double, even triple, if they apply my Principle of the Three M's: Mutate, Metabolize, and Metastasize.

InFlight: Tell us about how you first discovered the Three M's.

Ancale: Well, as many people know, I first became interested in cellular biology after the loss of Barney, my German shepherd. I wondered: what exactly is this "cancer" that can knock out an animal as strong and loving as Barney? So I did a little reading in Scientific American and it hit me. The average, everyday cells inside Barney--or in you and me--exist in a kind of stasis. But cancer cells aren't stuck in that kind of stale Second Wave thinking. They believe in their nucleii, that they can divide and grow virtually without limit. That's the kind of spirit that's been missing from American business! So I spent the next four months learning everything I could about how cancer cells achieve that kind of growth, and how to apply those lessons to today's economic climate.

InFlight: Give us an example of the Three M's in practice.

Ancale: Kentucky Fried Chicken is now the primary vendor in 88 percent of the public high school cafeterias in America. Two years ago, they didn't even dream of touching the schools market. Their CEO brought me in for the seminar, and they started having daily Mutation Meditation sessions. Each person testifies about whether he or she has been acting and thinking like a proto-oncogene--those are the genes that encourage constant growth--or like a stand-pat, rest-on-our-laurels tumor-suppressor gene. Sometimes these confessions are very moving.

Most of KFC's management then started working ninety, a hundred hours a week, and they demanded the same commitment from their cooking staff at the franchise level. You know, in normal cells there's a protein called pRB that puts the brakes on growth and reproduction. But cancer cells have special cyclin-kinase proteins that say: "What limits? Just go for it!" That's what I call efficient metabolism.

InFlight: It seems like a miracle that American business ever survived before this book.

Ancale: Oh, no, no, I can't take that kind of credit. I'm just helping business leaders find new words for what they've always known. This stuff is deep, deep in the American grain. You know, one of the great proto-oncogene leaders in history was Theodore Roosevelt. Where some sticks-in-the-mud were saying we should be content with our little 3000-mile continent, Teddy had the guts to say: "Why not Cuba, too? And why not the Phillipines?" He knew that real growth is relentless growth. And that's the spirit that really drives this

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