Most business problems can be solved if you can teach yourself to look beyond the dollar sign. Business revolves around human beings.

Anyone can get the order if he’s willing to stretch the truth far enough. Whether you tell the truth or no, you don’t come out a winner just by getting that first big order. The mark of a pro is getting the reorder.

He begins his presentation by reaching into his pocket, holds up a twenty-dollar bill, and says, “This twenty is for sale for exactly one dollar. Who want to buy it?”

Now, be honest. Would you leap to your feet clamoring to get his attention? Or would you wait a few seconds, see what everyone else does, and then after a hand or two goes up, timidly raise your own?

If you’re one of the hesitaters, you’re normal. We’ve been taught all our lives that only suckers fall for deals like that. But once someone else is willing to take a chance, on no better information than ours, then our greedy little hands pop up, and we tend to go along. The faster others’ hands are raised, the greater the demand, and the more likely we are to be part of it. Our sense of what something is worth derives not from the intrinsic value of the object itself—whether it’s twenties for a dollar or unusual tulip bulbs or a rare gem—but from the demand that has been created for that object.

Marketing is not the art of selling. It’s not the simple business of convincing someone to buy. It is the art of creating conditions by which the buyer convinces himself. And nothing is more convincing than hard evidence that others want the same thing.

General Motors officials did not travel around the country to sell their proposition. They made announcements from Detroit and stood back while the customers came to them. GM understood the necessity of creating a climate where the customers became their own salesmen, and GM became a kind of referee deciding who would be awarded the sale.

It’s critical to know about your customer. Armed with the right knowledge, we can outsell, outmanage, outmotivate, and outnegotiate our competitors. All of us gather data about other people—especially people we want to influence. The only question is how well we understand it and what we do with it.

If selling were just a matter of determining who’s got the low bid, then the world wouldn’t need salespeople. It could all be done on computers.

You’re probably doing a lot of it already, and the Mackay 66 will just help you systematize your information in a way that will make it more useful and accessible.

Though most of the information will come from personal contact with your customer and from observation, you don’t have to be the sole collector. Your resources are:

• Customers
• Suppliers
• Banks
• Internal Data Base
• Colleagues
• Conventional Media
• Internet Data Base
  • General Press
  • Financial Press
  • Trade Press
  • Trade Association
  • Special Reports
• Assistants
• Receptionists

Most sales manuals will tell you that the most important thing you are selling is yourself. This book won’t. In my opinion, selling yourself can sometimes be a very bad idea… because very often, my friend, you and I are lousy products.

Our challenge, whether we are salespeople or negotiators or managers or entrepreneurs, is to make others see the advantage to themselves in responding to our proposal. Understanding our subjects’ personalities is vital. Let them shine. Our own personalities are subordinate.

General Motors got state legislators across the country to do somersaults for their Saturn proposal, in part because the company managed to hide behind its corporate identity throughout the entire process. There were no individuals with strange-sounding names or funny accents or huge personal wealth for the press to take potshots at. Just a large, well-known, amorphous company. Who are these people? No one really knew, and they stood a better chance of getting what they wanted that way.

In the “good old days,” salesmen were matched to the ethnic makeup of their clientele. You sent your Irish salesmen out to call on Irish customers; Jewish salesmen, Jewish customers, and so on. That’s changed a bit.

If you aren’t sure of your customers, stay home and hire someone who knows the territory. Sometimes you’ll find that your prospects are more comfortable and receptive around people whose styles are local.

There’s a correct approach for your sales situation, whether it’s hiring the right spokesperson, operating behind the corporate veil, or creating demand for your proposition. The key is knowing your customer, not just marching in and offering an objectively attractive deal.

My definition of a salesperson is not someone who can get the order. Anyone can get the order if he tells enough lies—for example, about price or delivery time.

A great salesperson is someone who can get the order—and the reorder—from a prospect who is already doing business with someone else.

I have never made a cold call in my life. Before I see anyone on a sales call for the first time, I see to it that I’m introduced.

If you’re selling for a big outfit, a Microsoft, your introduction is made, in part, by the company’s advertising, marketing, and public-relations program. Microsoft’s solid reputation is a powerful silent salesperson that accompanies every sales call.

If you’re not selling for a Microsoft, you need another effective entry. The best is a recommendation from one of your won customers, someone already known to your prospect.

There are two ways to do it: retail and wholesale. Retail means the one-at-a-time kind of contacts that are built up through participation in community or social activities. Wholesale means the recognition, and acceptance, extended by people who don’t know you personally but who have heard about your as a speaker, read your articles, or read about your civic activities in the papers.

Somewhere within six blocks of every company is a favored watering hold. I know of one salesperson who has developed the technique of waiting in his car across from the prospect’s parking lot on Friday afternoons for the five-o’clock whistle and then following the procession to the saloon of choice. Whatever it is he wants to know, whether it’s about a prospect or a competitor, can usually be uncorked in this convivial atmosphere. He says he has perfected the ability to lose convincingly in every bar sport in America: pool/shuffleboard/pinball/“and I’m still working on darts.”

You’re about to call to make an appointment to see the Tough Prospect. Your call is answered by the company receptionist. You do not ask for Mr. T.P. You say, “I’m going to ask you in a moment to connect me to Mr. T.P.’s office, but before I do, could you kindly remind me of the name of his assistant?” She will. Then ask her to connect you with Mr. T.P.’s office.

“Hello. Angela? I’m Harvey Mackay, president of Mackay Envelope Company [Straight to her brain. Who is this guy? How does he know my name? Have I met him?] I’ve written Mr. T.P. within the past two weeks, and now I’m calling him from Minneapolis. I would like to see Mr. T.P. I would like to see him for exactly three hundred seconds. I will go as far as Guam or Sri Lanka just for the purpose of seeing him for those three hundred seconds, and if I take any longer, I’ll donate five hundred dollars to T.P’s favorite charity… which I believe is the Red Cross, isn’t it?”

The truth is I never take the full five minutes. I simply introduce myself and say, “As you may know, we’re bidding on your contract. I just came here to tell you, as president of Mackay Envelope, that we regard your business as significant. If we are fortunate enough to receive your business, I’ll take personal interest in seeing to it that you will receive the service and craftsmanship you have every right to expect.” That’s it.

In and out in two and one half minutes. And I follow up with a. Resigned letter postmarked that day from Minneapolis thanking him for his time and restating the same pitch I gave him in person… and if it seems appropriate, a receipt for a check for $100 to his favorite charity. “I just wanted your to know I promised Angela I’d send a check for $500 to your favorite charity if I wasn’t out of your office in five minutes. Even though I made the deadline, I’ve always been an admirer of the Red Cross and have sent them a small donation.”

Does it always work? No. Does anything?

If “Angela” won’t make the appointment for you, try to T.P. to call back saying, “Angela, even if he won’t see me, perhaps he will talk to me. I am going to be in my office at the following times: two p.m. to three p.m. today; eight a.m. to own tomorrow.” Then instruct your assistant as follows: “When and if Mr. T.P. calls at any of these times, you’re to say, ‘Oh, yes, Mr. T.P., he’s been expecting your call. I’ll put you right through!”

You don’t have to confine that device to T.P.’s. Anyone you’re playing telephone tag with will appreciate knowing when he can reach you, so leave the times as part of your message, and make sure your assistant is in on it, so she can make a fuss over the caller and call him by name (“… I’ll put your right through!) when he does call back.

You still haven’t gotten even a whiff of an order. So what? Be patient, you will. You have positioned yourself in the best possible spot you can be in: Number Two, and a very strong Number Two, because no one, including Number One, is going to half the trouble you are to keep this account aware of your interest.

Apply the Law Of Large Numbers to your prospect list. Position yourself as Number Two to every prospect on your list, and keeping adding to that list. I can promise you that if your list is long enough, there are going to be Number Ones that retire or die or lose their territories for a hundred other reasons and succumb to the Law Of Large Numbers.

Country clubs and business clubs, with selective memberships and their own dining and athletic facilities, exists for one reason: to create an atmosphere that makes it easier to do business.

Let’s say you’re entertaining customers in a town where you don’t belong to a club.

The best way, of course, is to get someone you know in town to let you use their club and sign a tab in the member’s name. That’s a whale of an imposition, but if you have a friend willing to let you do it, do it.

If not, pick the best restaurant in town. You, not your assistant, should call beforehand, ask for the host/hostess and say you’re from out of town, you’re entertaining one of your top customers, and “You won’t be sorry when I get there.” Describe yourself and say you would like to be greeted by name. Tell him or her you want a table that has three characteristics: not near a swinging kitchen door, not near a busing station, and not in a high-traffic entrance area. Let him or her know you would like their best waiter. No menu. Just a recital of the choicest three or four items being served that day. Give the host/hostess your credit card number. Tell him or her to add 20 percent to the bill for the waiter, but not to present the bill at the table. Give your office phone number for verification, or if you have to, stop by in advance and sign the bill.

By doing a little advance planning you’ve just made the best restaurant in town your own private club.

I have never once heard from any car salesperson—or any salesperson of any substantial item—once I’d made the purchase from him. No thank-you note. No “We just got a new shipment in.” No nothing.

Yet many of the successful people I know are constantly sending out short notes.

“I want you to know how much I enjoyed our meeting/your gift/your hospitality/whatever”; “Congratulations on your new financing/house/plant/wife/kid’s performance at tennis/whatever”; “Here’s an item about envelopes/golf/tennis/marketing seminars/whatever I thought you might be interested in.”

They’re hand-written, hand-stamped, and mailed the same day the item appears or is announced or we’ve had a meeting. It takes only a moment. It’s all a matter of personal recognition and courtesy, as it is to remember names and take a personal interest in the people with whom you work. It’s a major part of the reason why Holtz, Fallon, and Whitney are successful—and why I’ve never bought a car from the same person twice.

Ask a roomful of entrepreneurs what the sweetest sound in the world is and they lean toward the crisp crinkly of a freshly minted currency or the full thud of a competitor’s body hitting the pavement.

Ask anyone in the sales game and they’ll tell you that it’s the sound of their name on someone else’s lips.

I know the headmistress of a private school who makes it a practice to learn the names of each of the over one thousand kids attending her school. If they’re new and she hasn’t met them, she learns their names by studying their pictures. On the first day of each year, when the buses arrive to drop off the kids at school, she greets each one by name as they get off the bus. Imagine how reassuring it is to a frightened first-grader, suddenly thrust into strange surroundings, to be recognized immediately by an adult who is in charge of his or her life. Or to the child’s anxious parents who have plunked down $13,000 for tuition. When they ask Junior how it went the first day, they discover that the headmistress of the school has taken a personal interest in their child.

In the twelve years that headmistress has been at the school, enrollment has more than doubled, the school has moved to a grand new facility that is clearly the finest in the area, and the endowment has been increased sixfold. Not all the result of learning those names, of course, but it certainly didn’t hurt to have a headmistress who understood that her performance as a salesperson was as important as her role as en educator.

Knowing what to do isn’t enough if you haven’t developed the self-discipline to do it. The headmistress who learned to recognize her one thousand students had no extraordinary gifts of memory. She learned it the same way she learned Latin when she was a high school freshman. She locked herself in her room every evening for a week and spent the time drilling herself with handmade flash cards.

Most of us quit doing that sort of thing in ninth grade. She didn’t.

I have known successful salespeople who were alcoholics, gamblers, lairs, thieves… but I have never known a successful salesperson who sat on his ass all day.

The most dangerous, expensive, and self-destructive habit of all: wasting time? You can do all those other nasty things and still make a decent living. But if you blow off your nine to fives on useless, time-consuming behavior, you will fail.

A salesperson really has nothing to sell but his time. His product exists independently of anything he adds to it; his personality will win him or lose him accounts initially, but if he isn’t around to provide service and be accessible to his customers, he’ll lose those accounts.

The mark of a good salesperson is that his customer doesn’t regard him as a salesperson at all, but a trusted and indispensable adviser, an auxiliary employee who, fortunately, is on someone else’s payroll.

It takes energy and self-discipline to sell. Your customer doesn’t care if you make the call. You, the salesperson, have to care.

Set up a schedule with a fixed number of calls to be made every working day, and complete that schedule. 

It is an absolutely fail-safe method—the only one there is—to ensure success. If you give yourself a reasonable work program and follow it, you’ll hit the top of the charts.

Setting goals is simply the long-term version of keeping track of your time. Actually, a three-step process is involved:

• Setting goals
• Developing a plan to achieve those goals
• Keeping track of your time to make sure your plan gets executed

Bill Gates: (1) “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.” (2) “The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.”

Remember the four-minute mile? So they decided in was impossible. And for thousands of years everyone believed it. Then one man, one single human being, proved that the doctors, the trainers, the athletes, and the millions and millions before him who tried and failed, were all wrong. And miracle of miracles, the year after Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile, thirty-seven other runners broke the four-minute mile, and the year after that three hundred runners broke the four-minute mile.

A few years ago, in New York, I stood at the finish line of the Fifth Avenue Mile and watched thirteen out of thirteen runners break the four-minute mile in a single race. In other words, the runner who finished dead last would have been regarded as having accomplished the impossible a few decades ago.

Think about the stonecutter: He hammers at his rock a hundred times without denting it. On the hundred-and-first blow, the rock will split in two. You know it is not that blow that did it but all that had gone before. You can accomplish your goals… if you set them. Who says you’re not tougher, smarter, better, harder-working, more able than your competition? It doesn’t matter if they say you can’t do it. What matters, the only thing that matters, is if you say it.

“It’s the pioneers who get all the arrows.”

Who (or what) is psyching you up?

You never stop needing role models.

Study them, copy them, compete with them, and even try to surpass them. They’re constantly goading themselves to meet new challenges. They top old role models, then find new ones. They top themselves, and they set new goals. What better way to measure yourself, to feel good about yourself, and to achieve than trying to be like people whom you admire? Look at yourself in the mirror. If you like what you see, don’t forget that you want to feel the same way tomorrow morning and the morning after.

I came to really that fantasizing, projecting yourself into successful situations, is one of the most powerful means there is to achieve personal goals.

Human survival itself very often depends on a kind of future vision, seeing oneself in specific situations as a healthy, thriving, creative person.

Dream on.

All you have to do is make him think it’s his idea.

You’ll be amazed how the terms of your deals will improve when you learn to say NO.

As a buyer, you have to be aware that the seller is constantly measuring you, and moving in for the kill. Time is almost always the seller’s enemy, not yours. The longer you take, the longer you have the use of your own money and control over the terms of any deal, and the more likely those terms are to improve.

First, be prepared to say NO. No one ever went broke because he said NO too often. Second, the most powerful tool in any negotiation is information.

Say you want to buy a house, or a business… a big-ticket, on-of-a-kind item. Nothings tougher than finding out what the seller’s real price is. There’s a way. You clone yourself. You hire a substitute, a ringer. 

Let’s say we’re talking about a house. The ringer meets the seller and asked the price. The seller says $489,000. The buyer reaches into his pocked, pulls out his checkbook, and begins to write out a check, a low-ball check.

At this point we begin to get the true price. The seller reacts either by getting offended and refusing to deal, or by trying to keep the deal alive. If the seller is irate and won’t deal, we know that his price is, for the time being, $489,000.

But seven times out of ten, your seller, probably seeing a real live buyer in front of him for the first time in ages, begins to take him very seriously and starts to negotiate. He may counter on the spot. Let’s say, $440,000. In which case, you now have a much better idea of what he’s really willing to take. Or he may stall. Regardless, if there’s any glimmer of hesitation, you now know more about his price than he knows about yours… before he’s ever met you. You may have begun to tap into the mother lode of all negotiating tools: information.

The next step is to wait a week, then send in another ringer, with a slightly different line. He may offer a higher price and be impossible on terms, or he may even try a slightly lower price. I’ll pay much more if you’ll let me name the terms.

He’ll pick up more information. And he’ll help drill a lower price into the seller’s skull as the level at which buyers are willing to deal.

If you still want to step in, you not only have a good idea what the real price is, you not only have conditioned the seller to expect a lower-than-advertised price, you have also arrive at this happy state of affairs without yourself having antagonized the seller with a low-ball offer.

It doesn’t always work, of course, but if it works once in a lifetime, that’s enough.

Bankers are people with a product to sell. Money. It is a wasting asset. When it sits in T-bills, which is where it is when it isn’t being lent out, it earns 1.6 percent. When it’s invested in your mortgage or your car, it’s earning at least twice that much.

Don’t forget, despite all the psychological barriers they throw at you, that the banker is the seller, you are the buyer. They don’t make house calls, but that doesn’t mean your job is to persuade them to do business with you. Their job is to persuade you. Make them do it. You’ll get a better deal.

Herr Schwan demonstrated that walking away from the table is not just for when you don’t want to deal. Sometimes it’s the only way you can make the deal you want.

If you have to have a deal, then all the other side needs to do to win the negotiation is outwait you.

The reason the democracies have been in such failures in international negotiations with tyrannies is that the attitudes of the general public are part of the barrage our representatives bring to the bargaining table—and the general public has an expectation that “success” in bargaining is measure by the act of reaching an agreement, never mind what the agreement is.

As a result, once our foreign-policymakers are maneuvered into goin into negotiations, it’s almost inevitable that we lose, because the other side knows that they have only to refuse to make a deal—unless it’s one they regarded as favorable to them—and the public perception will be that our negotiators will have lost a key opportunity.

Don’t deceive yourself into believing that just because it’s negotiable it has to be negotiated.

Deals seldom get worse when you walk away from the table.

Be prepared to walk away from the table… and mean it. You’ll be able to go back to the table and get even better terms.

The salesperson writes up the deal. He has the prospect initial it. Then he asks the prospect causally what the other dealers offered him. At this point, the prospect, flushed with victory, tosses away the most valuable asset he has in the negotiation: information—to wit, the other dealers’ prices.

“The sales manager has to okay the deal.” … Won’t go for the deal.

And then proceeds to retrace it up to exactly the same level the other dealers had offered the prospect. Why, you might ask, doesn’t the prospect simply walk at this point?

He signs because he can’t walk away from that table without a deal. But you can. And when you do, you’ll end up using you cars for less money than you would if you fell for the classic scam.

It’s dealing with people who are honest.

The second most important term is including the right to inspect all their books and records, including tax records, correspondence, etc. pertaining to the agreement. Once that clause is in there, people with a tendency to get cute usually don’t.

Every now and then you’ll find yourself dealing with one of those country cousin types who says he doesn’t want a contract and “your word is good enough.” Maybe yours is, but his usually isn’t.

What I do when I make a deal with one of these country cousins is send a letter that same day in which I:

1. Thank him profusely for his courtesy and
2. Set out the terms of the deal: “As I understand our agreement, I have agreed to…”

I don’t usually ask for any acknowledgment (though you could just to be on the safe side—to make sure the letter arrived). It’s just a nice, friendly little letter—and a useful record if there should be any misunderstanding later.

Anyone who goes to that much trouble to try to show you how much he doesn’t care if he sells something cares a hell of a lot more than he’s willing to admit.

Beware the late dealer. Unless you are on your guard, you may read his intentions totally wrong and end up giving up a bargaining advantage. Feigning indifference or casually disregarding timetables is often just a shrewd negotiator’s way to make you believe he doesn’t care.

You have not only the right, but also the personal responsibility to think in a cool and calm way about any major investment you are asked to make. Never make a significant deal that is proposed to you, a deal that is going to involve your commitment to spend your own money, on the spur of the moment. There is no more certain recipe for disaster than a decision based on emotion.

Somewhere along the line something similar is going to happen to you. Someone is going to say this is absolutely your last chance to accept their generous offer. Someone is going to make you an offer you can’t refuse. Where every step has been choreographed, every note orchestrated to lead up to that one moment, the moment when it’s your cue, your duty, your responsibility, to say yes.

Say no.

We’ve all heard it said that if any proposition looks too good to be true, it probably is. But before you decide to invest, look beyond the proportion itself, and

• If the surrounding are too grand
• If there are too many unfamiliar faces
• If it is too far away from home
• If the people are too nice
• If the business is too glamorous

 

• If the title that comes with your participations is too elegant—in other words, even if the proposition seems right, but if considered in the context of all these other factors, it all seems a little too much

Get the hell out of there.

If huge enterprises, some so valuable their assets exceed those of most of the nations in the world, can be bought and sold, cut up into little pieces, or put together into bigger pieces, like a heap of scrap iron, then there’s no deal that you and I could contemplate that can’t be put together. A deal can always be made when the parties see it to their own benefit.

Nine out of ten lawsuits are settled before judgement is rendered in the courtroom because even the bitterest of adversaries will sit down at the same table when they can be shown there is a greater advantage to themselves in negotiating than in fighting.

Whatever it is you are trying to buy or sell can be bought or sold if you can get the other side of the table to see how the deal works to their advantage.

There are four things you need to do to build a successful business. One: Find the capital. Two: Find a favorable environment to employ it. Three: Hire the key people. And here’s where he took a long pause and said, “So far, I’m not telling you anything you didn’t already know, because number four is the important one. Then you’ve got to know when to get the hell out of the way. That’s the hardest part, but that’s the one that will make you rich.”

Fallon understands that in his business—and in yours, more than you realize—what people are looking for isn’t only money, it’s recognition, appreciation, and creative freedom. He gives them what they need. They give him what he needs: the best product in the industry.

Fallon doesn’t give orders; he facilitates the creative process by hard work and accessibility. In the ad game, your inventory is ideas, and they can come from anyone, anywhere.

The ket to keeping the ideas flowing is an atmosphere where everyone can feel free to contribute. That atmosphere requires a barrier-free environment.

No matter what business you’re in, to be successful, managers must create the kind of environment that makes their people the most productive. It isn’t enough to make them conscious of details if you destroy their sense of freedom and spontaneity in the process. You must understand them well enough to give them no what you want, but also what they need to make a maximum contribution.

Look at the people who walk out your door and leave you to become successful at their own businesses. Chances are they’re not doing it just for the money. They need the room to express their own styles. Give them that room… and the recognition and appreciation… and nine out of ten times they won’t leave. “Intrapreneurship.” These are new forms of capitalism. It’s fueling new forms of innovation with capital. It gives men and women the opportunity to realize their own idea without leaving the company. One step short of full partnership, it still lets the best become presidents of their own company within a corporate framework.

Sure, it’s not as profitable for us as it would have been if he’d been content to stay on as an ordinary employee. But that wasn’t the alternative. The alternative was losing him and winding up having him as a competitor.

“I’d rather have him inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in.”

They all know that being tops in the saddle often means being light on the reins. They say the horse never knows such a jockey is there—unless he’s needed.

“It doesn’t matter how many pails of milk you spill, just so you don’t lose the cow.”

I have one ironclad rule for myself. I walk my plant every day just like it says in In The Search Of Excellence. I can learn something new and get that feel, touch, and pulse of the place without anyone having to say a single word to Mme. Do wives and husbands have to announce each other’s moods with a drum roll and trumpet fanfare?

A capable manager walks his plant and gets the good news before anyone else.

An outstanding manager gets the bad news first. Nobody wants to be the bearer of bad tidings, because that triggers the kill-the-messenger syndrome. If you’re in charge, you have to encourage the flow of bad news, because if you don’t bad situations get worse—before you can stop the hemorrhaging.

If your only means of communicating upward is a formal, operations-manual kind of system, you’re making a mistake. Don’t rely on the formal chain of command to provide you with the bad news. If there’s a problem, the manage in that area will always try to solve it before you hear about it. He’ll justify his action as being within his scope of responsibility, but he’ll be motivated as much by a sense of wanting to cover it up before you hear about it.

You need a second line of communications. You have to encourage not only your own people, but your customers, too, to talk to you informally, to feel comfortable approaching you in the halls and getting concerns off their chests.

The make of a real pro, no matter what the business, is recognizing that the absolutely best business information you can get is never found in a report or other secondhand information. It’s a steady diet of nose-to-nose, constant, immediate, unfiltered feedback from your customers and employees.

I have a very simply way of making sure that a job I really don’t want to do gets done. I write out a brief description on a sheet of yellow legal paper and throw the paper on the floor next to my desk. To get to my desk, I have to go through the nuisance of stepping around, over or on it. Whatever it is, it gets done in a hurry.

If you expect the other guy to care about you, show that you care about him.

They get the best quality. They get the best delivery. They get the best prices… you can be certain that they know what they should be paying even though they don’t get bids for their outside needs. If you overcharge, you still get paid, once, and then you never hear from them again.

The way you pay your bills says something about the kind of person you are to deal with. Whether it’s the man who painted your house or the firm that delivers your raw stock, you’ll always get a better shake if you pay the same day you get the bill.

Most organizations need both these talents: the salesperson who brings in the business and the manager who knows what to do with it. But you’d be surprised how many businesses there are where they either don’t understand that those two talents seldom run together in the same person or where destructive conflicts between the inside types and outside types end up tearing the place apart.

Ike had Nixon: George W. Bush has Rumsfeld; every ball club has the manager of the moment. You have to get someone who can make the tough, mean, unpopular decisions—and can take the fall when they get too tough, mean, and unpopular. 

Your public performance won’t fly if you’re the one who has to crack the whip at home.

Be a damn good hatchet man.

If you are determined to be a tough guy, wisdom says you better bring these strengths to the fore:

• exceptional intelligence with the ability to ask tough questions from 9:00 a.m. until quitting time, whatever that is
• fair-mindedness (you might call it the ability to hit with either a left jab or a right cross)
• maintenance of extremely high performance standards for yourself
• commitment to keep your guard up continually (and cynically)
• the ability to shed criticism like a duck shedding raindrops

In other words, you must have the mind-set of a drill sergeant. Your troops aren’t going to love you, but they’ll respect you—as long as you can prove to them you’re tougher than they are and you’re willing to drive yourself even harder than you’re driving them.

Vince Lombardi said, “Victory doesn’t mean a lot. It means everything.”

If you run a business, there are 1,001 way to screw up every day, and almost all of them can be avoided with a little more attention to detail or common courtesy. Everything can go wrong. If you’re in charge, your job is to minimize the mistakes.

The strategy is leadership.

Nobody is going to believe it’s important unless you, the boss, make it seem important. The tactic you use is by example.

If you’re going to be a winner, look like a winner.

You can preach about little things and discipline until you tongue hangs out, but it won’t work unless you yourself find a way to dramatize it and make it seem important enough so the message gets through.

No matter what the lesson is, you can teach it only by instilling a sense of pride, not shame in the pupil. Poking into offices that are, presumably, not on public display, says, “You don’t know how to do your job.” Shaping up public appearances says, “Let the whole world see you look as good as you are.”

Winners surround themselves with other winners. A winner knows he’s a winner. He doesn’t need second-raters and yes-men around to feed his ego. He knows he’ll win more, and go farther, with associates who not only can keep up with him but who also are capable of teaching him something.

If you’re about to form a new business connection, whether it’s a job or a joint venture, don’t just look at your opposite number. Look at his subordinates. Does he trust them? Does he delegate to them? Do they complement his talents by being strong managers while he’s an entrepreneur? Or are they just his clones? If they’re weak, you have a problem. You’ll not only have your hands full getting anything done your way, you’ll also be completely dependent on your new associate’s personal capabilities and energy. There won’t be quality staff backup. Not a good situation in which to find yourself.

Efficient achieved at the expense of creativity is counterproductive. Don’t equate activity with efficiency. You are paying your key people to see the big picture. Don’t let them get bogged down in a lot of meaningless meetings and paper shuffling. Announce a Friday afternoon off once in a while. Cancel a Monday morning meeting or two. Tell the cast of characters you’d like them to spend the same amount of time normally spent preparing for and attending the meeting at their desks, simply thinking about an original idea. And it has to be something they’ve never mentioned before. Don’t even require them to submit the results. Just see what happens.

If you discover one of your executives looking at the wall, instead of filling out a report, go over and congratulate him or her.

They are probably doing the company a lot more good than anything else they could be doing. They’re thinking. It’s the hardest, most valuable task any person performs. It’s what helped get you where you are. THINK: that’s the one-word motto that Thomas J. Watson brought to IBM decades ago. THINK has never left IBM, even during tough times. 

You don’t have to wait until the calendar tells you it’s time for the Christmas party or the office picnic or some other form of compulsory fun.

When you sense that the pressure has really risen and stayed on too long, when you can feel the concentration level going down—that’s the time. You’ll be pleasantly surprised at the results. You noticed what was happening: You cared—and you did something about it.

“These are the people who are on strike. They strike by wearing black armbands, the traditional Western symbol of bereavement, while they continue working.”

But the plant keeps operating. No production is lost. The workers keep on earning wages. They keep talking with management about the problems. And they keep on working!

The payoff was that the terms of settlement of the grievance probably weren’t much different from that they would have been had the workers shut down the place.

You can practice all day long, but if you don’t really know what you’re doing, no matter how much talent you have, you’re only perfecting an error.

There are two qualities that are indispensable in making it to the top: expert coaching and iron determination.

No book is going to change your life. Only you can actually change your life. I can’t do it for you. No teacher can.

A teacher is not there just to acquaint you with the tools of your made; a teach is a tool of your trade.

Hire people who are still learning, people who feel that learning is a lifelong process, either in the classroom, the office, or at home. Encourage your employees to learn by paying their tuition for them. Develop a business library and stock it with written materials and CDs and DVDs. Show them you want them to grow—and your business will grow, too.

There are two type of experts, and it’s very important to be able to distinguish between them: There is the expert who can make something happen, and there is the expert who can tell you what he or she thinks is going to happen. Get all the advice you can afford from the experts in category one, but be very, very cautious about the category-two types.

Whether it’s economists, the most prestigious of the professional pundits, or stock-market forecasters, or political analysts, or just plain old sport handicappers and racetrack trouts, my advice is the same: Be extremely leery. Rely on these people to tell you why something happened, but don’t rely on them to tell you why something is going to happen. They don’t know any more than you do—and neither do their computers. When it comes to forecasting events with a large number of highly volatile variables, any one of which could determine the outcome, experts are less than expert. Trust yourself and your gut, and you’re likely to do at least as well.

There isn’t any. But you do have to do it, so you may have to master a technique that both suits your style and the occasion.

Nothing works all the time, but there’s one method I’ve saved for the biggies. I sit in my big, comfortable office. I reach out for the culprit through my assistant, who gives him “little tip… I’ve never seen Mr. Mackay so angry.” I make hamster in the anteroom for up to a half an hour. The purpose of the preliminaries is obviously to make him focus on his mistake and be painfully aware of the depth of my wrath.

He is summoned in. I say, rising up, scowling, and pointing to my chair, “please go over and sit in that chair.” He sits in my chair. I sit in what would normally be his chair. “All right, Jack, now what would you say if you were me?”

It’s unfamiliar territory, so that generates discomfort automatically. Second, because of what is coming down, they know they don’t belong in the position of authority represented by the boss’s chair, and that makes for an added burden of guilt. Believe me, four out of five times they were harder on themselves than I ever would have been. Because I don’t do the chewing out myself, no never-to-be-forgotten-always-to-be-resented phrases are lodged forever in their memories. They do all the dirty work.

Consciously or unconsciously, no one really wants his or her successor to succeed. They recommend candidates likely to fail, thereby making their own achievements all the more remarkable.

Anyone who thinks he or she is indispensable should stick a finger into a bowl of water and notice the hole it leaves when it’s pulled out.

All successful sales organizations offer a constant round of morale-booster meetings, incentives, awards, and recognition. No matter how often salespeople are told “It isn’t personal” when they’re turned down, professional sales managers realize how psychologically draining those rejections are. It’s a never-ending struggle to keep their people up and motivated. What applies to salespeople also applies to the rest of the workforce. Everyone needs to feel appreciated.

If you want to goose up the morale a little bit among your middle managers, give them some unexpected recognition. For most people, bragging rights are just as important as money.

Then send out a memo announcing exactly what you just told them, or put it in the house organ.

You’ve accomplished several things: You’ve told your people you notice and appreciate good work, and you’re created a performance incentive without locking yourself into a costly and ever-escalating program. That, of course, is all in addition to your existing recognition and awards program.

Our success depends on marketing. There’s no magic formula for making every employee aware of the importance of marketing to our company. It’s a daily grind. Our strategy is to create awareness among our people.

The parking space closest to the door of our main office has a sign: “Reserved for [you fill in the name] Salesperson of the Month.” The key to that parking-slot gimmick isn’t just recognition for an individual. It’s also that the parking space is closer to the door than my parking space or anyone else’s. It’s a very specific way of saying that sales are the key to our business.

There are two very simple signs I want to tell you about. One hangs on the door to my office. It says, “If you know where you can get us some business, come in.” The second sign is on the little round table in the conference area of my office. It says, “Our meeting will not be interrupted… unless a customer calls.”

My lawyer was sixty. My accountant was fifty-eight, and my banker would admit to being seventy, but I think he was closer to eighty. They had seen enough business problems in their lifetimes to be able to deal with anything imaginable without knowing the ins and outs of my particular industry.

Though everything that happened to me in my first five years of business was new to me, nothing was new to them. And even when I didn’t take their advice—and ofter I didn’t—they were a calming and reassuring influence. And that’s something every businessperson, novice or experienced, has need of from time to time.

“I’m a great believer in luck,” said Stephen Leacock, the Canadian humorist, “and the harder I work, the luckier I get.”

Work half days every day. And it doesn’t matter which half… the first twelve hours or the second twelve hours.

He said the first five days of the week, Monday through Friday, are when you work to keep up with the competition. It’s on Saturdays and Sundays that you get ahead of them.

It’s the “peak performers” who do the best job of handling the load. They can turn on tremendous bursts of speed for a week, two weeks, three weeks, when it’s needed for some particularly important task, and then be unashamedly lazy in between when the nature of the work is routine.

Peak performers can distinguish between goal-oriented performance, really productive work, and mere wheel-spinning. They are astute in avoiding the latter. Classic entrepreneurial boredom sets in… and then they get the hell out of the way for a while.

So, yes, you have to be able to work very, very hard, but no, you don’t have to approach every assignment in the typical “Type A” full-speed-ahead fashion. Knowing when to throttle down can contribute as much to your performance, and your life-span, as knowing when to throttle up.

If there’s any characteristic that distinguishes the entrepreneurial type, it is a half-mad fanaticism about going it alone, without anyone poking a nose into his business, asking questions or telling him what to do. Nothing is tougher for an entrepreneur than letting go of total control.

The seat-of-the-pants entrepreneur, no matter how talented or intuitive, needs professional skills he can never hope to master himself.

Any business relationship in which one party has an obvious edge over the other won’t be to the advantage of either because it won’t last.

These days, if you expect to keep your business, you’ll need professional skills to run it, and the people who have those skills are likely to be just as aware of their value as you are.

They expect a piece of the action. You’re going to have to give it to them or risk losing them, and possible something much more important.

Instead of thinking of our employees as customers to be won over to achieve our long-term objectives, we think of them as automatons, pieces of machinery who are summoned to carry out our short-term objectives. It doesn’t work that way. Do your homework. Find out enough about the people you’re working with so you can show some genuine personal concern about them. Express that concern and make them your friends. One at a time. Your long-term success depends on their performance. To a greater extent than you may realize, they’re performing for you, for your approval, not just for your paycheck. If you can make them believe that your approval means something, by taking a personal interest in them you will have taken a major step toward securing your won long-term success.

Sheer stubbornness has destroyed a lot more bottom lines than new technologies. There were just as many mean spirited jibes at Coca-Cola for abandoning its original formulas as there were at Ford when it unveiled the Edsel. The difference was that Ford decided it was going to prove the marketplace was wrong and stuck with its mistake far too long. Coca-Cola realize early that while humiliation was inescapable, horrendous losses need not be. It cut its losses, and its mistake cost it a lot less money than stubborn pride cost Ford.

One thing professional stock and commodity traders learn early is that they don’t give away medals for courage in the marketplace. There is only one reward the marketplace has to offer: money.

If you’re not making any, bail out. Quickly.

Facing the results of a huge mistake, many people will stop dead in their tracks, too emotionally drained to see that any problem can be solved with a checkbook isn’t really a problem, it’s just an expense. Once the mistake is recognized, what’s lost is lost. Don’t freeze. Act. If you can buy your way back on the right track, do it. Quickly.

Then it’s no longer a problem, it’s just a negotiation over the cost of the solution.

Everybody’s a winner on paper. It’s in the flesh that the differences stand out. Hiring the right people is the greatest talent a manager can have because good people produce good work and lousy people do lousy work. I get involved in the hiring process not just to get good new people but also to remind the ones who are already with us about what’s important.

Employees are asked to submit candidates.

By the time we find the right person, everyone in the place is part of the program and totally aware that courtesy and attention to detail are critical concerns. We’re not filling slots; we’re looking for capable, caring, conscientious people.

“How can you tolerate unfilled vacancies for that long?” First, we plan our needs so we aren’t backed up to the wall when any one person leaves. Second, when anyone really solid comes through the door, they have a job—even if we don’t have a place. That gives us bench strength. Third, our selection process is so rigorous that our long-term retention rate is well above 80 percent.

If you want to understand the fundamentals of hiring, go back to the basics of buying and selling. You, the employer, are buying and he or she, the candidate, is selling.

Now, should you be offended or distrustful because the candidate is selling hard? Not on your life! But there is a big difference between admiring a beautifully produced television ad and a believing it.

Happy hunting! And remember, don’t bag it unless you expect to be happy with it hanging in your office for some time to come.

Ask yourself, how would you feel having this same person working for your competition instead of for you?

There’s nothing the matter with being generous, but beware of spontaneous gestures unless you remember they have a way of becoming permanent “traditions.”

3. Always park you care in a getaway position.

4. Use the car’s CD player to listen to disks that teach you something.

8. Never go to the bank or the corner ATM machine during Friday lunch hour.

9. Never have a coffee with another salesperson, only with a customer. (Make sure you know which sort of latte they’re nuts about.)

If you can’t take the best advice and forgive your enemies, then take the second best and forget them. The only way you can achieve true revenge is not to let your enemies cause you to self-destruct.

Knowing your competition is just as important as knowing your customer.

Unless you have a unique product or service, or run a state-owned bakery in Fidel Castro’s Cuba, competition is a fact of life. You must deal with it. The best way is to gather what knowledge you can and then act.

Knowledge is not power unless it is used.

We arrived where we are today because a number of people gave us a leg up along the way, but ask for a show of hands and 99.9 percent of us consider ourselves self-made men and women.

There is in the human makeup that which is unwilling to bear the burden of being grateful, and therefore morally beholden, to anyone for very long. So whatever you do for your kids, your spouse, your subordinates, your boss, or your friends, just remember: You’ll be a lot happier if you think of it as doing it for yourself. And then try like hell to forget you did it, because the beneficiary has.

I suppose there are people with real money who drive Cadillacs and Mercedes. I don’t know many. As long as practically anyone can own one of those so-called prestige cars, who’s going to be impressed? In fact, the opposite is true. If you can afford a fancy car, you make more of an impact driving an ordinary one.

Cars depreciate. Houses appreciate.

You and I may be fascinated by meeting celebrities, but for the most part they’re bored meeting us.

Talk about whatever it is they do that made them famous, and you can see their eyes glaze over as they give the same responses they’ve given ten thousand times before.

The trick is to avoid the fan syndrome and treat them like human beings. Find where their interests lie.

Google.

“Self-esteem,” the higher it is, the better you get along with yourself, with others, and the more you’ll accomplish.

Humility is the most overrated of human connections. Will Rogers said, “If you done it, it ain’t bragging.”

What’s the matter with being proud of what we have done or think we can do? In my opinion, humility is what our parents and teachers try to stuff us with when we’re six years old to make us easier to handle, but it’s unnatural. When we’re young, we’re full of the sense that we can and should be able to do almost anything.

Dr. Anthony Greenwald, a psychologist at the University of Washington, sees the “egocentricity bias”—the reinterpretation of events to put ourselves in a favorable light and the belief we have more control over events than we actually do—as a sign of mental well-being.

Did you ever get a good performance out of a pessimist? (By the way, no one ever called himself a pessimist. Pessimists always call themselves realists.)

Optimism involves self-delusion, a belief that our own abilities are superior to the obstacles that logically should overcome us. But that’s exactly what’s needed to perform any heavy-duty assignment.

Don’t let the “egocentricity bias”/optimism be snuffed out in you. It’s a hell of a lot more productive than humility.

You can remember anything… if you’re interested in it.

Nobody expects you to always remember the names of you customer’s kids, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have them dancing right off the end of your tongue when you need them.

You write them down immediately after you leave your meeting with your customer. Five minutes before your walk into his office the next time, you review that form and you’re a genius… or at least you appear to be.

Don’t try to rely on your memory for stuff like that. Just be damn sure you write it down.

Nobody who stated with nothing and ended with something got there all by himself. Once, long ago, someone saw a quality in you that made them want to give you a leg up. Would they feel the same way about you today? Be honest. If the wouldn’t, if success has changed you, then it’s time you got back to your roots. Whatever material things you have now could vanish just as quickly as they came. Better hold on to the one asset you started with—the appeal that caused other people to trust and believe in you. Stay in touch with your mentors. If you let yourself lose contact with them, chances are you’re also losing contact with what got you where you are.

Play this game with yourself. Predict the outcome of events that interest you: the stock market, elections, athletic events, whatever.

There are three rules to the game. Once, you have to write your prediction down (otherwise, you’ll cheat, you devil). Two, you also have to write down the reasons for your predictions. Three, when you lose, you have to force yourself to analyze why you lost, why your reasons didn’t hold up.

If your ego needs an occasional cold shoulder, this little exercise will provide you with a lifetime supply. It will also force you to reexamine and adjust your reasoning without having to pay any penalty for being wrong. You’ll find that the more you do this, the more accurate you’ll become. And if you find you have a real talent for it, but not until then, you should back that talent with cash.

It’s lonely at the top, and the bigger they are, the more strokes they need.

One of the forces that drives a super achiever far harder than the rest of us is an inordinate need for recognition and approval. Money is one way to measure it. That’s why they work so hard to get it. But so is a compliment from a friend. And those are a lot harder to come by. So if you know one of those types, let them know you appreciate them.

“Eighteen Reasons Why You Should Travel First-Class”

The bottom line and prioritized first reason was the people you will meet.

When they open a new restaurant, for the first two months they tell about half the people who phone in for reservations that the place is full for whatever night they request and to please phone back.

Maintaining the illusion of demand regardless of supple. The lesson here is not that people are sheep but that in a capitalist economy, everything that is sold is a commodity, whether it’s stocks, hard assets, season tickets, or restaurant seats. No one wants it fi it’s too easy to get; if they can’t get it, if it’s in demand, then everyone wants it.

Our sense of the worth of an object is not derived from its intrinsic value but from the demand that has been created for that object.

Since you’re going to have to take care of it—that’s what you’re getting paid for—why not let him hear what he wants to hear: “I’ll take care of it.”

Babe Ruth got paid to hit home runs, and of course, he did, 714 of them, but most memorable one he ever hit was when he “called his shot” and pointed to center field with his bat before he hit it there.

Call your shot. Saying you’re going to do it before you do it, counts. It counts big. You’ve given your boss peace of mind. You’re someone who delivers. Can you think of a better reputation to have in any business situation?

It makes no sense to put in all that work getting a speech written without getting a firm fix on the whole point of the exercise: audience reaction.

There’s a reason Broadway shows don’t open on Broadway. They open out of town because it give the company a chance to gauge the effects of their material on an audience.

If you give speeches, doesn’t it make sense to do why you do with every other major product your company produce: Do some market research? Try out those corny jokes, hone that material… until you’re positive you’ve got a winner. It will not only improve the text, it will also improve your own performance, because you’ll have confidence that what you are saying will generate the right response.

Most successful people are good on their feet. We’re an information society, so the ability to transmit that information in an intelligent, succinct, and persuasive manner is about as valuable a skill as anyone can possess.

“How do you manage to jump from one thing to another like that? I asked him.

“I haven’t,” he said. “I’ve always done the same thing. Sell words. The job descriptions are just a little different.”

Learn to use the language. Written and spoken. Anyone who’s a word dink has got it made.

What I realized is what most successful speakers already know: You may be totally alone when you’re making a speech, but you don’t have to be alone when you’re preparing for it.

The skills we learn by overcoming our terror of standing up in public and spilling out guts carry over into the rest of our lives. We gain self0confidence and assertiveness, which allow us to be better managers, better salespeople, and better leaders.

Eleven Ways To Win Your Audience

1. Why did this group invite me to speak? (stated reason) How was my talk publicized and positioned for this audience?
2. What is this group’s purpose?
3. What are the chief characteristics of this group? (professional, social, demographics, career level, etc.)
4. Who spoke to the group recently? How were they received? Can I get copies of their remarks?
5. Who were the speakers who addressed this group most successfully in recent history? What made them successful?
6. How can I personalize the speech for this group? What humor will work? What is a “no-no”?
7. Who are the opinion leaders in this group? Which of them will be there? How do I reach them?
8. Who will introduce me? How will he or she position me? What nice things can I say about him or her?
9. Will I be expected to answer questions? What are the key questions I can anticipate? Any touch issues I should be aware of?
10. What messages will provide genuine “take home” value for this group? Should I give them any physical “take home”? (charts, summaries, etc.)
11. Who is my group “insider” who can help me in speech development and in getting reliable feedback on my performance?

Do you realize what a rare and beautiful thing cash is? There are people making $200,000, $300,000, $400,000 a year who haven’t seen $1,000 in cash in the past twenty years. It’s all plastic, checks and numbers in bank statements. It’s never crisp, crunchy, crackly, comely, curvaceous, cold, hard cash.

We give cash to our salespeople for new accounts. When we have our sales meetings we always announce the new accounts, and right there on the spot I pay out a percentage of the value of those accounts to the salespeople, in cash.

I always use brand-new $100 bills. And I count them off, one at a time, “one, two three…” You should see those people. They’re intoxicated. They’re addicted. They’re mesmerized.

The first thing you have to realize is that you can’t tell them very much. Be sparing, but when you talk, give them some silver bullets—things that will really make a difference.

Tell them about their first job. Their first real job. They will be delighted to be making so much money. You must tell them the truth. They are being overpaid.

They are overpaid because they know next to nothing that has any commercial value and have to be trained and gain some experience before they can be of any real value. They overpay you for the first two years because they reason that once you know what you’re doing, they can underpay you for the next twenty.

“Well, then, why does anyone stay around?” they may ask. Because if you can get through that next twenty years and get into a position where you reach the top and help run the place, you’ll get overpaid again.

That’s the pattern of modern capitalism. You’re overpaid while you train, underpaid while you work, but you have the incentive to keep on getting underpaid in hopes you climb to the top, where you can watch other people do the work and get overpaid again for a few years. 

Obviously, the trick is to see to it that those middle years, the underpaid years, are as few as possible. The way to do that is to recognize that once you’ve mastered the job, it’s time to think about moving on, or up.

But if you decide to stay, recognize that you don’t know everything about everything. Challenge yourself, and make yourself learn something new every change you get.

Do that and you’ll be beating the system. Your employer won’t be able to simply profit off what you’ve already learned because you’ll be forcing that employer to pay you to learn something new, something commercially valuable, every time you walk into the office. And by the way, if you take that approach, chances are you’ll make it to the top a lot more quickly than if you simply lay back and use what you already know.

You have to keep changing and keep learning so that you are constantly challenging yourself. If you don’t, the world will pass you by. And that’s true whether you’re an employee or an employer.

Do something you like.

That sounds simpler than it is because so many of us have had childhood experiences in which the people who controlled our lives seemed determined to make us do things we disliked. If that’s what our early life was like, it’s natural to assume that’s what the working world is like, too. It isn’t. The world is full of people who are doing what they like to do and making a very good living at it. And it isn’t just people in the glamour businesses like advertising, writing, acting, and saving the whales. The trick to learn is that if you like something, you can make it pay no matter what business you’re in.

You don’t stick around just to collect the gold watch. You keep changing and learning. And you find something you like and make it work for you—even if it seems totally unrelated to your own business.

No matter how bright you are or how good you are at what you do, we live in an economy based on change.

Unless they are able to communicate, to master the basic skills of speaking and writing in a forceful, polite, effective way, the day is likely to come when being a nuclear physicist or an envelope-maker won’t be enough. That’s because no matter how safe a little niche they may think they have found for themselves, in a world where capitalism constantly destroys its own creations, their jobs will change, so will the skills needed to perform them, and so will the need for them. As a result, not only will they not be able to stick around for the gold watch, they also may have to go out into the hard, cruel world again and market themselves. And unless they can communicate in an attractive fashion, they’ll be in big, big trouble.

It’s those broad, generalist skills, they ability to communicate in writing, speech, dress, and manners—all those boring things parents and teachers have been driving them nuts about all these years—that someday are going to keep your kids in designer jeans and off the unemployment lines.

The old saying is “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” The people who make it big are the ones who fix it before it’s broke. They force the competition to play catch-up ball. They make their own rules, and the others have to play by them.

Tell your kids to take chances. The greatest advantage young people have is that without financial and family encumbrances of older people, they have so little to lose by taking risks. So encourage them to try something new. Defy the odds.

They may fail at times, but to double their success rate you may have to double their failure rate. Just remember: The wheel is tilted in their favor, the system is based on their side, because it is based on change. On destroying the old. They have a lot less to lose attempting to make a change than attempting to hang on to an old technology, and to the status quo, in a system that rewards change.

Though we all possess individual characteristics that make each of us unique, I believe I’ve seen enough successful people so that I can identify those shared characteristics that make successful people successful.

Determination? Goal-setting? Concentration? We all think we have them. But the truth is, we don’t I’ve written this book to help you join that 10 percent club. It’s not exclusive. You just to work to join it.

I have seen business after business of in the tank because owners took their successes for granted.

No company has a permanent consumer franchise. No one has the only game in town. The never-ending cycle of destruction and change inherent in a capitalist economy always provides new opportunities for those with determination, goals, and concentration.