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I once brought a particularly gifted speaker to Australia and New Zealand, to address our staff and customers…and I recall him saying this to me: ‘John, if I wanted to know anything about you I would just go to your bookcase, and then I would see who your heroes are, what business issues you consider to be important and what you consistently learn about.’ I remember thinking that I should go home right away and fix up my bookcase! And then it occurred to me that things were not as bad as they seemed, after all I had spent a lot of company money bringing this very valuable man to our shores, plus I had searched high and low to provide our 1^st sales force (our staff) and our 2^nd sales force (our customers) with an array of high quality speakers and trainers…at major conferences and key state meetings.

At Schwarzkopf, I even created an educational forum for our salon owner customers, featuring a national convention each year and two regional meetings…at which times they would encounter the best educators available, worldwide. The customers paid to attend these sessions but no profit was derived by our company, because it was in our interests for customers to learn how to grow their businesses…which in turn would lead to growth for Schwarzkopf. The educational forum was branded ‘The pH Club’ (progressive hairdressing), and at the first national convention the opening speaker was the then chairman of McDonalds in Australia, Peter Ritchie, talking about service and other key issues…and the industry speaker that day was ‘Stefan’, the owner of 60 salons in Australia. We very rarely presented product messages at pH Club meetings, unless there was a new product being released, and even then it would take up very little time (the club is still going after 23 years). I also ran a ‘board of customers’ in both countries and a regular speaker at those meetings was professor Roger Layton AM (faculty of commerce and economics)…and so our ‘board members’ were fed a diet of very high quality educators (3 times a year for a day and half each time), and the board concept ran for 8 years! So what are you doing to further your own business education, and if you are a manager, the education of your staff and even your customers…because the growth of people always precedes the growth of business results? People in business are the targets of incessant, high pitched, low quality education…and the closer you are to sales and marketing the worse it gets! The only reason I moved into business education was to offer an alternative and opposite message to those that I had found to be both embarrassing and repugnant…delivered by so-called ‘motivational’ speakers. The diet of drivel served up to sales people includes these inane topics: ‘how to set goals’; ‘how to be positive’; ‘how to sell anything to anyone’; ‘handling objections’; ‘closing the sale’, etc. Try to imagine doctors, architects and engineers being faced with such absurd professional ‘challenges’.

My message then is to be very selective in what you read, and the people you see as role models. The best bet is to avoid the books and people that are ‘flavour of the month’, because they almost always fade into oblivion. The authors that I found compelling were Peter Drucker and Harold Geneen, and the best speakers I hired were Wilfred Jarvis and Charles Jones. These people told the truth about personal and business success, with no hype whatsoever…but with plenty of fun along the way. The bottom line is that the narrower your education is, the slimmer your chance will be of achieving business success…or, what you earn depends on how much you learn.