Executive Times

 

 

 

 

 

2007 Book Reviews

 

Yes You Can! by Jonathan Black

Rating:

**

 

(Mildly Recommended)

 

 

 

Click on title or picture to buy from amazon.com

 

 

 

Mumbling

 

Jonathan Black’s new book, Yes You Can! examines the world of motivational speakers. At first, it seemed that Black would be presenting an expose. Instead, he meanders around the issues involving why motivational speakers are hired, whether they are worth the prices they get for their speeches, and by the end of the book, Black becomes a speaker himself. In some ways, reading this book was like watching the Stockholm Syndrome set in, as the enthusiasm about exposing hucksters that showed up early in the book mumbles into a “how to” manual for becoming a speaker on the circuit. Here’s an excerpt, from the beginning of the chapter titled, “The Million Dollar Hustle,” pp. 55-59:

 

Does this resonate at all? You trudge into the office in body armor to deflect the day’s indignities. Just once, you’d like someone to appreciate the stuff you do. A little respect—is that too much to ask? Maybe you’re not feeding orphans in Africa, but it’s something. If only you didn’t have to convince yourself of that every morning.

A motivational speaker can help.

That’s certainly the strategy of an organization called the Mil­lion Dollar Round Table (MDRT), a worldwide organization of insurance salesmen, or—as MDRT likes to bill itself—”The Pre­mier Association of Financial Professionals.” It counts 28,000 members in seventy countries. At one time, members had to qualify with $1 million in sales. That requirement has now been softened to $67,000 in commissions, and the organization downplays the “Million Dollar Round Table” name. Instead it promotes MDRT as an acronym for Members, Drive, Relationship, and Trust.

That last word may be the key to its most troublesome problem—poor public image. A 2001 Gallup poll of honesty and ethics in professions ranked car salesmen lowest; just above them on the list were advertising writers and insurance salesmen. We should be more forgiving. These folks are under a lot of pressure to sell policies. Lots of times they work alone. They need reassur­ance, they need some loving. No wonder they flock to MDRT’s annual meeting. For the seven thousand—plus attendees, it’s a non­stop blast of pep talk and uplift.

“Many people join MDRT just to come to our meeting,” says Sharon Neville, the meetings’ executive producer. “It’s the jewel in our crown.”

Guess who else comes to the meeting? That’s right—speakers. Lots of speakers. MDRT’s 2004 confab in Anaheim clocked in with one hundred speakers. And only the anointed mount this hal­lowed platform. Careers are launched here. It’s where unknowns dream of breaking into the majors. It’s where stars cement their reputation. The annual meeting of MDRT is the World Series of speaking.

MDRT is an old organization, founded back in 1927, spawned from the National Association of Life Underwriters (NALU), a group formed in 1890 to combat the poor reputation and corrupt practices of so many insurance salesmen. It was a Boston salesman with John Hancock, Paul F Clark, who came up with the idea of forming an elite subgroup, a so-called “inner circle,” to raise stan­dards and secure goodwill. During the annual meeting at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee, he got thirty others to join him. Their goal was not entirely high-minded. They were also out to sell policies, and came up with thirty-eight sales techniques guaranteed to win clients, classics like “Keep quiet when a prospect pauses to think”—and not-such-classics like “Promise to buy a ru­ral fellow a fine new pair of pants if he’ll sign up.”

The group is considerably more sophisticated now—and well endowed. Company headquarters are a sprawling 65,000-square-foot three-story building in the Chicago neighborhood of Park Ridge. There are eighty people on staff. Many of them work at the MDRT Foundation, a charity that has dispensed over ~io million. Groups that champion children’s needs are prime recipients, though the foundation also aids seniors, the poor, and disabled people. It virtually started the Make-a-Wish Foundation. There is a bracing pride about it in its concern for others, which is how MDRT would like to portray the sale of life insurance. One tape of an annual meeting has members crying, “I protect the innocent!” and “I live a life of significance!” The big themes in its seventy-fifth anniversary souvenir program were “Sharing” and “Caring. That event, like every annual meeting, was an amped-up feel-good gala that is part business school, part cheerleading practice, and part evangelical revival. To quote from the seventy-fifth anniversary keepsake, it is where “members leap up to applaud industry heroes and honored guests. They cheer at the tales of triumph and sob with compassion at tales of adversity conquered. When the names of deceased members scroll on the main platform screen, members grieve as they would for close relatives.”

“We’re probably the only organization whose primary modus operandi is to make our members feel good about what they do and about themselves,” says Ray Kopcinski, VP and Meeting Ser­vice director. “That’s the focus of our annual meeting. It’s impor­tant for our members to get recharged.”

But it is the speakers who have made the annual meeting leg­end. Over the years, MDRT has nabbed most of the major players, from Cohn Powell and Barbara Bush to Lee Iacocca and Queen Noor of Jordan. Often, however, it’s the no-names that bring out the handkerchiefs. Again, the program: “When a nine-year-old who sold hair combs to benefit children with cancer spoke, mem­bers bought out her entire supply. When children with Down’s syndrome performed a hoop dance, two members—both male— stayed seated, overcome with emotion as the room emptied.”

Motivational speakers are big in the mix. So acclaimed is the podium that MDRT receives more than fifteen hundred tapes a year from meeting hopefuls. At company headquarters, there is an en­tire room with floor-to-ceiling shelves and cardboard cartons—all crammed with videotapes. Videotapes are the calling cards in the speaker business. You want to sign with a bureau? You need a tape. You want a gig at IBM? You need a bureau and a tape—and it bet­ter not be one of those cheapo one-camera shoots with a red curtain and no audience that looks like bad porn.

But you can’t tell everything from a tape, which is why MDRT also stages a full dress rehearsal months before the meeting. Kopcinski has his standards. No “slick Willies.” No canned guys. Even then, he admits, the occasional clinker slips through. He’s particularly sensitive to the mere “performers,” the men and women who have a platform persona but turn out to he totally different offstage. Kopcinski recalls, with a grimace, a speaker whose entire speech was “don’t sweat the small things in life, go for what’s im­portant, the big stuff,” but who was a nervous wreck in person. “He was throwing up offstage. He kept saying, ‘I’m not going on, I can’t do this.’ Our producer said, ‘If you don’t do this I’m going to kick your ass.’ Basically he pushed him out there.”

Another offender was a big-time basketball coach who gave one of the best speeches ever. “He comes across as a warm and witty guy, and you think, ‘Gee, I’d love to sit down with him and swap sto­ries,’” says Kopcinski. “He wasn’t that kind of guy at all. He arrived in a limo, jumped out, walked right up to the stage, did his thing. As soon as it was over, he didn’t say hi or boo or good-bye. He jumped back in his limo and was gone. He wasn’t a people person at all.”

The majority, of course, are big hits. Neville herself was partic­ularly moved by Joan Brock. You may have heard of Joan Brock. She was the woman teaching braille in a school for the blind when she, astonishingly, went blind herself. The victim of a rare disease, she eventually learned to cope and starred in her own cable TV movie, which culminated in her speaking at MDRT. That launched her speaking career. Marvels Neville: “She could walk out and sit on a stool and you’d never realize she was blind.”

Not all hard-luck stories qualify for the platform. The folks at MDRT are very discerning. Overcoming adversity is a big draw, hut the speaker can’t have courted disaster. Joan Brock went blind by accident, stresses Neville. Not so the people who climb moun­tains and get into sticky situations because they’re reckless. One such, a Texas M.D., has never spoken at MDRT. The doctor sur­vived an incredible ordeal descending Everest in a storm that doomed seven other climbers in 1995. He clawed his way through the ice and lost his fingers. But what kind of man, asks Neville, leaves a wife and kids behind to take that kind of risk? Not the type you’ll find speaking at MDRT’s annual meeting.

Anything to do with children goes over big. Among last year’s highlights was an autistic twelve-year-old who had become a jazz pianist. He wrote the official theme song for the conference, which happened to be “Wow!” And who will ever forget the young Israeli and Palestinian boys who started from opposite sides of the stage? With each statement they took a step closer, until they came together center stage to thunderous applause.

What members get out of these speeches in the long term is harder to nail down. Kopcinski concedes that the impact can be hard to assess. So much depends on personality, readiness, timing. No one does formal studies, though there is ample feedback from those who’ve been struck by a speaker’s message. Kopcinski himself is a prime example. A few years back, he was sitting through a rehearsal listening to yet another speaker—half-listening, really, over the years he’d heard dozens and dozens— when his ears pricked up. He doesn’t even remember the name of the speaker. “He was one of those ‘now’s the time, you say you’re going to do it—do it’ speakers.” But something clicked. Before the speaker was even done, Kopcinski was out of the auditorium and on a phone in the hall, making arrangements to climb Grand Teton.

 

For anyone who has been in the audience of a motivational speech, Yes You Can! will present characters that are familiar. To those who have considered becoming speakers, there are ideas here on how to proceed. For most readers, there’s not enough here worth one’s time, unless you’re really curious. There are questions, but not answers, on why so many are paid so much for so little.

 

Steve Hopkins, December 18, 2006

 

 

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The recommendation rating for this book appeared

 in the January 2007 issue of Executive Times

 

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