Path to the Top : Telling How to Succeed Is Big Business
With an unswerving gaze and convictions as firm as his handshake, W. Clement Stone was the kind of American businessman who had no trouble motivating employees to build his Combined International Corp. into a $925-million insurance company.
“Don’t say ‘if things work out’-- they will work out!” declared the 83-year-old Chicagoan, now retired but still a jaunty figure in his trademark polka dot bow ties and pencil-thin mustache.
But in 30 years, Stone never succeeded in wringing a profit from Success magazine, which he launched to spread his gospel that a positive mental attitude can create a business success from the most equivocal American clay.
A Turnaround Attempt
After Stone’s costly failure, it surprised some in the New York publishing world when Hal Publications Inc. announced that it would buy a one-half share of the magazine, change its focus and triple its editorial budget, in a turnaround attempt expected to take more than a year. But executives of Hal Publications Inc. insist that Success will be proved the right product at the right time.
“Americans, and particularly those of the baby-boom generation, want to know everything about business success, and how they can achieve it,” said James B. Horton, chief executive of Hal Publications and publisher of Success. “Today ambition is OK, and telling people how they can succeed is big business.”
Hal Publication’s gamble is one sign of the way the success business has boomed.
Pop business-advice books have topped the best-seller lists for two years, and many other companies have cashed in by selling magazines, audio cassettes, seminars, videotapes and even computer programs that promise to chart the tortuous path to the top.
Market’s Potential
One of the first to recognize the market’s potential has parlayed early gains into a business-advice mini-empire. Management consultant Thomas J. Peters, co-author of business-blockbuster “In Search of Excellence,” today runs from Palo Alto a $4-million-a-year partnership that packages business advice in speeches, audiocassette and videotapes, personalized diaries and three-day seminars that typically cost $25,000 for an average-sized company.
Observers see several causes for the public’s growing appetite for business advice. They point to Americans’ time-honored love of self-help efforts, concern about competition from the Japanese and others abroad, and the nation’s more conservative tilt.
And they note that the huge baby-boom generation has matured into its fourth decade and the age of ambition.
Baby boomers are eager for advice partly from an anxiety over the competition they face from their peers. “There are so many millions of them competing for the same goals; that’s got to make them anxious and more determined to succeed,” said Scott DeGarmo, editor of the new Success.
The fever for success has bred an adulation of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial thinking. This adulation is witnessed in a steady increase in the number of U.S. business start-ups, which last year grew to a record 600,400, up 11% from 1980, according to Dun & Bradstreet Inc.
The new generation’s ambition is somewhat different from the old. Opinion researchers have found that today’s strivers are somewhat less loyal to their companies, and more willing to step over the bodies of friends on their way to the top.
Giving Up Friends
For instance, the view that success comes only at the expense of others is held by nearly twice as many 18-to-34 year olds as older persons, said SRI International Inc. of Palo Alto. The conviction that success requires giving up at least some friends is held by 50% more 18-to-34 year olds than by persons over 34, the research organization group found in opinion sampling.
Generally, business advice is sold today in two varieties--the inspirational strain offered by such traditional practitioners as Stone and Dale Carnegie, and a more recent brand that tells in highly specific terms how to manage a company, dress and get along with superiors and subordinates. Michael Korda, a business-book author and editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster Inc., said the dispensing of such practical advice has been necessary since most U.S. colleges ceased teaching social skills in the 1960s.
“They simply don’t teach young people how to dress and behave and get along with their elders,” Korda said. “You may think that such a goal is worthwhile or contemptible, but somebody’s got to teach it to young people if the middle class is going to be replenished with each generation.”
He said it is possible for a young woman to reach adulthood “without ever meeting anybody with traditional male chauvinist attitudes. If she goes to work her first day at Nynex (the telephone company for the northeast U.S.) or IBM or some other company and discovers that her boss is such a person, what’s she going to do?”
Hal Publications’ strategy is to blend such advice with Stone’s inspirational messages in the magazine, which took on its new look in last September’s issue. In recent issues, along with Stone’s column and articles on salesmanship, the magazine has carried guides to dealing with office intrigue, learning to apologize to subordinates, and corporate manners.
It has carried articles on business successes and failures (computer maker Adam Osborne among them), a column by “One Minute Manager” co-author Kenneth H. Blanchard, excerpts from Mark McCormick’s best seller “What They Didn’t Teach You at Harvard Business School,” and neo-conservative Irving Kristol’s ruminations on how capitalism “became a clean word again.”
Monogrammed Shirts
In an article on dress, for example, Korda instructs that American gentlemen do not wear monogrammed shirts or monogrammed underwear, Gucci loafers or aviator sunglasses “unless actually piloting a plane.”
While the magazine’s how-to focus may be unique, several dozen magazines today carry at least some articles about people who have succeeded in business and their thoughts on how success is achieved.
Among them are a crop of magazines that have emerged since the late 1970s, such as Inc., Venture, Wealth, Black Enterprise, Entrepreneur and Hal Publications’ two-year-old Working Woman. Portraits of success also abound in the myriad regional business magazines such as California Business and the new Manhattan Inc. and in magazines that are not focused on business.
“When we launched Inc. a lot of people thought the idea was just dumb,” said Bo Burlingham, executive editor of Inc., which is directed at presidents of small and medium-sized companies. “Now everybody’s trying to tap into the entrepreneurial market, including magazines like Esquire and New York.”
Yet some are skeptical that Success offers the right formula. Inc., which grew to a circulation of 700,000 in five years, instructs on how others have managed young corporations but “tries not to be too prescriptive,” said Burlingham. “I don’t know if there are any easy answers to these management problems.”
Ann Powell, managing editor of Savvy, said her magazine gives professional women a diet of success stories and advice on investments but shies from tips on how to succeed. “We think it belittles the reader,” she said. Powell fears such an approach will turn off readers.
Magazine Denounced
Success magazine’s outlook has been faulted on more general grounds as well. Success Editor DeGarmo tells of a reviewer in a Canadian newspaper who denounced the magazine as embodying “the most vulgar aspects of commercialism.”
DeGarmo acknowledges that corporate rung-climbing and managing a company are slippery problems that are not likely to be solved with advice from a magazine. But he contends that the magazine can at least provide part of the answer, and can also motivate and make readers feel better about their pursuit of success.
“People read these magazines and it validates their attitudes,” he said.
Sales figures suggest that clearly someone finds value in such magazines and in the other products that package business advice.
Many Best Sellers
Pop business advice books have ranked high on best-seller lists for two years. There are in print almost 4 million hardback and paperback copies of “In Search of Excellence,” and 700,000 of “The One-Minute Manager,” by Kenneth Blanchard and Spencer Johnson.
More than a million copies have been printed of Lee A. Iacocca’s best-selling autobiography, “Iacocca,” which currently tops the New York Times’ best-seller list. While Iacocca’s book is not strictly a business advice book, it clearly appeals to the same ambitious readers looking for inspiration.
Publishers and booksellers won’t disclose sales from the business-book category, but industry officials estimate sales totaled more than $600 million in 1983, and that sales of non-technical business books are growing by 20% a year.
Demand May Fall Off
Publishers are keenly aware that demand for such books may fall off abruptly--as has happened recently in the computer-book and celebrity fitness book categories. But they don’t see it happening anytime soon.
Harriet Rubin, editor of business books for Harper & Row, predicts that in the wake of Iacocca’s success, “this will be the year” of books about the strivings and successes of chief executives. Adds Stuart Applebaum, a vice president of Bantam Books: “There are lots of people at their legal pads, typewriters and word processors grinding away even as we speak.”
In the last year and a half, five companies have begun offering business advice in software programs for small computers.
Users of the “Sales Edge,” “Management Edge” and other programs of Human Edge Software Corp., of Palo Alto, type into the computer descriptions of a managerial or sales problem, and the computer, relying on programmed information, spits out a lengthy narrative describing the best way to handle the person or problem.
Pscyh Out the Target
The “Sales Edge,” for example, is programmed to psych out the man or woman who is a salesman’s target. The user types in a description of the target’s personality traits; the program offers advice on whether the salesman should be, for instance, more aggressive or less aggressive in trying to book the sale.
“It’s a solution for a civilization that has moved past the industrial economy to a managerial one,” said Human Edge President Jim Johnson, a psychologist who added that the company has sold 45,000 of the programs.
The biggest business-advice hits in audiocassette form are inspirational messages, particularly those designed for salesmen.
Vic Conant, vice president of Nightingale-Conant Corp. of Chicago, said his 20-year-old company’s business grew slowly until the last five years, when it “skyrocketed” with greater public use of cassette tapes.
Sales Grew 50%
He said company sales grew by nearly 50%, to $20 million, in 1984, because of growing use of cassettes in autos and portable tape players, and the growth of interest in business subjects.
“It’s kind of astounded us, actually,” Conant said. “In the days of Clem Stone and Norman Vincent Peale this was a pretty slow-moving business.”
He said the company’s best customers seem to be businessmen who need regular doses of inspiration, and like to administer it to themselves as they drive from place to place.
The company’s biggest hit has been super-salesman Dennis Waitley’s “The Psychology of Winning,” which consists of 10 cassettes sold for $50. It has brought Nightingale-Conant about $16 million in revenues over the last seven years, Conant said.
Nightingale-Conant also offers psychologist Dr. Joyce Brothers’ “Success Is a State of Mind”; executive Mary Cunningham’s “Strategies for Personal and Business Growth,” and preacher Dr. Robert H. Schuller’s “Possibility Thinking”.
This year Conant will begin sales in such department stores as Saks Fifth Avenue, May Co. and Marshall Fields.
Book and stationery stores have begun carrying cassettes on business and other self-help topics. The Waldenbooks chain, for example, began carrying tapes in the last year and a half and, with sales strong, has increased its inventory to 29 titles, a spokesman said.
Chief executives want inspiration, too, and are willing to pay for it. Joseph R. Mancuso, president of the Center for Entrepreneurial Management in New York, said the last two years have seen a “groundswell” of interest in three-day management training seminars his company offers for $1,650.
As much as anything, these chief executives want “stirring talks on how others have made it--they’re just like anybody else,” Mancuso said.
Such demand has sparked a rise in the number of management experts who offer their services as speakers or offer general performance advice at corporations. This subindustry has countless participants and is growing faster than anyone can count, its members say.
“Basically, it consists of anyone who thinks he knows anything about management, and any academic who’s looking to pick up a few extra dollars,” said Ned Klumph, who writes a management newsletter, “Room at the Top,” from Cherry Hill, N.J.
Among the most celebrated of advice-dispensers is Thomas Peters, of “In Search of Excellence,” who is flooded with 15 times as many requests for appearances as he can oblige, associates say. Among the companies eager for his advice is American Telephone & Telegraph Co., which distributed dozens of copies of his book on orders from Chairman Charles L. Brown.
