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The Super Salesman Who Helped Win World War II

By Jack Malcolm / 5.30.2012 / 2 Comments

It will be ready by Tuesday

This past Memorial Day focused our attention on the sacrifices of the soldiers, sailors and airmen who won World War II. As the son of one of those warriors who fought in the air over Europe, I am as admiring and respectful of their achievements as anyone else. However, his B-17 bomber did not make itself, nor did the millions of tons of equipment, clothing and food that sustained them in their fight.

Those all came from the astounding ability of the American economy to convert itself to war production, as recounted in a fascinating new book, Freedom’s Forge, by Arthur Herman. That book is well worth reading for several reasons, but here I concentrate on one of the true heroes of the American war effort, Henry J. Kaiser. The two main purposes of business are to make things and to sell things, and Kaiser was a genius of both.

Kaiser’s sales skills were honed early in his life. A restless child, he quit school at 13 and was a traveling salesman at 16. His first business failed, and when he met his future wife at the age of 23, her well-off father agreed to the marriage only on the condition that he could save $1,000 and earn at least $125 a month. Kaiser took a train to Spokane Washington and began making the rounds of local businesses in search of a job. When that failed, he opted for a targeted approach and began pestering McGowan Bros. Hardware for a job. He showed up one day after a fire had swept through the business, and McGowan said, “Are you crazy? Can’t you see I’m ruined?” Kaiser offered to salvage what inventory he could and sell it. With the store back in business, within 10 months he was earning $250 a month and had bought a house for his bride.

He soon got into the roadbuilding business. One of his employees was on vacation when he overheard two men discussing a contract that was going to be awarded for a major road to Redding, California. He called Kaiser, and soon the two were on the train to the town. Unfortunately, during the trip they found out that the train they were on was an express which did not stop in Redding. Unfazed, Kaiser decided to jump from the train when it slowed down three miles outside of town. They showed up bloody and dirty but won a half million dollar contract. It probably did not hurt that when they were in the waiting room, the receptionist mentioned that her feet were cold. Kaiser went out and bought her an electric heater and never had trouble getting an appointment.

In later years Kaiser’s business grew and in partnership with five other companies built the Hoover Dam and other massive projects. By 1940, as America slowly and belatedly woke up from its isolationist dream that it could stay out of the war, Kaiser was already a famous and accomplished businessman.

1940 was a grim year for Western civilization. By the end of that year, only Great Britain held out in Europe, but they depended on a fragile lifeline of cargo ships which were being sunk three times as fast as they could be built. Existing shipyard capacity in the US was taken up by the Navy, in a belated effort to gear up for a war that the American public still believed they could avoid.

Kaiser saw an opportunity and decided to compete for a contract to build cargo ships, in spite of two minor (for him) disadvantages. The most obvious was that he had no shipyard and would be hard-pressed to tell you what the pointy end of a ship was called.

The second, ironically enough, was his reputation for superb salesmanship. Jesse Jones, one of the top gatekeepers in determining who would get the business, actually forbade his people from meeting with Kaiser alone, complaining that they would come back from meetings saying, “Mr. Kaiser is wonderful; he convinced me to give him my watch.” One secret of his sales technique was that he had excellent questioning skills. It was said that he would ask questions to get the response he wanted, and then say “That’s a great idea”.

Yet Kaiser was persistent, and had a mesmerizing ability to sell a vision and engender confidence in his ability to deliver. His motto seemed to be: “Overpromise and overdeliver.” He concentrated on the British, and brought their buyers to an empty patch of mud flats in California. The confused buyers asked, “Where are your shipyards?” Kaiser said, “Right here. Give me the contract and within months there will be a shipyard here and thousands of workers.”

When he won the contract in December 1940, Kaiser called one of his men, Clay Bedford, and said “You’re going to build me a shipyard.” Bedford simply replied, “Where?” They had to build not only the facilities for shipbuilding, but also housing for the thousands of workers who began streaming in from all parts of the country. Starting from the mud up, the yard laid the first keel just four months later. Although they had never heard of the term “thinking outside of the box”, Kaiser, his son Edgar, and Bedford, used their unfamiliarity with shipbuilding to their advantage and revolutionized the construction process.

Kaiser knew how to spot top talent and get the utmost effort from each. Bedford and Edgar ran competing shipyards and strove to outdo each other. At the start, it took 220 days to build a Liberty ship. Both shipyards soon managed to whittle that down to less than 80 days, but still the Germans were sinking them faster than they could be built. The military clamored for faster production. By November 1942, Bedford made a special effort and built and launched the Robert S. Peary in 4 days and 15 hours, and it sailed the seas until 1963. Although that was more of a stunt than anything, it was said that they were launching ships so fast that one lady arrived at the shipyard to christen a new ship, but it was launched before she got there. She was told, “Don’t worry, Ma’am—just wait here and another will be along in a few minutes.”

In just 56 short months, Kaiser’s shipyards produced 1,490 ships.

Kaiser also had an uncanny ability to perceive a need well in advance of most people. In 1940, while most Americans were deluding themselves that they could avoid war, he realized that magnesium was going to be a metal of strategic importance, so he built four plants when everyone said he was crazy, and magnesium was delivered when it was needed in huge quantities.

Henry J. Kaiser proved on a colossal scale that the ability to anticipate a need, overcome obstacles and sell the vision, and then to deliver on the promise—are qualities that not only win sales but can help win wars.

Clear thinking - Success

Dear Graduate: Your Learning Has Just Begun

By Jack Malcolm / 5.29.2012 / No Comment

Don’t put those away just yet

My daughter graduated last week from Wake Forest University, and even though no one asked me to give a commencement speech, here’s a message I would like to send to her and all the other 1.8 million students who have reached that proud milestone this year.

It’s just one simple message: don’t get out of the learning habit.

After four years of hard work and intensive study, it can be very tempting to put the books and tests away for good, kick back and decompress a little, and focus on the mechanics of your job (assuming you’re one of the fortunate ones who has one). But that would be a mistake.

Right now your capacity for learning is as high as it’s ever been, but that is an asset that can quickly be wasted. You have developed the habit of learning from your four years in school, and that’s a habit you don’t want to break. It’s kind of like physical conditioning; you know how hard it can be to get back into shape after you’ve let yourself go. It’s the same with learning. You know from experience that after summer vacation you need to kick-start your brain a little to get into peak mental condition for learning.

You and I both know people who brag that they never read books. Your own commencement speaker cited the statistic that 42% of college graduates never read a book after they get their diploma .As Mark Twain said, “the man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.”

What was important in Twain’s time is exponentially more important today. You need that capacity to learn because the reality is that you will probably work for a significant portion of your life in a profession that doesn’t even exist yet, probably in competition with smart people from countries whose names you would barely recognize.

Knowledge snowballs. There is a compounding effect to knowledge—the more you know, the easier it is to learn more, because you have a much more extensive network of ideas and associations that incoming information can stick to. That’s why time works in your favor; the more you learn at an early age, the faster you will learn and the more you will know as time goes on.

One of the world’s top experts on experts, K. Anders Ericcson, tells us that the majority of people in any occupation or professional field quickly reach a level of competence and then stop. Only a small percentage continue to keep learning year after year, and those gradually open a significant gap between themselves and others. Be one of those people. Never stop learning; never stop reading.

To keep the habit, set aside some time for reading and for study. Get interested in the world and read the paper. But don’t forget that you can also learn a lot from your work and daily life: pay attention, don’t be afraid to ask stupid questions, listen more than you talk, and don’t try to be the smartest person in the room. Keep a journal.

Besides the practical considerations, the drive to learn, to understand and to master, can be one of your greatest sources of satisfaction and personal motivation in the years to come. It will keep you young: Henry Ford said, “Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty.” Stay curious; don’t let what you know stand in the way of all there is to learn and appreciate.

Persuasive communication

Knowledge and Persuasion

By Jack Malcolm / 5.17.2012 / No Comment

It’s always half empty.

Last week I went on a little rant against those who tell us that in this Google Age it’s not important to stuff your head with facts. I showed how on having a deep well of knowledge to draw from is so critical for effective thinking. But what about persuasion? Compared to clear thinking and compelling communication, it would seem that having a lot of facts at your command would seem to be relatively less important. In this article, I’d like to show that depth of knowledge is a huge asset for persuasion as well.

Regular readers know that one of my key themes is that content is king. It’s wonderful to have a gift of gab and to know how to pull all the persuasive strings, but without a lot of facts at your immediate command, you can look like a fine pen that is running out of ink.

Unless you make a living as a writer, most of your persuasion is real time, so you’re not going to have time to look up the information you need to support your point. In a dialogue where two people are trying to influence each other, the one who has the necessary facts at their command when they need them is likeliest to prevail.

Have you ever seen someone deliver a slide presentation and look at the slides most of the time? They use them as a crutch and a memory aid for their “talk track”, and it’s obvious that they don’t have full mastery of the material. Yet, they’re trying to talk you into something based on that material. The content may be airtight, but yet it’s unconvincing; they come across as content mercenaries, fighting for someone else’s ideas.

If you’re a salesperson, it’s especially because knowledge is so readily available that you have to “add value” and that is in the form of proprietary knowledge. You are the one who knows how to diagnose needs (which require a much deeper knowledge and analysis than wants). The customer knows about his or her own business operations and processes, and they can look up and compare product specs easily enough, but you make a living with your special expertise that connects those two pools of knowledge.

Having a facile and fluent command of facts and detail has a strong subliminal effect in its own right. Knowledge is impressive. We admire those who have a deep grasp of their topic, who can pull up concrete and specific facts to support their arguments. On the flip side, we see this every political season, in which an inexperienced candidate is lambasted in the press for not knowing the name of a key foreign leader, for example.

Deep knowledge can also make your communication more compelling by adding specificity and concrete detail. It’s one thing to say that your product makes your customer’s business process more efficient; it’s far better to say, “We speed up the reconcilement process by 35%, which cuts an average of four days out of your accounts receivable.”

Want to impress an audience, especially one comprising senior level executives? Then tell them something new and be prepared to deep dive, both of which require you to know a lot. When you’re presenting to an audience, it’s often the detailed grasp you can demonstrate during the Q&A that will convince the listener. When I interviewed senior executives for my book on sales presentations, several of them told me that they like to “scratch beneath the surface” of the presentation to test the presenter’s depth of knowledge. If it’s a technical presentation, they may not personally have the knowledge to assess everything that’s told to them, so they use this tactic as a gauge of the presenter’s credibility.

There’s a cute story about the physicist Max Planck, who used to travel around Germany delivering physics lectures. One day his chauffeur made an interesting proposal: he said they should trade places at the next lecture, since he had heard the lecture so many times that he was sure he could deliver it word for word. Planck agreed, and the plan proceeded. Everything went perfectly, until the question and answer period, when a distinguished professor asked a difficult question about some esoteric detail in the lecture. The chauffeur, without skipping a beat, said: “Herr Professor, I am surprised that someone as knowledgeable as yourself would ask such a question. To prove how simple it is, I will let my driver answer it.”

Unlike Planck’s driver, you probably won’t have the luxury of someone sitting in the audience to bail you out, so you had better become that expert.

Clear thinking

Knowledge May Be Free, But It’s Not Worthless

By Jack Malcolm / 5.9.2012 / No Comment

I know!

A commentary by Bret Stephens in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal got me thinking about the importance of “rote knowledge” in today’s world. In his article, he laments the fact that graduates are coming out of college with vast knowledge gaps, because of the trendy idea in education that learning how to think is more important than cramming your head with facts.

Of course, this idea has been around a long time, but it’s even more deeply embedded in the popular imagination since we have ubiquitous access to the world’s information. We have Google if we need to look something up, and Siri can answer practically any question we have. The implication is that since knowledge is free, it is worthless.

The problem with that line of thinking is that it’s a false tradeoff: knowledge and effective thinking are not only not mutually exclusive, but critical thinking is impossible without knowledge. In other words, cramming your head with facts does not make you a worse thinker. In fact, “rote knowledge” can make you a better thinker, in so many ways. Here are just a few:

Better critical thinking: Although critical thinking is partly about evaluating the logic of someone’s argument, it’s also about being able to compare their view of reality to yours, and being able to generate alternative points or explanations. Facts fit into our brains in patterns, and those patterns help us to filter incoming information. Something rings true or false depending on how it interacts with the existing patterns in our minds. Richer patterns make for more reliable critical filters.

If you don’t have a deep well of knowledge at your command, anytime you hear or read something you have to take it at face value until you have a chance to look it up, and that takes time which you will not always have.

Learn faster: In this world of rapid and accelerating change, the capacity to learn is a crucial asset. But the rate of learning is dependent on how much you already know. It’s virtually impossible to learn anything “new” without connecting it to something you already know. It’s a snowball effect: the more you know, the faster you learn, and the faster you earn, and so on.

More innovative: Innovation doesn’t spring from ignorance. Knowledge is the raw material of innovation. It proceeds from adding to existing knowledge or making new connections between disparate ideas. More knowledge exponentially increases the possible connections.

Improve focus and attention: The discipline of studying and learning something in depth, of memorizing and of testing your knowledge strengthens your powers of attention and focus. This is something I’m personally experiencing, as I am embarked on a project to learn as much French as possible before my trip to Paris at the end of June.

Intuition and decision making: Even intuition benefits from knowledge. Indeed, expert intuition may be no more than rapid pattern recognition that goes on underneath our slower logical thinking processes. Chess masters don’t think any more steps ahead than mediocre players, according to those who have studied the source of their expertise. They also don’t run through huge numbers of possible moves like a supercomputer. Their minds don’t have to run through an endless series of bad moves in order to find a few good ones to choose from. Rather, they have deep stored databases of patterns and moves that they recognize; they can “see” where those patterns will lead and the top two or three alternatives come into their minds. They win through superior knowledge, not any superhuman skill at decision making.

Logical thinking: Knowledge even makes pure logic easier. In a well-known demonstration, psychologists like to test our logical thinking by showing four cards, with either a letter or a number showing, and ask you which cards you would have to turn over to prove or disprove the statement: “If a card has a vowel on one side, then it has an even number on the other side.” Most people get the answer wrong, and this is supposed to show our deficiencies in logic. Yet, when the same problem is posed in terms of a familiar real-life scenario, such as deciding whose ID to check to guard against underage drinking, almost everyone gets it right. In other words, existing knowledge makes it easier to follow the logic.

So there you have it, six ways I can think of, off the top of my head, how knowledge adds to good thinking. I’m sure I could have found more, if I wanted to look them up.

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