Selling Wisdom: The Elusive Quality

Des Moines, IA, “If I place two pieces of material the same size, shape, and form on an anvil, and one is made of granite, the other of leather, and then hit each with a hammer what will happen? The granite will shatter into pieces, precisely because it is hard. It is rigid, brittle and weak. The leather is barely dented, precisely because it is not hard. It is flexible, malleable, elastic, supple-it is tough.”

“And this is the quality of mind we are talking about here.”

The man behind the quote is Joe D. Batten, the tough-minded salesman of Tough-Minded Management, which just happens to be his message and the title of his classic volume on managerial improvement in the corporate world.

Joe Batten is to management development what Norman Vincent Peale has been to inspirational writing. He’s a pied piper, someone to exhort us all to self-improvement, to harnessing our utmost through attitude reform, and – by making us better individually – bringing about growth in the business organization.

Comparing Batten with the renowned Dr. Peale is no facile linkage. In fact, the forward to Expectations and Possibilities, the latest of Batten’s nine books, is written by Dr. Peale.

“Mr. Batten believes that the most important resource in life is people and that everyone needs to develop a clear and complete and rational system of expectations to set free the strength and power of the built-in resources which God has put into human life,” testified Dr. Peale.

Joe Batten has built a very successful enterprise of his own around his teachings. His 25-year-old firm, Batten, Batten, Hudson & Swab, headquartered in Des Moines, is one of the oldest and best known human resources development companies in the country.

“We have worked with about 80 percent of the Fortune 500,” he said in a recent interview with Personal Selling Power.

THE ROOTS OF TOUGHNESS

Perhaps the reason for Batten’s enduring success is the consistency with which he practices what he preaches; a blend of sophisticated management techniques with timeless verities on the vital importance of human development.

In his books, in interviews, in thousands of talks he has made, Batten’s own brand of ageless vitality comes across clearly.

“I’m a happy man,” he says in a time when few seem able and/or willing to say it. Batten, 56, grew up in the southern Iowa mining town of Olmitz, a town that has long since vanished. One of four children of a small store owner, he had what he calls “an upbringing of stern and rock-bound rectitude.”

“I’m a square,” he says with a candor he advocates so eloquently, “in every sense of the word.” In school he “majored in sports and girls.”

His vitality, then as now, made him a force to be reckoned with in the arena of sports-football, basketball, running and boxing. As a Marine in the South Pacific in World War II, Batten battered his way to fame in the ring, with 21 knockouts to his credit. And as busy as he is today, Batten still finds time to teach boxing privately in his backyard gym.

But Batten’s rise to fame wasn’t in the ring. In his classic Tough-Minded Management, still a strong seller worldwide more than a million copies and 18 years after its first publication in 1963, he lays the foundation of his ideas about management and human potential that have made him probably the best known name in the field.

In it, he hammers home the idea that people can change, can improve themselves through a plan of individual development. As they can change and better themselves, so can they better the organization they work for, to the good of all.

What is essential, he says, is a climate conducive to motivation; a plan, and goals, both personal and corporate, self-honesty, integrity, courage and wisdom.

BASIC TRUTHS

If enthusiasm is the essence of teaching, then it is little wonder Joe Batten is a master teacher. Unlike many other high-dollar consultants, his utter dedication to the philosophy he talks about is beyond question. And he has little time for the fads visited upon management as a field, seeing the bulk of them as of little or no value.

But those eternal truths like courage, logic, wisdom and integrity form the core of Batten’s thesis.

Here’s Joe Batten on candor: “The tough-minded manager does not bear witness to honesty simply in church or at company picnics. He plays the whole game honestly; candor, he knows, in personal day-to-day relationships is the only real way.”

And on wisdom: “…the real stuff of management – the underpinning of this book, in fact – is less tangible and less measurable. It is courage, firmness and candor, yes. Empathy, insight and other evidences of a feeling for people are requirements, too, and it should go without saying that we favor using the latest and most sophisticated management tools if they pay their way. But these are not all.

“The elusive quality, trait or attribute is wisdom.”

And that trait, Batten declares, spells the difference between those who make it close to the top and those who take the last step up.

And how would this eloquent speaker and writer define that elusive human quality?

“I myself believe wisdom to be a quality which must be developed to a substantial extent in the fiery furnace of experience (although quite a number of young people already have it) and must encompass a number of understandings about life and human nature.” He explains these understandings in Tough-Minded Management.

THE POWER OF IDEALISM

But Batten, despite an education that just misses his being “Dr. Batten,” is no ivory tower intellectual of the business world. His schooling, tempered by both his rough-hewn childhood and years of success in the competitive sphere of management training, has produced a happy marriage of the theoretical and the practical.

Over many years, this oracle of productivity has kept an eagle eye on the absolute necessity of results. In Beyond Management by Objectives, he puts it this way:

“The main difference between the successful and the unsuccessful person is not that the one is doing more than the other. It consists more precisely of what he is getting done and, perhaps more importantly, of the fact that these achievements are positive.”

And despite some naysayers to the contrary, he believes the achievements of everyone on the corporate ladder are measurable, up to and including the top rung.

A key difference between Joe Batten and many others in management training is Batten’s idealism. Batten is an idealist in an age when idealism is often considered an oddity.

His ideals, pounded out with fervor, are seen in his calls for faith, the importance he places on religious convictions, his rock-bound passionate belief in the improvability of the individual and of mankind.

High among those ideals is a belief in the free enterprise system. Batten sees the United States and the rest of the free world locked in a Herculean struggle with the Soviets and their allies. He has written: “The ideological, political, economic and social outgrowths of this clash are many and diverse; but, fundamentally, it is the individual dignity of man versus the faceless conformity of the collectivists.”

“We must make it clear,” he later explains, “by our everyday actions and reactions that we believe in the dignity of the individual and that the positive approach is not a catch phrase or a passing fad but a vital way of life.”

But for Joe Batten, recognition of individual dignity stops short of propping up every individual. And in a timely commentary on the American scene, he sees the present economic dilemma sparking “a great mobilization of resources, a strengthening of nerve, a firming up of resolve.”

“Whenever the country faces a situation squarely, it always comes back in a way that gets results.”

FOCUS ON SALES RESULTS

During the current slump, Batten sees a special challenge for sales personnel and opportunities for those who successfully shift from a passive stance to a strong “pro-active posture.” Salespeople, like others in American society, he notes, must “quit relying on external resources and begin looking towards internally generated expectations.” For Batten, this means a change “away from competing with others to competing with your own self-generated goals.”

Batten isn’t satisfied that there is enough thought being given to new and creative approaches to coping with the economic doldrums.

Overall, sales management during this period will have to adopt a strategy of “lean, clean and mean goals,” said Batten. “A system of profitability accounting rather than after the fact, historical or cost accounting.”

“Many sales managers spend much time reviewing how many calls their people have made, how many hours they have worked, how much money they have spent. The tough-minded manager of the eighties will say: “Look, we work toward these agreed upon objectives; we are committed to them. The thing I want you to report is exactly what you’re accomplishing every day or week. That is discernibly moving toward those objectives. Don’t give me activity, focus on results.”

By this change of focus, both the manager and the salesperson can concentrate their time and energies on sales and move away from the game of make-work reporting, covering up problems or hiding behind them.

What about the individual salesperson who is out there fighting decreasing odds? What would Batten recommend in these tough times?

“We have to look at what makes that person get off the edge of the bed each morning, go out and get the job done. There is a four letter word called H-O-P-E.

“I wrote the book, Expectations and Possibilities, to provide a whole pattern or lifestyle of hope. Out of that comes everything. If we lose hope, we lose everything.”

Of course, acquiring that trait – and keeping it in very tight times – isn’t always easy. Can it be instilled (by a sales manager) or self-acquired?

“No way,” he contends. “You can’t go out and look at a patch of land and say: ‘I’ll instill a garden.’ You’ve got to plant the seeds, water them, fertilize them and cultivate the soil. The better the job you do the finer, the better and more beautiful your garden.”

Too often, Batten explains, salespeople think of themselves as part of the current into which they have been thrown. “If you think that way, you may have a vague, hardly recognizable feeling of resentment, of lethargy. You might cover it up with a lot of aggressive drive and action.”

This negative thinking pattern often leads to “rapid burnout,” said Batten, “and leaves salespeople empty, listless and ready to give up quickly.”

“On the other hand, if you get up in the morning and feel, “I had a hand in that; I had involvement; I made these commitments because these goals are part of my expectation; that way you’ll function all day in a significantly different way.”

Batten, who has appeared in many sales training films (Dartnell), describes what he termed a key concept to sales growth: The GROWTH acronym.

“I’ve mentioned it in many speeches around the world. It’s simple. The ‘G’ stands for goals and vision; the ‘R’ for realistic assessment of strengths, the ‘O’ for openness and vulnerability. The ‘W’ stands for a sense of wonder that I think is so crucial. The ‘T’ stands for tough-minded expectations, and the ‘H’ stands for hope.

“Here are all the answers a salesperson needs in order to understand personal growth.”

He might have added that, in growing, one lives a richer life. That sounds like Joe Batten, and so does this, because it comes straight from his heart; “I will make the lives of others richer by the richness of my own.”