Chapter 4: Introducing 2,000 Percent Solutions

Chapter 4

Introducing 2,000 Percent Solutions

 

The hardest tumble a man can make is to fall over his own bluff.

— Ambrose Bierce

Booked Up

Read more novels and fewer business books.

— Tom Peters

By early 1998, The Future Before Its Time had gone from being a vague desire to write a book into a long manuscript on which Carol Coles, Robert Metz, and I had lavished much wordsmithing. To us, this material was obviously so good that every publisher in the world would soon be fighting over it. We coauthors were all very pleased with the results.

We asked Robert Metz to suggest how we might proceed with our manuscript. He said that there was one book agency that could turn our championship effort into an instant best seller. Robert didn’t know anyone there, but like the intrepid reporter he had always been, he called and made a contact. We received from them a faxed form to fill out in order to be considered for representation. Robert felt that he couldn’t answer most of the questions, and I agreed to take on the task. Soon, I was stymied, too. Robert called back for more direction and was told to just do the best we could.

Eventually our 37 pages of answers were ready to go. We expectantly sent the answers off. We waited for weeks. Nothing happened.

When Robert called to check, his contact sheepishly revealed that the agency couldn’t represent us. The contact told Robert they had another author under contract who was working on a virtually identical book. Since Robert and I are both lawyers, we could understand the need to avoid a conflict of interest. We were glad that we had been in contact with such a reputable agency. Of course, we still haven’t figured out what that virtually identical to ours book was. Perhaps it was just a proposal that didn’t sell.

Where should we go from there? Robert explained that the publishing business had changed a lot in the prior decade. Before many mergers, even tiny publishers had tried to have full list of books in every category. But with the shrinking number of publishers, many companies had chopped out business books. As a result, there were now only a handful of places where business books like ours ever found a home. Although each of these publishers would accept submissions directly from us, Robert felt that we would do better if we could arrange an introduction.

Unfortunately, all of Robert’s former editors were no longer doing business books and could not help us. One of our clients was a business book publisher, and a contact through that client had previously led to a publishing contract. We felt that route would be a good one to follow again. I also knew some successful business book authors and contacted them to see if they could introduce me to a publisher. Several were helpful, but one person was extremely so. He recommended his publisher very highly and gave me the contact information for all of the right people.

I called the person our friend had recommended, and she indicated that she was the wrong person to call. But she put me through to the correct person who was duly impressed by my mention of the man who sent me: His book was their featured title for the current catalog. Again, a long list of questions to answer was faxed to me. I found that I could reuse some of the answers I had written for the agency that had turned us down.

The Joy of Acceptance

What we anticipate seldom occurs; what we least expected generally happens.

— Benjamin Disraeli

Within weeks, we had a contract, an advance check, and brimming confidence that the worst was past. After all, we had a great idea, a finished manuscript, and a publisher!

We soon learned that publishers are often very tactful while wooing authors. Their reservations are shared after you cash the advance check. Our book needed work: It needed a different title, a different structure, and better writing. Other than that, we were all done. And, by the way, we had insisted that the book come out on a fast schedule, which meant that we had little time to respond; that part was our fault.

We were happy to comply. While Carol and I were off doing other things, Robert began proposing titles and sending over revised chapters. Robert’s ideas for a title went over well; he came up with the idea of The 2,000 Percent Solution, an ironic play on the reference to Sherlock Holmes’s use of injected cocaine (a 7 percent solution) in The Sign of Four (Penguin Classics, 2001) by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. My own contribution was far more modest: adding the word “exponential” to the subtitle.

But our draft chapters kept coming back with clear encouragement to rewrite the whole thing. We were also falling behind the publication schedule. Robert, Carol, and I had a meeting with our development editor, and I began to see what she wanted. I started writing the drafts while Robert and Carol improved them. But the process was slow. We fell further behind.

Finally, it became clear that we had two weeks to pull the project out. Robert came to live in a hotel near our offices while the two of us settled in to write night and day. A difficulty of distance had slowed our earlier progress. Robert had a Mac and we had PCs. The different types of machines didn’t exchange files very well over the Internet in those days. In our offices, we kept PCs humming. At first, Robert would rewrite what I wrote, then I would rewrite what he wrote, while Carol improved both of our work. But time grew short, and the last 30,000 words were written by me in a period of about a day and a half with no time for anyone to edit or rewrite them.

Exhausted, we turned the manuscript in and crossed our fingers. Our publisher kindly agreed to accept the manuscript if we didn’t mind a heavy editing. We welcomed a heavy editing!

The book went into production. Carol and I headed off for a much needed vacation. As a last minute thought, we shipped off a copy to Peter Drucker for his comments.

Peter Drucker Becomes Our Coauthor

Let us be of good cheer,

remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never come.

— James Russell Lowell

After our vacation was planned for Hawaii, Carol and I had also scheduled a day to see Peter Drucker in Claremont, California, on our way to the islands. I liked to stop off in California on my way to Hawaii whenever possible because my parents, sister, and a nephew lived there. The distance between Peter’s house and my parent’s house was about 35 miles. We would have dinner in San Bernardino after a day with Peter.

Feeling relaxed and confident to have the book behind us, we looked forward to our day with Peter. But we were in for a surprise: Peter had been studying our manuscript for weeks and wasn’t at all happy with what he had seen.

“The beginning is all wrong,” he said. “If you don’t change it, this book will be a flop.”

Realizing that our publisher had been incredibly accommodating throughout the publication process, we politely told Peter that it was too late to make changes. The book was already being typeset.

Peter waved our objections aside. “Tell them I said to change it, and they will,” commented Peter confidently. He had, after all, sold more business books than any other author in history.

“What do we change it to?” we asked with concern.

“I’m not very good at editing,” he replied. “I’m better at writing: Here’s how I would write it.”

We started taking down notes as fast as we could as he dictated hundreds of words to open the book, most of which ended up in the Foreword in paraphrased form. Wanting to be fair to Peter, we asked him if he wanted to be credited as the author of the material. He waved that off: “I never write forewords or introductions, except for my own books.” But he did for us without taking any credit, and we are very grateful.

As Peter expected, our editor said that she would accept the new material if we got it to her within 48 hours. While Carol enjoyed the pleasures of our Hawaiian resort, I spent most of the next two days writing, rewriting, and second-guessing myself in the business office by pounding away on a rented computer. Carol stopped by every few hours to keep my morale up and to check that what I was writing was consistent with what Peter had directed us to do. Finally, the attachment was off in an e-mail and had been received in New York. Whew!

Here are some of the gems based on what Peter dictated that made it into the book:

• “Unlike most business books, The 2,000 Percent Solution is primarily about what to do differently rather than how to do something better than you do it today. Its purpose is to focus your attention on important tasks that your organization should be, but probably is not, working on now.”

• “The book’s fundamental premise is that no matter how successful your organization is, it is performing way below its easily achievable potential. If your organization is like most, it is probably functioning below average in many important activities.”

• “Complacency is the primary reason for this frequent, significant gap between potential and achievement.… At best, complacency causes you to be satisfied with far less than your personal and organizational best. If your company is not accelerating its rate of improvement, you are probably resting on your laurels …. Complacency also keeps you from seeing and acting on your organization’s best opportunities.… At worst, complacency fools you into falling behind others, triggering predictable crises.”

• “This book has a serious and important purpose: to make you and your organization vastly more successful by having you ask and answer new questions.”

• “Of all the things you do now, how do you know what works for you? Where is complacency costing you the most in light of what you could accomplish? What do you need to know and do that is different from and more successful than what you know and do now? No matter how successful you are in what you do, how can you improve a lot where it will be worth a great deal?”

• “The 2,000 Percent Solution has another important meaning for you and your organization. It contains a new thought process to help you achieve large benefits that can be applied to a broad range of issues, both organizational and personal. In essence, you have an opportunity to adopt a way of thinking that can help you in everything that you do. Instead of adding specialized knowledge that fragments your organization, The 2,000 Percent Solution will add valuable thinking that will unify and direct your organization into new and more effective ways of operating.”

• “A call to set objectives and plans to achieve well beyond the best of what someone will soon implement…. A call to go for the maximum result that can be achieved in your most important activities with reasonable risk and resources — always much greater than merely exceeding tomorrow’s best practice….”

I’m sure now you can see why I always tell people that if they find any good writing in The 2,000 Percent Solution, it must have been inspired by someone who helped us with the manuscript who has a better way with words than I do.

Busting Stalls and Repeating Seven Steps

Never confuse movement with action.

Ernest Hemingway

—       

I’ve learned never to assume that people have read and remembered what is in other books I’ve written. Since I would like you grasp and use the key lessons in The 2,000 Percent Solution, this section will give you the basics. If you haven’t already read the book, I hope the information in this section will encourage you to take a look for yourself. If you have read it, I hope this overview will encourage you to reread it.

The 2,000 Percent Solution is dense enough with concepts and directions to be two books. However, we didn’t want to do separate books because we were concerned that if we wrote the material as two books, many people would never get the total message. You need to apply all of the information in order to successfully create 2,000 percent solutions, ways of accomplishing 20 times as much with the same time, effort, and resources.

Here’s a metaphor to help you understand the book’s content and structure: In our neighborhood, a house stood empty for several years and became an eyesore. The owner was satisfied to live elsewhere and let the house fall apart. He was a rich doctor who didn’t care enough about the money he could have gained by renting the house to bother with that option. As a result, the doctor was stuck with property he didn’t need and had developed a habit of ignoring. That’s what we call a “stall,” a bad habit that delays progress.

Finally, a new owner bought the property, bulldozed the old house, and flattened the now-empty lot. He had cleared the way of the obstacles to making a lovely home and yard. That’s what we call “stallbusting.” The prior owner’s habit could no longer exist.

With everything about the property now open for change, the new owner built a lovely home that took best advantage of the property’s qualities. In the process, a home was created that could easily house a large family and lots of guests for a party. By making the location suitable for habitation, the new owner created a better way of using the lot. He had created a 100 percent solution by building a home in the usual way. If instead he had built that new home with 1/20 the time, effort, and resources of a usual home, he would have created a 2,000 percent solution. That result might have been accomplished by moving and repairing a lovely home scheduled for demolition to make way for a new road.

In part one of The 2,000 Percent Solution, you can learn about how bad habits keep individuals and organizations from accomplishing their potential. What’s the problem? Our habits are so ingrained that we usually don’t notice that we have them. Otherwise we would get little accomplished as we endlessly second-guessed ourselves about what to focus on and do next. So habits do have positive potential.

The most common bad habits that stall progress are based on blindly following traditions that no longer apply; being closed to new information that’s valid; misunderstanding what’s going on because of a preconception; avoiding unattractive situations and places; assuming that you are understood when you aren’t; involving more people and steps into processes than are absolutely necessary; and putting off required actions. In the book we call these bad habits “stalls” and name these most common bad habits as tradition, disbelief, misconception, unattractiveness, communications, bureaucratic, and procrastination stalls.

One chapter is devoted to each stall. Much of each chapter is intended to help you spot such stalls in yourself and others. Then we provide possible solutions, which we call “stallbusters” (a humorous allusion to the popular movie Ghostbusters). More importantly, we describe thought processes that will help you unravel the cause of your stall and pick a better habit to build. For example, in dealing with tradition stalls, it’s a good idea to find out what the original purpose was for the activity. Then check to see if that’s still the right purpose. If it isn’t, pick a better purpose and make that a new tradition. Design the activities required to accomplish the purposes of the new or the old tradition (when that should be continued).

Most people find the first part of the book to be fun, easy to follow, and not overly hard to apply. I’ve been tempted to write a sequel to part one that would address more stalls and go into more detail. But so far the closest I’ve come is to create a teleseminar called “Stop Stalling” with a lightly edited transcript based on the recording.

Hopefully, the first part of the book will direct you to overcome the bad habits that waste so much of your time now. With those bad habits reduced in their harmful effects, you are now ready to look at the potential to create 20 times the results.

The second part of the book addresses making a 2,000 percent solution, the subject referred to in the book’s title. A 2,000 percent solution is simply any way that you can accomplish 20 times as much with the same time, effort, and resources. In practice, this accomplishment might mean using the same time and resources and getting 20 times the results. Or you might accomplish the same results in 1/20 the time and with 1/20 the resources. Any combination of spending less time and resources that also boosts your total output can also be a 2,000 percent solution. For example, if you accomplish a total result that’s 5 times as large in 25 percent of the time, that’s a 2,000 percent solution.

In part two, we describe an eight-step process that organizes your thinking to accomplish such 2,000 percent solutions. The steps are designed to help you access your most helpful memories as well as add new information that will improve your thinking. The 8 steps are:

1. Understand the importance of measuring performance. (Otherwise you cannot know whether you are improving.)

2. Decide what to measure. (Focus on the causes of greater performance.)

3. Identify the future best practice and measure it. (What will best-in-the-world performance probably look like in five years?)

4. Implement beyond the future best practice. (Combine cutting-edge practices that no one else has ever combined before.)

5. Identify the theoretical (or ideal) best practice. (This kind of “best practice” is the best anyone will be able to perform the task over the next five years by drawing constructively on the most powerful human emotions, instincts, and preferences.)

6. Approach as close as you can to the theoretical (or ideal) best practice. (Shoot for perfection around the simplest possible model of employing human behavior.)

7. Identify the right people and provide the right motivation. (Establish conditions under which the change can succeed.)

8. Repeat steps 1-7 endlessly. (This is the most important point because you will have only scratched the improvement surface with your first 2,000 percent solution.)

Our biggest challenges in leading people successfully through the eight steps are to get them to realize how little they know about what tomorrow’s cutting-edge practices are going to be, how people routinely do something similar in virtually perfect ways very rapidly, and why it’s critical to keep repeating the process.

Of those lessons, repeating the process is the most important and least appreciated point. Here’s why repetition is important: Like all new habits, you build skill with regular use. Until you’ve repeated this process several times and taught someone else, you won’t make this a new habit. You may achieve a 2,000 percent solution, but the potential benefits you’ve left behind when you stop developing the habit are enormously larger than any gain you get from the first time through.

Telling the Story

A good storyteller is a person who has a good memory

 and hopes other people don’t.

— Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb

Having heard that authors go on book tours when their books are published, we naturally planned to have the granddaddy of all book tours for our “breakthrough” book. At the suggestion of our publisher, we hired a publicist to schedule interviews for us over a period of eight months. We liked the fact that his approach featured tying the book back to the availability of our consulting services to help people create 2,000 percent solutions, even though our intent had been to create a book and an approach that people could easily execute on their own.

The tour was scheduled to begin right after the publication date in January 1999. I would visit more than 30 cities during a period of four months. The locations were clustered to allow for efficiency in travel but did require me to cross the country several times. Since it was winter, I would also have to deal with storms, delays, and other weather-related challenges.

In addition, we had been in contact with local CEO organizations across the country and arranged to speak at many events sponsored by such groups. Dozens of groups invited me to speak when I was in their areas. I also scheduled appointments with clients in each area so I could tell them about the book.

Carol agreed to join me for trips to Atlanta and Miami. Robert agreed to be available for New York where he lives.

Early on, we caught a big break when CNBC agreed to interview Robert about the book. One of the hosts of that business television network, Bill Griffeth, was a former colleague of Robert’s from FNN (Financial News Network, one of the predecessor networks for CNBC) days. It was a thrill to sit huddled around the television set with the whole company watching Robert’s excellent interview. We had the computer on at the same time and enjoyed watching the book rapidly climb up the ranks on Amazon.com before, during, and after the interview.

Our publicist advised us that we would need to have a local slant on our book to create media interest. To meet that need, we did a lot of calculations to identify who the high- and low-performing local companies had been in each locale that I would be visiting.

I soon found that reporters had virtually no interest in our book, but they usually needed help with stories they were already working on about local companies. Give them some good information and quotes about those companies, and our book would at least get a mention. This approach led to some unusual interviews such as discussing the weaknesses of the ambulance services in Denver and whether the Mirage hotel and casino in Las Vegas had been a good investment. I had to be prepared for anything and everything. Reporters expected me to know everything about their area.

A second thing I learned is that many reporters lacked basic knowledge of business, economics, and financial markets. I met a lot of English majors who were working day jobs in business reporting hoping to pay the bills while writing the great American novel at night. Typically, they wouldn’t have met with me at all except that my publicist was persuasive in promising that I would deliver whatever they were looking for. Those promises kept my staff and me quite busy for the next four months. We had to become free consultants to reporters in order to tell our story.

Another lesson came when I visited book stores in the cities where I was touring: In many cases, there was not a copy of our book to be found! I began to wonder what point there was in visiting so many places when the book wasn’t available locally.

To add injury to insult, one day a BMW rear-ended my rental car at high speed on an otherwise empty road as the driver turned his head this way and that to speak to his passengers. I was in pain from whiplash for the next six months. My doctor told me to stop traveling and it would get better. Right.

Gradually it began to dawn on me that while a large book tour sounded good, it wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be. A low point came when Steve Wynn, the future casino billionaire, tracked me down by telephone to have a long discussion about his business practices based on an article that I was quoted in that morning. Mr. Wynn worked out on a treadmill; I could hear his footfalls and puffing as he tried to persuade me that I was wrong. Meanwhile, I had the first of two interviews for that morning to reach in a few minutes. It was frustrating, to say the least.

Meeting the CEOs in person, however, proved to be a pleasant surprise. I was typically allowed two to four hours to provide a workshop based on the book, which gave me time to teach them the main concepts in the book (after correctly assuming they hadn’t yet read The 2,000 Percent Solution). While some of the sessions had as few as ten CEOs, others featured over a hundred. Giving so many of these workshops allowed me to find out what material they liked best and understood the most easily, and how much they could accomplish in such a short workshop. With that experience, the workshops kept getting better and better. Those results made me wish that I had organized the whole trip to only do workshops and had skipped the media part of the journey.

An unexpected benefit for me, although Peter Drucker had told us it would occur, was that I began to understand the content of The 2,000 Percent Solution in a new way. In that new understanding, I realized that the book’s basic point was that we each know how to organize things to perfection in some areas for individuals and groups, but we don’t think of those previously observed models when trying to work on a particular task. Open up the mental pathways to those perfect experiences, and great things quickly follow. I was particularly impressed by the advantage of carrying that message in a larger group: As the CEOs shared with one another their problems and solutions, their observations sparked more understanding among the other CEOs. There seemed to be a cumulative learning process that such a group could provide that could not be duplicated in individual tutorials or solitary learning.

Client Reactions to the Book Tour

A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.

— Winston Churchill

Never before had so many clients seen me so often in their offices. Many of our clients work in corporate headquarters far from the financial centers. They were accustomed to visiting me in Boston when there to speak to investors or while in New York as we worked on projects together. Suddenly, here I was coming to places like Denver, Miami, Phoenix, Montreal, Las Vegas, Minneapolis, Houston, and Detroit.

Naturally, clients were curious about what brought me to their town. Business book tours were new to most of our clients. Most had hired us because of our skill and experience in corporate strategy and finance, not because we had written books about creating 2,000 percent solutions. Many clients had not been to any of the 400 Year Project meetings, so these meetings during the book tour provided an introduction to that work for some.

There was a distinct look of amusement in most of their eyes as I recounted what had been going on and delivered an inscribed, autographed copy of the book. I can only assume that many were thinking, “Has he lost his mind?” But all were too polite to say so. Then they looked downright relieved when I noted that they could get an overview of the book in 15 minutes by reading the first paragraph of each chapter and glancing at the questions at the end of any chapters that interested them. I suspect that some feared that I would be calling back to discuss every page in the book until I provided those time-saving instructions.

Turning back to their situations and needs, it was clear that they had no immediate need at the time to talk to me about consulting projects. After all, I had asked for the meeting. They would have picked up the telephone and called if they felt a need to talk or meet. I wasn’t sure that I had enhanced any client relationships in the process, but I certainly enjoyed seeing their offices and meeting some of their colleagues. However, I decided I wouldn’t ask for client meetings when I was out promoting books in the future.

Waiting for Godot

Everything comes to him who waits — among other things, death.

— Francis Herbert Bradley

We received a lot of advice about how to successfully launch a book. I spent time discussing the subject with friends who had written business best sellers. I also read interviews with best-selling business authors about what they felt had contributed to their success. Members of the 400 Year Project steering committee also had ideas about how to get the word out.

Clearly, everyone had an idea for how to get someone else interested … but no one seemed to want to take the 2,000 percent solution process into his or her own organizations or personal life. That reaction should have told us something. But we were so caught up with the advice for attracting others that was so enthusiastically given to us that we didn’t notice that the well of enthusiasm for our work wasn’t very deep.

A common piece of advice was to get advance copies out to as many decision leaders and influencers, such as CEOs of major companies, authors, media figures, reviewers, and social leaders, as possible. Having heard that advice very often, we took the direction seriously. Thousands of advance copies and autographed versions of the first printing poured out of our office like a hundred year flood. Federal Express probably had a record year based on our heavy air freight volume.

We waited. We waited some more. Then we waited a little longer.

Then we got our first clue that hit home: A friend who worked in Harvard Square reported that the copy we had sent to the Harvard alumni magazine where I had labored as a youngster was being offered at a local used book shop for $1.00.

We later learned that the people we had sent the materials to often received as many as 100 books or advance reader copies a day. Some local charity, library, or used book seller was the inevitable recipient of this unsought largesse. I should have remembered our own surveys of CEO reading habits: CEOs are busy people and usually don’t read many books until after they retire. Even then, business books are low on the list of preferred reading. We finally realized that the advice to distribute advance copies was only good for those who could command attention because of who they were, something that didn’t apply to us.

Fortunately, our publisher prided itself on doing a great job of attracting book reviews, and we soon found that some of our review copies found their way to people who were writing favorable reviews of The 2,000 Percent Solution. Unlike Broadway where you find out whether or not you’ve got a hit by reading the reviews just a few hours after the curtain goes down on opening night, book reviews trickle in. But within four months, we learned that people who read the book almost always liked it even if they didn’t seem to apply it. That was some good news.

Amazon.com Weighs In

Fame! In the best of cases, a misunderstanding.

— Albert Camus

Because the young people on our staff had insisted we put up a Web site for the book, our site was up and working early in the promotional process. Feeling generous, I suggested we post free access for all but two key chapters of The 2,000 Percent Solution on our http://www.2000percentsolution.com Web site. Jason Breyan got busy telling people about the site, and hits on our site began to climb. Soon we were attracting thousands of visitors a month. Some of them were clicking on our link to buy the book on Amazon.com.

Everyone told me I could expect to get slammed by “know-nothings” who would write “ignorant” reviews about our book on Amazon.com. Young people encouraged me to ask clients and friends to write and post reviews there to balance out that expected arbitrary negativity. Pretty soon, the sales started to climb as people read those positive reviews. Some of our more enthusiastic supporters also began to write reviews of other peoples’ books and mention our book. Sales climbed even faster.

Other people volunteered to help, but most of them didn’t feel they could use a computer well enough to put up reviews. Many were executives whose assistants normally did that sort of thing for them. So they asked for our help. Before long, we had a full-time person assisting friends and clients to post their Amazon.com reviews.

Soon we hit the top 200 list. We were excited. I asked our staff members if they wanted to try to go higher. They did. We offered to help more people with posting reviews.

I kept waiting for the deluge of negative reviews, but hardly any appeared.

Then an honest mistake occurred. An overworked data entry person in our company mistakenly took a review written and posted by one person and also posted it for a different person who hadn’t written that review … but had written another review. An alert Amazon.com customer noticed this inadvertent duplication and wrote a scathing comment about dishonesty in a “review” of The 2,000 Percent Solution. Sales plummeted as dozens of other customers joined the chorus of negative reviews based on this mistake. All of the published enthusiasm that people honestly felt for our book was now suspect. I asked everyone in our company to stop posting reviews for other people. Amazon.com kindly deleted the duplicated review and all of the dishonesty comments.

Sales leveled off at a lower level and then began to fall in a fashion that’s normal for most new books. It’s clear that prior to the mistake there had been some sort of an avalanche effect going on that that was pushing the book forward. That momentum had been broken by the mistake and the powerful reaction to that error.

A key lesson, however, was that Amazon.com provided a better place to communicate with prospective customers than the bulk of what we had been encouraged to do. We continued to think about what else could be done.

Audiences Call

In the future everybody will be famous for fifteen minutes

— Andy Warhol

The good reviews that appeared in newspapers and magazines brought us invitations to speak before various groups. Early on, we had a hard decision to make. A leading computer manufacturer called to ask me to do a 70-city global tour talking about 2,000 percent solutions. Because of the North American tour commitments, I didn’t have the time to do that. Neither Carol nor Robert wanted to go on the road for long enough to fill in for me in North America. I’ve often wondered how the development of the 400 Year Project might have changed if I had been able to go on that tour.

After the North American tour was over, Carol and I could accept speaking invitations. These engagements were a lot of fun. Our hosts treated us like royalty. Photographers took endless photos of us shaking hands with the listeners. Restaurants were cleared out so that we could chat over dinner with those attending the conference or meeting.

But the most fun we had came when the Young Presidents’ Organization (YPO) invited us to speak to a huge group in Washington, D.C. In exchange for doing a little speaking, we enjoyed great parties for days. One of the highlights we’ll always remember was a lovely cocktail party and dinner at the Russian embassy. Unlike other times when we spoke, the YPO CEOs escorted us everywhere and took care of us rather than assigning the task to overworked assistants. We began to think that book writing provided benefits no one had told us about.

Presenting to Prospects

Wake up. The avant-garde is dead. It’s been marketed.

— William Self

With the naive enthusiasm of first-time authors, Carol and I set out to wow even more people. In prior years, we had made it a practice to attend annual meetings of organizations to which our clients belonged. Typically, we would host some small dinners and meetings at these events to express our thanks for client support. We would meet other people with whom we could chat later in the year about potential assignments.

That plan was too modest for me now that we were authors. For the next convention, we built a booth and became an exhibitor. Rather than describing our traditional services, we just promoted our book. Smiling broadly to everyone who passed, we were disappointed when people found everything other than talking about our book to be more interesting. We did not exhibit to promote our book again.

Unsuccessful experiences were more instructive, however, than being carried along by the Amazon.com avalanche had been. Most things you do to promote a new idea don’t work. Also, our book’s ideas seemed to be a harder sell than most improvement concepts. The idea of accomplishing 20 times as much simply didn’t excite — or even interest — the average person who worked for a large company. Why not? Presumably most corporate leaders realized that they wouldn’t gain anything for themselves by becoming remarkably more productive. Why bother to learn?

* * * *

By the end of 1999, we knew that The 2,000 Percent Solution wasn’t going to drive the 400 Year Project forward all by itself. We also earned many bumps and bruises from following traditional thinking about how to use books to launch new ideas.

Our best successes came from making our own way. As I looked forward to 2000, I knew it was time to take off in new directions for the 400 Year Project. Never again would I primarily rely on the advice of book marketing experts. That lesson was the beginning of wisdom for creating 400 years worth of normal improvements in the 20 years between 2015 and 2035.

Copyright © 2007. 2012 by Donald Mitchell.