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Executive Times |
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2007 Book Reviews |
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Yes You
Can! by Jonathan Black |
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Rating: |
** |
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(Mildly Recommended) |
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Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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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 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
“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 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 The group
is considerably more sophisticated now—and well endowed. Company headquarters
are a sprawling 65,000-square-foot three-story building in the “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 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 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 URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Yes
You Can.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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