IBM
0181 IBM Terry Osborne
The management presentations at the 100 percent clubs, the conventions for the sales personnel who had achieved their target, could make or break an individual. In this context, I well remember Terry Osborne. He was one of the up-and-coming new managers who'd been through the traditional route of being an AA (Administrative Assistant) to Frank Cary at Armonk in the US. He was posted into the UK to take over, indeed to rescue, General Systems Division when it had had a disaster in the previous year. In turn I found myself as his AA, given the job of successfully bedding him down as the head of the division. I well remember attending a videotaping session with him and the group personnel director - John Steele, who I always got on well with - for the video which was to be sent to the branches at the beginning of the new year. I always respected Terry, who was a lovely guy and very much in the IBM mould.
To help him put in perspective his coming experience in the UK, I took him to meet John Stopford, with whom I had worked on my programme at the London Business School. It was a wonderful meeting. John Stopford was not merely a leading professor at LBS but was also on the board of Shell and was just about to go off to head the new multinationals operation at the United Nations. Accordingly, with two such high-powered individuals meeting for the first time over lunch, there were some lovely moments. Had the meeting been between other people I would have said it was a delight of one-upmanship, but both of these people really were modest people who wouldn't have indulged in that. Thus Terry, trying to give helpful advice to John Stopford about the US, said he must go up to Vermont in the fall -- the trees there were lovely then. John's reply to this was “I do so agree, that's why we have a cabin up there”. He topped even this, when Terry asked where he would be living in New York and John said “…off Fifth Avenue”. Terry almost threw his hands up in horror, and said that the cost of even the smallest apartment there was absolutely horrendous. To this John responded “That’s alright. I've got a brownstone on Fifth Avenue. I swapped with the director of the World Bank”.
The climax came on, when Terry was describing the thrill he'd got as he attended the American Senate investigation of IBM. He went along with the leading IBM vice president, Gil Jones, as his assistant at the Senate hearing. John topped this with the simple statement “I know how you felt. I felt exactly the same when I first addressed the whole assembly of United Nations”. There was just no way of ever topping that!
Regrettably Terry didn't understand half the things we were trying to tell him about marketing in the UK. He was totally steeped in the IBM sales approach, which simply could not allow for any other form of marketing other than face-to-face selling. I had the same problem later on, when I tried to explain mass marketing to the UK board – at the time when the PC had come along. They simply didn't understand what I was saying. They didn't object to my ideas, they literally didn't hear what I said. That was, in the middle 1980s, when I first realised IBM was heading for real trouble.
Unfortunately, despite my best efforts, I was not able to control Terry's visits to the various branches, and we soon learned that he been going down like a lead balloon there. The whole division was in the deep depression after the disasters of the previous year; when - not least - almost everyone had failed, by a large margin, to make their targets. As part of the team which tried to work out how to resuscitate their sales enthusiasm I had even gone as far as suggesting that we bring in the Tavistock to do some form of therapy on the sales people.
The problem was evident, when after this period, I went with Terry to the industry conference in Bournemouth. Everything went very well on the train down. We went over the presentation, which had been prepared for him, and he was once more the very dynamic guy. But as soon as he stepped up to the podium his confidence dropped away and he looked almost like an animal caught in the headlights of a car. I won't say he was a disaster, since he managed to carry off the presentation much better than most managers might have done, but he certainly did not make a charismatic figure.
Our last chance to rescue his career, and our division, came when we went to the Hundred Percent Club in Cannes. The only time we had available to us there was at the divisional lunch, where traditionally the general manager -- Terry -- spoke to his troops over lunch. It was this vehicle that we had to use. Accordingly, to make the most of this last opportunity, we literally spent a couple of months on preparing his pitch to the key sales personnel attending this lunch.
We reasoned that we had to get away from the normal handing out of the awards for best salesmen of the year. Everyone was used to that, and Terry would not be rescued by such an event – not least because it was boring for the vast majority who had not won. Instead we decided that he would hand out prizes to all the people who would have never got prizes before, but who the branch personnel thought ought to have received some recognition. Accordingly we trawled each branch for the individuals who the branch loved, but who had been unrewarded. Then we collected all the personal anecdotes about these, so that the whole presentation was nicely personalised.
We spent several weeks crafting this presentation into a work of art. We carefully balanced all the material, and burnished the best anecdotes and jokes - all of which were buried in the presentation.
We then rehearsed Terry, day after day after day, until he was not just word perfect but lived it night and day. We didn't give up until the last-minute. Thus, I particularly remember being in the Presidential suite at the Carlton Hotel, at three o'clock in the morning, with him and his boss going through the presentation yet again.
We still worried that he might still lose his confidence, and bottle out. Accordingly we put one of our number to sit next to him during lunch and ply him with drink until he was ever so slightly tipsy. As Terry got up and launched into his speech he was almost on autopilot. Luckily our work paid off. It was well received. The audience loved it. To them this was a totally new Terry. It showed him as a genuine guy. What was even better was that Terry sensed that he was getting across and everyone was loving him; and his confidence grew by the minute. It was an incredible success. His career was saved, and so was the future of the group, though – as IBM ran into trouble in the mid 1980s - he ultimately went to another company.
hits