IBM
0259 IBM Education Staff
I concluded my first year ‘on quota’, that is in field sales, on New Year's Eve 1993. It started at lunchtime with a very boozy affair and with me – following my success in closing Meyer (and with it getting the branch into the HPC, The Hundred Per Cent Club) - drinking a significant amount of champagne. I was lucky to get home without being breathalysed. The problem was that the champagne very quickly went to my head. By late afternoon I had an awful hangover. The real problem was that the evening Pat and I were giving a large New Year's Eve party -- with even more drinking.
The New Year started with me being taken off territory and assigned to the IBM education group at Sudbury Towers. I never quite knew whether this was a reward for, or punishment for, my activities during the previous year. Whatever the reason it suited me down to the ground. Teaching at Sudbury was great fun. The students were internal IBM students rather than customers. Those who taught customers were second class citizens!
In essence we taught at a postgraduate level, at a very high level indeed, in that virtually all the students had good degrees, or at least the equivalent. It was a very bright audience and, just as important, the students were - in effect - employed by us. When I first started they were still paid by the branch, but they knew that their progress depended on us. Later on they were actually directly responsible to us, and we decided what their future was to be; indeed I actually had to fire a couple of students who failed to make the grade.
This meant that they hung on your every word. They were a joy to teach. I, and the other new instructor who joined the group at the same time as me, taught the earlier stages of their education rather than Sales School. This was lower status work, but I enjoyed it more. This was, not least, because you could actually see the students learning – whereas, later on in their education, the final course was much more of an exam.
It was a superb experience, which changed my approach to teaching throughout the rest of my career. Inevitably it was based on the presentations skills I had been taught, when I myself was on these courses. But, in addition, everything was done to make our teaching effective. This included the amount of time we spent on preparing the lectures. Thus, whilst half the ten storey building was given over to lecture rooms, the other half was given over to office space where I my colleagues spent most of our time preparing the lectures. What is more, these lectures used the best possible visual aids. Most of the teaching was delivered by overhead projector, with professionally produced acetates. For some of the lectures, especially those on accounting which I taught, very expensive magnetic presentations were produced, For these the various elements had magnets attached which would stick to the magnetic boards in the lecture theatres – and, in this way, the various accounting equations could be built up in front of the students.
Lecturing was only part of our role, however. Much of our time was taken up by role-playing, as customer or prospect, in the dummy calls which were at the heart of IBM sales training. I must admit I enjoyed these, since I've always been something of a theatre aficionado. I was always able to ease myself into the relevant role, not least because some of the key calls were based on my own experience. The only call I ever blew was one of the warm-ups. These were used to put new students at their ease. One of these exercises required the student to be a salesmen trying to sell goods to a shopkeeper. I don't know why, but I chose one in Soho, in an Italian shop there. When the student started to sell me some unnamed electrical appliance I found that I was – in the context of Soho - assuming that it was a sex toy. In role, I got into a terrible flap, worrying about how he was insulting my wife. We had to break off that call in the middle, the only time I did, since both of us were convulsed with laughter.
After a year or two the whole operation was rearranged. Prior to this, education covered all the IBM divisions. Thus I taught more DP division personnel than those from GSD. After that time, however, we were dedicated entirely to GSD. What is more, we assumed responsibility for the trainees whilst they were with us -- taking on a management role.
As I said, I fired couple of students. One of these, for example, was initially very impressive. He came to the podium and had real presence; which presumably was why he had been hired. But, as soon as he opened his mouth, all that issued forth was gobbledygook. We tried everything to put meaningful words into his mouth but we all failed, and I had to advise him to look elsewhere for his future career. Fortunately he still had a number of jobs open to him from his previous application round.
hits