Behind the Conman Shibboleth

 

P. T. Barnum’s Most Famous Attraction

My first job at NCR Corporation was in Product Marketing, which encompasses marketing strategy, marketing communications, and sales support in the form of competition information. Yawn. But my career began with an immediate crisis. When I was taking stock of what I had to work with, I tried to find my division marketing strategy. There wasn’t one. Well, there was, but it wasn’t a strategy; it was a simple directive. Pursue major accounts. Period. So I wrote a marketing strategy document and showed it to the smartest guy I knew at NCR, the one-man band who gave Executive Briefings to targeted major account decision makers. He shook his head at me.

“It’s great,” he told me. “But there’s nobody to show it to. Not your boss, not his boss, and not the Director of Marketing. He doesn’t give this kind of stuff the time of day.” 

Oh.

We talked. He got more enthusiastic. “What might work is sending it directly to our real boss, the Division VP. You’re new.what do you know about the chain of command? He could read it, like it, and we’d be in business.”

That’s what we did. How I almost got fired and mailed back to New Jersey from corporate HQ in just two weeks. Shortly after entrusting my document to the interoffice mail, the two of us were in my cubicle talking when the Director of Marketing stormed by, shouting, “Both of you. My office. Now!”

Moments later, he was in mid-rant behind his big desk in front of the big picture window. 

“…should have the two of you escorted out of the building for gross insubordination and be done with you.” He took a breath.nice enough looking guys hen he wasn’t so red-faced. “I’m not surprised you’re behind this, Frank,” he said to my co-conspirator. “But you,” he said, turning to me, “What on earth possessed you? You just got here and you’re already directly undermining my authority? What do you have to say for yourself?”

I knew by then, thanks to Frank, that I had one card to play. When they hired people out of the information industry into the company, they believed you knew some important things about competitive matters. Within a matter of months, they stopped believing that because now you work here, where nobody knows  anything much. I was still an expert for now. I explained what was in the document he was holding and probably hadn’t done more than scan in his ire when the VP dropped it on his desk. As I was talking, he was beginning to read along, and by the time we finished, he had regained control of his temper.

“I’ll do with you later, Frank,” he said. “As for you,” he said in a milder tone, “Don’t ever do anything like this again. But I know how to deal with this now. This—” he held up the document, “—is our new divisional marketing strategy. Get it into the brochures and out to the sales force, and we’ll go on from there.” (Frank would be okay. They needed him. Everyone knew he was the smartest computer guy in the building.)

I still didn’t know if he knew my name or whether that was a good thing or a bad thing. He started referring mto me as ‘Strategy Man.’ He’d pass by my cubicle, always in a hurry, and pause to ask loudly, “How’s my Strategy Man today?”

A long way around,I admit, to showing you what kind of organization I was working for. If you could do things, get things done, the responsibility for those things was given to you unofficially, without title or authority. But you got your swings at the plate. That’s how I came to play a larger and larger role in the division and how I became the designated liaison for the biggest investment our Director had yet made in the sales organization. He had independently sourced and contracted with a highly successful major account sales consultant to teach a course to our salespeople in “Consultative Sales.” The course materials would be custom developed for our products, marketing targets, and product offering vs. those of our competitors. That’s where I came from. I was going to be the co-developed with this outside consultant for the course he would teach to every member of our sales organization.

We did all the development work at the consultant’s home in Miami. It was a snow-white showplace with a bayfront deck, a large cabin cruiser, and a highly entertaining nonstop spiel from Al Hoffman, our admittedly very sharp sales guy. To complete the picture, this was the very height of the Miami Vice vogue, and in or first boat Al pointed out the luxury yachts moored at their docks with no registration numbers showing anywhere on their hulls. We were working in an unreal place amidst very real scoundrels.  Life sometimes lands you in the movies285( no particular warning. All you can do is your best.

I attended the first course delivery for its shakedown ride after our weeks of design and documentation. I knew a lot more about sales and Al knew a lot more about our products and business issues. Al was confident as ever and my fingers were crossed. The first morning began the way it always would for the couple years Al taught our people. He didn’t say a word. He just punched a button on the projector and a wide screen began speaking to the 20 or so assembled students:

This was Hoffman’s most important frame of reference for the whole course. I kid you not.

Why I brought you here by an admittedly indirect route. To Al Hoffman, who had sold some of the biggest contracts in the computer industry, General George Patton was his spiritual mentor. His approach to sales training was borrowed from basic training in the military. The first two days were devoted to destroying their delusions about their skills as salespeople. When they had been reduced to nothing, Al would rebuild them to his own specifications. He was quite serious about this and committed to his mission. 

Of late, I’ve been reading the comments of hundreds of haters at Threads, various Substack sites (Threadies with college degrees), and others with followings at Instagram and Facebook. Certain words are always included in their ritual namecalling polemics. I was already used to the sexual ones, the vulgar/crass/crude denunciations by foul-mouthed moralists, and their citations garbage in/garbage out data about money and other economic statistics. I was surprised, though, by the constant recurrence of the term “conman,” which I thought really had to have been laid to rest by now. No. It’s one of their favorite epithets. Memories of the Al Hoffman course came back to me because it’s the simplest way to differentiate two kinds of individuals who have some of the same attributes but are in fact poles apart. 

Whatever you like or dislike about a controversial figure like George Patton, he was no conman. He was a warrior, a bold tactician, a stern disciplinarian, an insubordinate in every chain of command he served under, and a personally brave man with no quit in him. That Al Hoffman saw him as the ideal type of the salesman is a striking shift in perspective. 

What’s the difference between an epic conman and a great salesman? Both are showmen, dressed to the nines, usually endowed with the gift of gab and a talent for attracting attention and devoted adherents. What distinguishes Patton as not just a talented military man but a gifted salesman? Look at his uniform, his pearl-handled revolver, and, yes, his arrogance. He takes risks others won’t because he has a profound belief that he can do whatever he sets out to do. Then he does it. 

One of Hoffman’s favorite attention grabbers was: “What happens if nobody sells? Answer? Nothing.” What happens in the Battle of the Bulge if Patton can’t drive exhausted troops behind their own expectations, at greater speed than they thought possible, to accomplish the impossible? They lose, that’s what.They die and the civilians who rely on them for protection will:also be killed or enslaved. Why big risks are worth taking and selling to those who must approve those actions even if the outcome will be as successful as promised. 

Not all great military men are great salesmen, endowed with the attributes described above. There are always the Omar Bradleys who get the job done more quietly, planners and organizers like Eisenhower and Marshall. Are there military men who are more conmen than salesmen? Most certainly. George McClellan comes to mind. Always getting ready, parading in full dress with troops he drills constantly and never sends into battle. But think of the many men in history who are more like Patton in terms of promising the moon and delivering it after nearly superhuman effort. MacArthur, Doolittle, Pershing, Rough Rider Roosevelt, Grant, Sheridan, Sherman, Andrew Jackson, George Washington. Risk takers all. Often in trouble for what escapes from their unguarded mouths, deliberately or not, and usually conspicuous on the field of battle. They are selling courage, belief, endurance, and boldness in action, as they exemplify it personally. Their men may not like them personally, but they are willing to follow them into battle and on to victory.

How do we identify the conmen who often look like heroes before they show their feet:of clay? That’s actually pretty easy. They are the Barnums of  any realm they operate in. There is no real substance behind their sales pitch. The risks they insist others take they do not take themselves. When the battle gets truly fierce they leave the field and their followers behind. In the military and political worlds, if they are not willing to risk their own lives, they are not to be trusted. In the civilian worlds, they are the ones who are too clever by half, whose promises are too good to be true and too often not followed through in at all. There’s a whole world out there of conmen in finance, industry, religion, and retail sales whose Ponzi schemes, surefire development projects, miracle products, healings, and used cars were never legitimate collateral for any good faith investment. 

I was one of those who saw Trump as a conman when he entered the presidential sweepstakes. I knew him chiefly by his florid presence in the mass media. It wasn’t till I lifted the hood and looked under the headlines that I found this:

Those are buildings, not promises. He set out to build them and he built them. In the process he created thousands of jobs for construction trades and millions/billions of dollars in revenue for the occupants. He also wears his medals in public, exaggerates in his rhetoric, and is a conspicuous advertisement for American consumerism. But he’s kept more of his promises than any politician in my lifetime. He has also repeatedly, even continuously, put his own life and fortune on the line for the ideas he champions. He doesn’t always win. Nobody always wins. He’s not a conman. He’s an extraordinary salesman, and it is beyond ridiculous to call him what he most definitely is not.

Al Hoffman put his heart and soul into his sales training. I watched him do it. Staying up till all hours reviewing what had transpired in the day’s class session. He wanted his students to succeed, because he knew that sales drives revenue for every business, and without those sales, people lose jobs and companies die. Happens every day. He was always frank about the fact that his success rate with trainees was a 20-80 proposition. 20 percent could make significant improvements in their close rates. Most of the rest simply didn’t have the will, the talent, the discipline, or the brains to rise to the next level of their profession. But helping them as much as he could had become more important than making more money in commissions for himself.

Al Hoffman was great salesman. His legacy is not a stack of completed purchase contracts. It’s the human capital he improved by enabling others to succeed in aggregate to a degree beyond what any one man can do on his own.

Kind of how I perceive the man who came down that escalator into deadly peril and unending ordeals on behalf of the nation he loved. Neither Hoffman nor Trump is a saint. Neither am I. Nor, I doubt, are you. But we can all try to have the humility to respect the brave risk takers who take on the biggest challenges they can find in the hope of leaving the world a better place than they found it.