Episode 46: THE Leadership Japan Series-The Dale Carnegie Brand 100 Years Younger
Greg:Konnichiwa and welcome to Episode 46 of THE Leadership Japan podcast. I am your host Greg Story, president of Dale Carnegie Training Japan and much more importantly, you are a student of leadership highly motivated to be the best in your business field. If you would like your own access to 102 years of the accumulated wisdom of Dale Carnegie training through free papers, guidebooks, reports, training videos, blogs, course information plus much, much more then go to japan.dalecarnagie.com. Today, we are going to listen in to a talk on the Dale Carnegie Brand.
Intro Speaker: Greg is keeping this brand 100 years young, current and relevant to so many people. Greg is a 28 year veteran of Japan. He started in the academic field and since then he extended his career in a variety of fields, including consulting, client representation, international diplomacy, retail banking, and people development. It is really an honor for FCC to have a man of this diverse background be the featured speaker of this evening. He is scheduled to fly to Brisbane tomorrow to receive an award for his longstanding international contributions and distinguished career from his alma mater and during his visit he managed to find the time to come to us to give us his insight to his story, so please welcome Greg Story. Greg, please give us your compelling story.
Greg: Thank you. (Applause) Thank you very much Kei. This is my second time actually to address the FCC. Last time I was here I was representing the Shinsei Bank. And that was a challenger bank talking about how we took on the big boys and girls in the retail banking market. Today I’m going to talk about Dale Carnegie. The brand that we are talking about here is a 100-year-old brand, and it’s had many many trials and tribulations to get to this point in time and it has succeeded and there are some pretty clear reasons why it has succeeded and I’d like to talk about those tonight.
Usually most of the presentations we get at FCC, and I’ve been coming here since 2001, to FCC meetings, are normally about product, so you actually see lots of product shots. Well, tonight, you’ll see from the slides, it’s all going to be about people. Everything you’re going to see tonight is all about shots of people, because that is what we do. We are in the people developmentarea; Dale Carnegie was in the people development area. So it’s very much in the soft skills that we have.
As I mentioned in the advertisement for this event, one of our biggest fans is Warren Buffet and I’m going to go to a couple of videos to talk about Warren Buffet, because as I mentioned it is extraordinary to get someone of his fame and caliber to go out recommending your brand. And we could never afford to pay Warren Buffet. How much do you have to pay Warren Buffet to represent your brand? Forget it. Who can afford Warren Buffet? Nobody. The only brands he recommends are his own, that he, actually Hathaway, owns himself except for Dale Carnegie. And we’ll just hear a little bit from Warren tonight on why that actually is.
Video: (Voice Over) Persuasion, that’s the next remarkable skill of Mr. Buffet. Handling people.
Video: (Voice) My mom says when he was in his 20’s, he was reasonably socially inept. In large crowds he’d much rather not be there. And he’d much rather, be reading and working on his stuff.
Music.
Video (Voice over) So Buffet learned how to deal with people, from self-help guru Dale Carnegie.
Music.
Video: (Warren Buffet) I was terrified of public speaking while I was in high school and college. I couldn’t do it I mean. I’d throw up and everything. So I took this Dale Carnegie course and as soon as I finished, I was 20 years old, I went off to the University of Omaha and I said I want to start teaching, because I wanted to get up in front of people and make sure I didn’t lapse back.
Music.
Video (Voice Over) Carnegie promised anyone could win friends and influence people if they did things like giving people aspirations to live up to instead of nagging them. And use their first name all the time.
Video: (Warren Buffet) I actually had the diploma in the office. I don’t have my diploma from college. I don’t have my diploma from graduate school, but I’ve got my Dale Carnegie diploma there. Because it changed my life.
Greg: There’s a critical phrase, “It changed my life”. That is the power of this brand. And to have an advocate like this. You talk about the diploma. Let’s have a look and see if we can find the diploma, because that’s an interesting story too.
Video: Music. (Voice Over) Warren Buffet is one of the richest men in the world. His company Berkshire-Hathaway owns or has a stake in over 70 businesses such as Coca Cola, IBM, and American Express.
Video (Female Voice Over) And this is no ordinary billionaire. He’s given 99 percent of his wealth to charity and he thinks rich people should pay higher taxes.
Video (voice over) Tonight we’ll see were Buffet’s mega-deals are done-his private office in Omaha, Nebraska. It is as unconventional as the man himself. (Music) What are the other photographs in this room that represents something important to you?
Video (Warren Buffet) They almost all represent something important. I mean, over here, is my certificate from the Dale Carnegie course I took when I was 21. I was terrified of public speaking. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t get in front of a crowd and give you my name. And finally I spent a hundred bucks and I took this course and not only did I get so I could talk in front of other people, I can’t stop talking in front of people. (Laughter) And during that class, I should mention Charlie, I proposed to my wife during that, so if I didn’t get my $100 worth of that class…
Greg: So, you can imagine, here is one of the most successful investors in the world, going around on his own bat talking about Dale Carnegie and the difference it made. That was run from the BBC and then one recentlyby CBS. I’ve seen a number of these, obviously. Why is that? Why would he say that? “It changed my life.” That is a difficult proposition for any brand to be able to say that. Most of the things that we use in our daily life brands don’t change our life. And you see the certificate there and the number 8. That number 8 represents a prompt to me to remind myself that there are 8 million fellow graduates apart from Dale Carnegie, who’ve also had a big change in their lives. So the brand for us lives in the person, not on a shelf or a display, it actually lives in the person. So it’s quite unique and special.
As I said, yesterday was exactly the 100th anniversary of Dale Carnegie starting - 1912. Think about this, Dow Jones in 1912 has got a lot of companies listed. Today, how many of those companies do you think, that were listed in 1912, are still on the Dow Jones? Now, any ideas? Who thinks there’s maybe 10? Yeah? A couple? One. General Electric. Lehman Brothers, gone. Arthur Anderson, gone. General Motors, bankrupt. Kodak, bankrupt. Yet, here’s one guy started on 125th street, in Harlem, in New York, the YMCA, teaching his one little course,one guy teaching one class. And yet he’s been able to take the company through a hundred years of evolution. There’s got to be something very fundamental about that, that makes it work. And again it comes back to that people component.
This book, “Topic of Talks and Schedules of Sessions”, says,“effective speaking, personality development, and influencing men in business”. That was an internal document that he’d worked on himself. The turning point, though, was this book, “How to Win Friends and Influence People”, published in 1936, by Simon and Schuster. It instantly became not just a bestseller in America, it became a global best seller. It became a runaway success best seller. And in the publishing world, there are two fantastic long sellers. When you think about it, most books don’t sell for that long anymore, the turnover is quite high. You think about all the business books you know-how many are actually a long seller? Not that many. The bible is a fantastic long seller and this is the other fantastic long seller. His book. Because you think about it, 1936 until now, it’s still constantly consistently finishing in the top ten business books in virtually every language around the world because it’s become timeless and universal in its application. So this changed a lot for Dale Carnegie.
Also the title, “How to Win Friends and Influence People” has become a bit of a cliché in English. It’s almost like a parody sometimes when you look at it. But the constant idea was, well, think about it. We all like to do business with people we like.That’s fine. What makes you likeable? Why would someone want to do business with you rather than somebody else? And this is a dilemma that Dale Carnegie found with the people we’re facing and he came up with some ideas, distributing the Golden Books with his principles and they were developed to help people become better with other people. And the book is basically the explanation of all those principles. The other part is about influencing people. Well, we want to be persuasive. We want people to buy our product, idea, concept, direction, whatever we are advocating. And he found ways to help people become more persuasive. That’s why it still resonates. When you read the book in English, it’s still very quaint. And most of the examples he is giving us, the companies are no longer there and those people have already passed on. But there is something charming about the freshness still of what he’s written that lasts. And in 1938 it was translated into Japanese. It’s become a bestseller; nine million copies of this book have sold in Japan. That’s a phenomenal amount of copies, people who’ve had this, and for Japanese business people, they say to me the two bibles in Japan are Drucker on management and Carnegie on people skills. And that is a very consistent thing I hear from senior Japanese business people who’ve been very successful. So…
Superstar status overnight- he’s like a J.K. Rowling, writing a novel on the kitchen table at home. And the next minute-boom! She’s instantly well known around the world. Same thing, but on a much bigger scale because in those days there weren't the mega-superstars in volume like we have today. Because if you think about the media expansion today, back then if you’re on national broadcast, NBC, that is a big big deal. Because very very few people are doing that. And he was such a star that he could pull that type of audience and this is Carnegie Hall. Have a careful look at this. This is, the photographer couldn’t fit the whole think into the shot. This is only one-half of Carnegie Hall and they’ve packed up I don’t know how many floors this goes up to but they’re packed to the rafters, as we say as an idiom in English. They’re packed to the top and that’s to hear him speak. That type of superstar status that he had instantly attracted others.
This is in Buenos Aires, 500 people to a public preview. We run public previews today. Trust me, I’d love to have 500 people come to a public preview for Dale Carnegie, but back then that was the sort of audience that they could pull. There is no Dale Carnegie there. This is the people running the Dale Carnegie training in South America, in Buenos Aires, who are attracting 500 people to come and hear about his principles and how it works. So phenomenal take up. Everywhere he went. This is actually on a ship, this is on a cruise. He can’t escape-he’s got to talk. He’s a guy, who like a lot of people, spent a long time becoming an overnight success. From 1912 to 1936 he was not nationally known. He was known in the training world, he was known in the business world as a trainer. Personally taught 5000 classes. But he was not a brand name. Then he came out with this book a little bit later. Because what he discovered was, when I’m teaching people,they really grow their confidence, grow their leadership skills, grow their communication skills, grow their people skills. But when they’re under a lot of tension and stress, it’s all starting to break down.
It’s a very sad comment that a hundred years ago, the problem that he’s facing and the problem we are facing today, around stress and depression etcetera -it’s not that different. A hundred years ago, if you had minor amounts of stress, you just persevered and carried on. If you got really highly stressed and you became sick, then you went to hospital or possibly an institution. A hundred years later, what happens? If we have minor levels of stress we just carry on. If you get higher levels of stress you get pharmaceuticals. About then and now, there’s not much in between. This was a book written for the in between. See you can self-medicate in a way through taking different principles he devised by talking to people and how they dealt with stress and putting them into a book to help us control ourselves before we get to a state where we need pharmaceuticals or hospitalization. And this book again became very very powerful in building his brand. So this is the Japanese version, “Michi wa Hirakeru”, also great best seller. This country certainly needs some help with stress, stress relief. In fact we have some representatives from Acumen Group who publish the British Chamber Journal. In the next online bulletin, I’ve written an article about stress management. And it’s referring to some of the principles in this book because if I start talking about, you are going to be standing on a platform in the morning wondering why your train is late; there is a reason for that. Someone’s killed themselves on the train track. There are basically three suicides a day going on in Japan. So there is a lot of help needed. So this is not necessarily an idea that we have actually fixed.
So Dale Carnegie grew up in Missouri, hails from Missouri, and he grew up poor. Came from a very poor farming family. The classic rags to riches American dream success story and now his book is now being published in Japan in different volumes. This is the latest book, just came out recently, the Japanese version of this book will be released next month called, “Hito wo Ugokasu 2” instead of English which was, “How to Win Friends and Influence People in the Digital Age”. Which is trying to take what he was talking about and take it to this current era and the different sort of interactions that we face. So Dale Carnegie passes away, in 1955. Now, if your brand is built around one man, what do you do when the one man is gone? And there is no successor to the brand name because his daughter was only a child, a young child, maybe 3 or 4 years old when he passed away. And because it was a license business where the people around the world would have a Dale Carnegie license, people called them Sponsors in those days, and they would run the business. There was no natural successor to Dale Carnegie, so the likelihood was that it was going to end right there. That would be the end of it, except for a very powerful and important person, his wife, Dorothy.
Dorothy was his secretary and she became Mrs. Carnegie. And on his passing, into her office came some of the more senior guys in the organization, they had their own licensed areas. They were running the Dale Carnegie business there. Go back to 1955. Today we can hardly believe it but in 1955, no one thought that a woman could run a company. I used to watch episodes of that TV series “Mad Men”, set in the 50’s and I remember an episode, there was a particular episode where, the same thing, the woman was the daughter of the father who started the company and they rejected her ideas because she was a woman. And when you look at it you laugh because it’s so ludicrous. But back in 55 that was reality. Now Dorothy was as very strong person. She kicked those guys out of her office and said thank you very much and she went out and she hired clever people. She hired experts in different areas to work for her. And the difference between Dorothy and Dale Carnegie, Dale Carnegie was not a particularly business oriented guy. He was an artist. He loved training people. He personally taught more than 5000 classes. Think about that. He developed this idea and he pioneered it and he saw it grow immensely in North America, and particularly in South America. He loved the art-he loved what it did because he could see people growing, changing their lives, in factin front of his very eyes.
I don’t know if there are any engineers in the room? Any reformed engineers or engineers in this room? Pretty hard to pull an engineer in an FCC meeting. Oh we’ve got one over here-thank you. Thank you very much. He loved training engineers. Why? Because they’re so hopeless. (Laughter) They were absolutely hopeless in people skills, in communication. They were smart people, they were technical people. They were very very good in their field, on their own. But when they got promoted, they had to deal with managing people-they couldn’t do it. They came in droves to his training because they discovered they had a facility lack that he could fill. And so he was the artist. And he liked engineers in particularly because in one series of sessions he could just see bamboo drying, you know, getting better and better every week.
So, Dorothy, really, she is the soul of the international network. Now there are 298 offices in 86 countries around the world. And just think about those numbers. 298 offices-86 countries around the world. This is a multinational company of very big proportions. How many multinationals do you know that have got 298 operations on the ground in 86 countries? Not so many. Now, we don’t think of Dale Carnegie as a multinational, but it is a massive multinational by any comparison. And 90% of the Fortune 500 companies are using this training. Now if it didn’t work, trust me, they wouldn’t be using it. And if it wasn’t current, trust me, they wouldn’t be using it. And you don’t get the most powerful corporations in America adopting this training unless they see a return on investment, an ROI in this. And so he founded something in 1912 which I doubt he could have imagined would be at the stage that it is today. I don’t think he could have imagined 86 countries. He probably didn’t think about 86 countries he probably thought more in terms of the soul of what he was teaching. Before he passed away, two years before he passed away, Harry O’han was one of his early trainers and disciples. And in fact it’s so unbusinesslike; he gave half of America to one guy. Half of America, draw a line down the middle-Harry that’s yours; take care of it for me please. Just before he died he visited Harry O’han in Los Angeles and he said he knew, he knew time was coming up for him. And he said,“Harry, keep my dream alive”. Because he knew he wasn’t going to be around. That’s the artist-not the businessman. But today, thanks to Dorothy, it’s become a global operation.
And that global strength is very important. We talk about the brand. The brand is whatever it is in that country. The brand is whatever it is in that culture. The brand is whatever it is in that language. The brand is whatever it is in the delivery. And so when we get to convention every year, it’s a massive UN style operation. People all around the world. All of that expertise, all of that exposure coming together in the one place, refreshing the brand constantly. We are ISO 9001 certified, which is very strict in terms of what they expect us to keep doing, in terms of polishing our delivery component, which is the training. And so, Mr. Crom here in the middle actually was a previous president of Dale Carnegie, part of the family, from Dale Carnegie’s previous marriage. And so it is very much a family business as well.
I’ll give you a little episode. My first opportunity to go to convention was to Miami two years ago. So I didn’t know. I bought the company, but I didn’t work at the company for the first couple of years, because I was running the National Australia Bank, and I got a chance to go into the company. I go to my first convention. I’m the new boy-I don’t know anybody. I’m at one of the functions, I’m chatting with Dorothy Dale Carnegie, the daughter. What an honor. And she’s chatting with this guy and he’s got a mustache, he’s wearing a Hawaiian shirt, he’s got long hair and a pony tail. I’m thinking this guy doesn’t look quite Dale Carnegie to me, you know. And she’s very friendly with him. I was talking to him later and I found out he actually is the guy that organizes the conventions, all the cameras and all the sound gear, all the sort of backstage stuff. His company does that, they’ve been doing it forever. And he said, you know I really like your organization, I do this every year, I don’t make any money. It’s always the last job in the year, but I always like to come every year because you people really walk the talk. I’m thinking, what’s he talking about? And I said, what do you mean? And he said, well you guys actually follow the principals. You actually do what you say you should do. And I thought what you mean. And he said well I actually do this for a living. I go to conventions all over the place. The top motivational speakers are my clientele; I am organizing their events for them. I’m on the headset; I’m backstage. I hear everything. I see everything. And I see what’s going on out front and I also see what’s going on out back and a lot of times it isn’t the same thing. He said, what I like about your organization is that it is always the same thing. And that is the brand, the purity of the brand. Keep my dream alive. Change people’s lives. That is why the brand works.
And that’s why it is a success in Japan as well. Dale Carnegie was actually in Japan three times. Came here twice in 1939 as a guest of the Japanese government. And he traveled through Japan up into Korea through to China and then back again to the states. And he came back in 1953. When he was here in 1939 he visited a number of places and he went to Gifu and you might know that in Gifu the have a very famous Cormorant fishing festival, it’s quite a tourist attraction. It was a tourist attraction then and it’s a tourist attraction now and he stayed at the Nagaragawa hotel in Gifu and there was a gentleman there by the name of Mochizuki. And he was just working in the hotel and he was given a book, he was actually given this book “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie. Now in ‘39, a couple of years later Mochizuki is in a uniform. I don’t quite know where he was, but interestingly he said I had that book with me all through the war because it meant so much to me that he was a guy that could see beyond the statesmen and diplomats to a different world where people could get on. He was conscripted into the army, he didn’t have a choice, but he saw a different world.
