Aug 8 2021

1981 – Meeting & Working with Rummler

40 Years and 2 Months Ago Today

It was one week before my official start day at Motorola – at MTEC – Motorola’s Training & Education Center.

I drove in from Saginaw to Schaumburg to attend a one-day session that Bill Wiggenhorn was doing for all of his newly assembled staff at the new organization known as MTEC.

The week afterwards on my official start date I would attend another one-day workshop – with Neil Rackham – a few years later to become more widely known as the SPIN Selling creator.

And four weeks after Neil I would meet Ray Svenson, at another Staff Orientation Program (that’s what my calendar called it). I went to work for Ray 18 months later, but that’s another story.

This short story is about meeting (for the 2nd time) and hearing from (for the second time) Geary Rummler – before I started working with him on a dozen or so projects – where he was my consultant – meaning I carried his pencils from site to site and meeting to meeting – addressing the needs and wants of my Manufacturing, materials, and Purchasing internal clients.

I had met Geary and watched a presentation of him at NSPI’s 1981 Conference in Dallas. I met him as I had been working in a 10-person T&D function at Wickes Lumber with his brother-in-law, who had helped bring in two people from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Detroit that I worked with in the 3-person Program Development unit of Training Services at Wickes. Not that would remember me.

But that was about to change. He did his one-day session – and I was the only one in the room besides Bill Wiggenhorn, our Director, who was familiar with Geary’s methods. And I had been using them for 18 months – or at least, a derivative-of-a-derivative as my boss put it.

Here he is – 45-minutes from that one-day session. Geary allowed me to post this back in 2007 and it was first on Google Video, then Blink TV, then YouTube. Business models change – don’t-you-know.