A McCormack kunji

Mark H McCormack wrote his iconoclastic classic What They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School in the late eighties, at a time when management guru-dom and a B-school degree were treated with breathless reverence. This was the age of Tom Peters and Robert Waterman’s In Search of Excellence and all its subsequent spin-offs, supplementing the more philosophical and rounded analyses of Peter Drucker with the sexier, case-study-driven approach to management strategy.  

With What They Don’t Teach… McCormack, ever the sharp businessman, drove management literature out of the boardrooms, building on the kind of accessible, down-home management wisdom pioneered by Ken Blanchard’s One Minute Manager. Back then, the earthy (and highly readable) What They Don’t Teach You… resonated so much with Indian executives desperately seeking excitement in that drab licence-permit Doing Business environment, that when Business Standard published a full-page excerpt in its weekend edition a surprised marketing team found itself fielding requests for back issues.  

Indian executives weren’t the only ones who found McCormack insightful. The back cover of Beyond Harvard, published by the late McCormack’s family, informs us that What They Don’t Teach You … sold over a million copies and “introduced the Mark H McCormack street smarts — nuggets of wisdom, offering practical insights into how to get ahead in business and in life.”

The family of the man who revolutionised sports management through the International Management Group (now IMG) has certainly imbibed plenty of street-smart marketing wisdom from the late scion (he died in 2003). The “street smarts” in this book are not oracular offerings from the man himself but those that were imbibed by people who worked or were influenced by him. The back cover presents some enticing names such as Billie Jean King, Martin Sorrell, Jim King, Monica Seles, Sebastian Coe, and Colin Montgomerie, among others. 

This is not just adroit name-dropping in the interests of hard-selling a commonplace little book; it also disguises the fact that half of the 76 contributors of these McCormack-inspired “nuggets of wisdom” are current or former employees of the IMG set-up and that includes his sons, grandson and daughter and even a former PA. Professional management was clearly not critical to McCormack’s street-smart management strategy and smarming with the boss’ family clearly is.

Being a “self-help” guide, Beyond Harvard is formatted not for linear reading but for dipping and flipping, a management kunji, as it were. It is helpfully divided into three parts: People and relationships; Negotiation and Growing a business. Equally useful is the list of contributors appended at the end together with the pages on which their derived insights appear. This saves the publisher the bother of compiling an index and the reader the tedium of ploughing through page after page of banalities. 

For instance, the insights of Martin Sorrell, the razor-sharp CEO of WPP and, we learn, a former IMG employee, appear on pages 164, 168 and 240. On page 164, you wonder whether the editor read or understood Mr Sorrell’s terse one-and-a-half-page entry. Far from endorsing IMG – which is transparently the core motivation for publishing this book — Mr Sorrell writes of their radically different approaches to business. Much of what he says is an oblique criticism of McCormack’s penchant for total control, on relying on perception rather than facts to build an image and on how, contrary to the advice embedded in What They Don’t’ Teach You…, Harvard actually shaped his (Mr Sorrell’s) attitudes and business worldview. 

On page 168, though, he pays him a compliment. IMG was a case study when Mr Sorrell was at Harvard and he was struck by McCormack’s focus on detail. “Some people will call that micro-management… but if you extract yourself from the detail, it is very difficult to get back into it,” he writes. That’s a thought-provoking point, but by the time we get to page 240, even Mr Sorrell cannot escape a lapse into the trite with his advice to “Enjoy what you do.”

Unfortunately, this sort of stale guidance abounds. Under People and Relationships, we are treated to such truisms as “Honesty is the best policy,” Relationships trump theory,” “Pace Yourself,” and “The Power of Emotional Intelligence”, “Communicate, communicate, communicate”.  And those timeless axioms of “Thinking outside the Box” and “Setting culture and values” all find statutory mention. “All-new”? Same old, same old, is more like it. 

Add in the folksy anecdotes from family and admirers and it is difficult not to recall a similarly foolish entrepreneurial advisory that was recently published. Its author is now a presidential advisor whose claims to be a businesswoman rest on leveraging her father’s contacts and purveying cheaply made and overpriced garments and jewellery. Perhaps it is no coincidence that IMG bought the Ms Universe property from the current White House incumbent after co-owner NBC refused to air the pageant following his offensive statements about Mexican immigrants on the campaign trail. 

A prescient bailout for a future president is certainly something they assuredly won’t teach you at Harvard Business School.

Beyond Harvard

All-New Street Smarts from the World of Mark H McCormack 

Jo Russel (Editor) 

Hachette; 256 pages; Rs 399