Stop Paddling & Start Rocking the Boat: Business Lessons from the School of Hard Knocks - Hardcover

Pritchett, Lou

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0887307310 ISBN 13: 9780887307317

Publisher: Harpercollins, 1995

Synopsis

A humorous and practical management and sales strategy guide is peppered with hundreds of personal anecdotes and addresses such topics as partnering, the changing marketing environment, and the dangers of success. 50,000 first printing. $40,000 ad/promo. Tour.

About this title

From the Publisher:

In 1987, Lou Pritchett, the vice president of sales at Procter & Gamble, had a radical idea. He picked up the phone, called Sam Walton and invited the visionary chairman of Wal-Mart on a two-day canoe trip. There, on the South Fork River in Arkansas, Pritchett made Walton an offer no profit-minded person could refuse: The opportunity to forge a partnership between the two colossal firms.

This now legendary trip marks the culmination of a lifetime devoted to building customer relationships. Walton wrote to Pritchett, "Thank you for what you have personally done to bring or two companies together and develop a relationship that I think will be outstanding and beneficial to both of us for a long time to come. You are a real friend."

What you've got here is Lou Pritchett unplugged -- his living, learning and leading in one of the world's foremost corporations. It's not about formal training or theory applied. Nor is it a quick fix for chronic slumps in selling, marketing and managing. It's about learning from your mistakes and savoring your triumphs, mastering your weaknesses and fortifying your strengths. It's about initiating and sustaining a "love affair" with your customers and your own employees. And it comes from four decades of hands-on sales and general management experience, working side-by-side each day with employees and customers and shouldering responsibility with honor and grace. That's what Stop Paddling and Start Rocking the Boat  is all about.

If you can absorb everything around you, moment by moment, and can turn each sight, sound and sensation into practical business know-how, then your chances of success in business -- and in life -- are great indeed. Just take it from an Ol' Soap Salesman and read on...

About the Author:

Lou Pritchett is one of corporate America's true living legends- an acclaimed author, dynamic teacher, and one of the world's most highly rated speakers. He is acknowledged in numerous books and periodicals and by savvy successful corporate executives everywhere as the foremost leader in change management.

It was Lou Pritchett who changed the way America does business by creating an audacious concept that came to be known as "Partnering".

Lou Pritchett rose from soap salesman to Vice-President, Sales and Customer Development for Procter and Gamble and over the course of 36 years, made corporate history as an "Agent of Change" at P&G. He stood at the vanguard of corporate futurists to challenge a hidebound corporate giant to face the future by creating the future, thus ensuring its continuing role as one of America's great corporate success stories. A WHITE WATER RIDE INTO HISTORY

It was Lou Pritchett who, in 1987, boldly engineered an adventuresome partnership between two corporate titans. Lou Pritchett talked Sam Walton, the founder and Chairman of Wal-Mart, into getting into a canoe to ride the rapids of the South Fork of the Spring River in Arkansas. By the end of that white water ride, these two visionaries had agreed to change the way America did business. In 1989, Lou retired from his post at P&G to spread the Gospel of Change.

THE REAL SECRET OF SUCCESS

Over the last ten years, Lou Pritchett has become one of America's most popular speakers on customer partnering, change management and the growing importance of the human factor in the tidal wave of 21st century technology. His presentations, always delivered with humor and enthusiasm, have inspired long-established Fortune 500 companies and upstart entrepreneurs alike. He has bought his message of corporate success to companies throughout the USA and around the world...big and small, old and new, to those making five million and those making 50 billion, to companies that have been around 100 days and those that have survived 100 years. Those companies and affiliated organizations all have learned from Lou Pritchett how to survive and succeed by leading change in an unforgiving world of global economic revolution.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harpercollins
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0887307310
• ISBN 13: 9780887307317
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288