To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others PDF

 RIVERHEAD BOOKS Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Group (Cana...

 RIVERHEAD BOOKS Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 707 Collins Street, Melbourne, Victoria 3008, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa), Rosebank Office Park, 181 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parktown North 2193, South Africa Penguin China, B7 Jiaming Center, 27 East Third Ring Road North, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100020, China Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Copyright © 2012 by Daniel H. Pink All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. Published simultaneously in Canada A portion of Chapter 5 appeared in somewhat different form in The Sunday Telegraph. A portion of Chapter 9 appeared in somewhat different form in the Harvard Business Review. Photographs here and here by Jessica Lerner Illustrations here, here, here and here by Rob Ten Pas Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pink, Daniel H. To sell is human : the surprising truth about moving others / Daniel H. Pink. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-101-59707-1 1. Influence (Psychology) 2. Persuasion (Psychology) 3. Selling—Psychological aspects. I. Title. BF774.P56 2012 2012039889 158.2—dc23 While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content. To booksellers, with gratitude  CONTENTS Title Page Copyright Dedication Epigraph Introduction Part One Rebirth of a Salesman 1. We’re All in Sales Now 2. Entrepreneurship, Elasticity, and Ed-Med 3. From Caveat Emptor to Caveat Venditor Part Two How to Be 4. Attunement 5. Buoyancy 6. Clarity Part Three What to Do 7. Pitch 8. Improvise 9. Serve Acknowledgments Notes Index The only thing you got in this world is what you can sell. And the funny thing is, you’re a salesman, and you don’t know that. —ARTHUR MILLER, Death of a Salesman (1949)  Introduction About a year ago, in a moment of procrastination masquerading as an act of reflection, I decided to examine how I spend my time. I opened my laptop, clicked on the carefully synched, color-coded calendar, and attempted to reconstruct what I’d actually done over the previous two weeks. I cataloged the meetings attended, trips made, meals eaten, and conference calls endured. I tried to list everything I’d read and watched as well as all the face-to-face conversations I’d had with family, friends, and colleagues. Then I inspected two weeks of digital entrails—772 sent e- mails, four blog posts, eighty-six tweets, about a dozen text messages. When I stepped back to assess this welter of information—a pointillist portrait of what I do and therefore, in some sense, who I am—the picture that stared back was a surprise: I am a salesman. I don’t sell minivans in a car dealership or bound from office to office pressing cholesterol drugs on physicians. But leave aside sleep, exercise, and hygiene, and it turns out that I spend a significant portion of my days trying to coax others to part with resources. Sure, sometimes I’m trying to tempt people to purchase books I’ve written. But most of what I do doesn’t directly make a cash register ring. In that two-week period, I worked to convince a magazine editor to abandon a silly story idea, a prospective business partner to join forces, an organization where I volunteer to shift strategies, even an airline gate agent to switch me from a window seat to an aisle. Indeed, the vast majority of time I’m seeking resources other than money. Can I get strangers to read an article, an old friend to help me solve a problem, or my nine-year-old son to take a shower after baseball practice? You’re probably not much different. Dig beneath the sprouts of your own calendar entries and examine their roots, and I suspect you’ll discover something similar. Some of you, no doubt, are selling in the literal sense— convincing existing customers and fresh prospects to buy casualty insurance or consulting services or homemade pies at a farmers’ market. But all of you are likely spending more time than you realize selling in a broader sense—pitching colleagues, persuading funders, cajoling kids. Like it or not, we’re all in sales now. And most people, upon hearing this, don’t like it much at all. Sales? Blecch. To the smart set, sales is an endeavor that requires little intellectual throw weight—a task for slick glad-handers who skate through life on a shoeshine and a smile. To others it’s the province of dodgy characters doing slippery things—a realm where trickery and deceit get the speaking parts while honesty and fairness watch mutely from the rafters. Still others view it as the white-collar equivalent of cleaning toilets— necessary perhaps, but unpleasant and even a bit unclean. I’m convinced we’ve gotten it wrong. This is a book about sales. But it is unlike any book about sales you have read (or ignored) before. That’s because selling in all its dimensions— whether pushing Buicks on a car lot or pitching ideas in a meeting—has changed more in the last ten years than it did over the previous hundred. Most of what we think we understand about selling is constructed atop a foundation of assumptions that has crumbled. — In Part One of this book, I lay out the arguments for a broad rethinking of sales as we know it. In Chapter 1, I show that the obituaries declaring the death of the salesman in today’s digital world are woefully mistaken. In the United States alone, some 1 in 9 workers still earns a living trying to get others to make a purchase. They may have traded sample cases for smartphones and are offering experiences instead of encyclopedias, but they still work in traditional sales. More startling, though, is what’s happened to the other 8 in 9. They’re in sales, too. They’re not stalking customers in a furniture showroom, but they—make that we—are engaged in what I call “non-sales selling.” We’re persuading, convincing, and influencing others to give up something they’ve got in exchange for what we’ve got. As you’ll see in the findings of a first-of-its-kind analysis of people’s activities at work, we’re devoting upward of 40 percent of our time on the job to moving others. And we consider it critical to our professional success. Chapter 2 explores how so many of us ended up in the moving business. The keys to understanding this workplace transformation: Entrepreneurship, Elasticity, and Ed-Med. First, Entrepreneurship. The very technologies that were supposed to obliterate salespeople have lowered the barriers to entry for small entrepreneurs and turned more of us into sellers. Second, Elasticity. Whether we work for ourselves or for a large organization, instead of doing only one thing, most of us are finding that our skills on the job must now stretch across boundaries. And as they stretch, they almost always encompass some traditional sales and a lot of non-sales selling. Finally, Ed-Med. The fastest-growing industries around the world are educational services and health care—a sector I call “Ed- Med.” Jobs in these areas are all about moving people. If you buy these arguments, or if you’re willing just to rent them for a few more pages, the conclusion might not sit well. Selling doesn’t exactly have a stellar reputation. Think of all the movies, plays, and television programs that depict salespeople as one part greedy conniver, another part lunkheaded loser. In Chapter 3, I take on these beliefs—in particular, the notion that sales is largely about deception and hoodwinkery. I’ll show how the balance of power has shifted—and how we’ve moved from a world of caveat emptor, buyer beware, to one of caveat venditor, seller beware— where honesty, fairness, and transparency are often the only viable path. That leads to Part Two, where I cull research from the frontiers of social science to reveal the three qualities that are now most valuable in moving others. One adage of the sales trade has long been ABC—“Always Be Closing.” The three chapters of Part Two introduce the new ABCs— Attunement, Buoyancy, and Clarity. Chapter 4 is about “attunement”—bringing oneself into harmony with individuals, groups, and contexts. I draw on a rich reservoir of research to show you the three rules of attunement—and why extraverts rarely make the best salespeople. Chapter 5 covers “buoyancy”—a quality that combines grittiness of spirit and sunniness of outlook. In any effort to move others, we confront what one veteran salesman calls an “ocean of rejection.” You’ll learn from a band of life insurance salespeople and some of the world’s premier social scientists what to do before, during, and after your sales encounters to remain afloat. And you’ll see why actually believing in what you’re selling has become essential on sales’ new terrain. In Chapter 6, I discuss “clarity”—the capacity to make sense of murky situations. It’s long been held that top salespeople—whether in traditional sales or non-sales selling—are deft at problem solving. Here I will show that what matters more today is problem finding. One of the most effective ways of moving others is to uncover challenges they may not know they have. Here you’ll also learn about the craft of curation—along with some shrewd ways to frame your curatorial choices. Once the ABCs of Attunement, Buoyancy, and Clarity have taught you how to be, we move to Part Three, which describes what to do—the abilities that matter most. We begin in Chapter 7 with “pitch.” For as long as buildings have had elevators, enterprising individuals have crafted elevator pitches. But today, when attention spans have dwindled (and all the people in the elevator are looking at their phones), that technique has become outdated. In this chapter, you’ll discover the six successors of the elevator pitch and how and when to deploy them. Chapter 8, “Improvise,” covers what to do when your perfectly attuned, appropriately buoyant, ultra-clear pitches inevitably go awry. You’ll meet a veteran improv artist and see why understanding the rules of improvisational theater can deepen your persuasive powers. Finally comes Chapter 9, “Serve.” Here you’ll learn the two principles that are essential if sales or non-sales selling are to have any meaning: Make it personal and make it purposeful. To help you put these ideas into action, at the end of each chapter in Parts Two and Three you’ll find dozens of smart techniques assembled from fresh research and best practices around the world. I call these collections of tools and tips, assessments and exercises, checklists and reading recommendations “Sample Cases,” in homage to the traveling salesmen who once toted bags bulging with their wares from town to town. By the end of this book, I hope, you will become more effective at moving others. But equally important, I hope you’ll see the very act of selling in a new light. Selling, I’ve grown to understand, is more urgent, more important, and, in its own sweet way, more beautiful than we realize. The ability to move others to exchange what they have for what we have is crucial to our survival and our happiness. It has helped our species evolve, lifted our living standards, and enhanced our daily lives. The capacity to sell isn’t some unnatural adaptation to the merciless world of commerce. It is part of who we are. As you’re about to see, if I’ve moved you to turn the page, selling is fundamentally human.  Part One Rebirth of a Salesman  1. We’re All in Sales Now Norman Hall shouldn’t exist. But here he is—flesh, blood, and bow tie— on a Tuesday afternoon, sitting in a downtown San Francisco law office explaining to two attorneys why they could really use a few things to spruce up their place. With a magician’s flourish, Hall begins by removing from his bag what looks like a black wand. He snaps his wrist and—voilà!—out bursts a plume of dark feathers. And not just any feathers, he reveals. “These are... Male. Ostrich. Feathers.” This $21.99 feather duster is the best on the market, he tells them in a soft-spoken but sonorous voice. It’s perfect for cleaning picture frames, blinds, and any other item whose crevices accumulate dust. Penelope Chronis, who runs the small immigration firm with her partner in law and in life, Elizabeth Kreher, peers up from her desk and shakes her head. Not interested. Hall shows her Kitchen Brush #300, a sturdy white and green scrub brush. They already have one. Onto Chronis’s desk he tosses some “microfiber cloths” and an “anti- fog cloth for car windows and bathroom mirrors.” No thanks. Hall is seventy-five years old with patches of white hair on the sides of his head and not much in between. He sports conservative eyeglasses and a mustache in which the white hairs have finally overtaken the brown ones after what looks like years of struggle. He wears dark brown pants, a dress shirt with thin blue stripes, a chestnut-colored V-neck sweater, and a red paisley bow tie. He looks like a dapper and mildly eccentric professor. He is indefatigable.  On his lap is a leather three-ring binder with about two dozen pages of product pictures he’s clipped and inserted into clear plastic sheets. “This is a straightforward spot remover,” he tells Chronis and Kreher when he gets to the laundry page. “These you spray on before throwing something into the washing machine.” The lawyers are unmoved. So Hall goes big: moth deodorant blocks. “I sell more of these than anything in my catalog combined,” he says. “They kill moths, mold, mildew, and odor.” Only $7.49. Nope. Then, turning the page to a collection of toilet brushes and bowl cleaners, he smiles, pauses for a perfect beat, and says, “And these are my romantic items.” Still nothing. But when he gets to the stainless-steel sponges, he elicits a crackle of interest that soon becomes a ripple of desire. “These are wonderful, very unusual. They’re scrubber pads, but with a great difference,” he says. Each offers eight thousand inches of continuous stainless steel coiled forty thousand times. You can stick them in the dishwasher. A box of three is just $15. Sold. Soon he reaches one of his pricier products, an electrostatic carpet sweeper. “It has four terminal brushes made out of natural bristle and nylon. As it goes along the floor, it develops a static current so it can pick up sugar and salt from a bare wood floor,” he explains. “It’s my favorite wedding gift.” Another exquisitely timed pause. “It beats the hell out of a toaster.” Chronis and Kreher go for that, too. When about twenty minutes have elapsed, and Hall has reached the final sheet in his homemade catalog, he scribbles the $149.96 sale in his order book. He hands a carbon copy of the order to Chronis, saying, “I hope we’re still friends after you read this.” He chats for a few moments, then gathers his binder and his bags, and rises to leave. “Thank you very much indeed,” he says. “I’ll bring everything forthwith tomorrow.” Norman Hall is a Fuller Brush salesman. And not just any Fuller Brush salesman. He is... The. Last. One.  — If you’re younger than forty or never spent much time in the United States, you might not recognize the Fuller Brush Man. But if you’re an American of a certain age, you know that once you couldn’t avoid him. Brigades of salesmen, their sample cases stuffed with brushes, roamed middle-class neighborhoods, climbed the front steps, and announced, “I’m your Fuller Brush Man.” Then, offering a free vegetable scrubber known as a Handy Brush as a gift, they tried to get what quickly became known as “a foot in the door.” It all began in 1903, when an eighteen-year-old Nova Scotia farm boy named Alfred Fuller arrived in Boston to begin his career. He was, by his own admission, “a country bumpkin, overgrown and awkward, unsophisticated and virtually unschooled”1—and he was promptly fired from his first three jobs. But one of his brothers landed him a sales position at the Somerville Brush and Mop Company—and days before he turned twenty, young Alfred found his calling. “I began without much preparation and I had no special qualifications, as far as I knew,” he told a journalist years later, “but I discovered I could sell those brushes.”2 After a year of trudging door-to-door peddling Somerville products, Fuller began, er, bristling at working for someone else. So he set up a small workshop to manufacture brushes of his own. At night, he oversaw the mini-factory. By day he walked the streets selling what he’d produced. To his amazement, the small enterprise grew. When he needed a few more salespeople to expand to additional products and new territories, he placed an ad in a publication called Everybody’s Magazine. Within a few weeks, the Nova Scotia bumpkin had 260 new salespeople, a nationwide business, and the makings of a cultural icon. By the late 1930s, Fuller’s sales force had swelled to more than five thousand people. In 1937 alone, door-to-door Fuller dealers gave away some 12.5 million Handy Brushes. By 1948, eighty-three hundred North American salesmen were selling cleaning and hair “brushes to 20 million families in the United States and Canada,” according to The New Yorker. That same year, Fuller salesmen, all of them independent dealers working on straight commission, made nearly fifty million house-to-house sales calls in the United States—a country that at the time had fewer than forty-three million households. By the early 1960s, Fuller Brush was, in today’s dollars, a billion-dollar company.3 What’s more, the Fuller Man became a fixture in popular culture— Lady Gagaesque in his ubiquity. In the Disney animated version of “The Three Little Pigs,” which won an Academy Award in 1933, how did the Big Bad Wolf try to gain entry into the pigs’ houses? He disguised himself as a Fuller Brush Man. How did Donald Duck earn his living for a while? He sold Fuller Brushes. In 1948 Red Skelton, then one of Hollywood’s biggest names, starred in The Fuller Brush Man, a screwball comedy in which a hapless salesman is framed for a crime—and must clear his name, find the culprit, win the girl, and sell a few Venetian blind brushes along the way. Just two years later, Hollywood made essentially the same movie with the same plot—this one called The Fuller Brush Girl, with the lead role going to Lucille Ball, an even bigger star. As time went on, you could find the Fuller Brush Man not only on your doorstep, but also in New Yorker cartoons, the jokes of TV talk-show hosts, and the lyrics of Dolly Parton songs. What a Fuller Man did was virtuosic. “The Fuller art of opening doors was regarded by connoisseurs of cold-turkey peddling in somewhat the same way that balletomanes esteem a performance of the Bolshoi—as pure poetry,” American Heritage wrote. “In the hands of a deft Fuller dealer, brushes became not homely commodities but specialized tools obtainable nowhere else.”4 Yet he* was also virtuous, his constant presence in neighborhoods turning him neighborly. “Fuller Brush Men pulled teeth, massaged headaches, delivered babies, gave emetics for poison, prevented suicides, discovered murders, helped arrange funerals, and drove patients to hospitals.”5 And then, with the suddenness of an unexpected knock on the door, the Fuller Brush Man—the very embodiment of twentieth-century selling— practically disappeared. Think about it. Wherever in the world you live, when was the last time a salesperson with a sample case rang your doorbell? In February 2012, the Fuller Brush Company filed for reorganization under the U.S. bankruptcy law’s Chapter 11. But what surprised people most wasn’t so much that Fuller had declared bankruptcy, but that it was still around to declare anything.  Norman Hall, however, remains at it. In the mornings, he boards an early bus near his home in Rohnert Park, California, and rides ninety minutes to downtown San Francisco. He begins his rounds at about 9:30 A.M. and walks five to six miles each day, up and down the sharply inclined streets of San Francisco. “Believe me,” he said during one of the days I accompanied him, “I know all the level areas and the best bathrooms.” When Hall began in the 1970s, several dozen other Fuller Brush Men were also working in San Francisco. Over time, that number dwindled. And now Hall is the only one who remains. These days when he encounters a new customer and identifies himself as a Fuller Man, he’s often met with surprise. “No kidding!” people will say. One afternoon when I was with him, Hall introduced himself to the fifty-something head of maintenance at a clothing store. “Really?” the man cried. “My father was a Fuller Brush salesman in Oklahoma!” (Alas, this prospect didn’t buy anything, even though Hall pointed out that the mop propped in the corner of the store came from Fuller.) After forty years, Hall has a garage full of Fuller items, but his connection to the struggling parent company is minimal. He’s on his own. In recent years, he’s seen his customers fade, his orders decline, and his profits shrink. People don’t have time for a salesman. They want to order things online. And besides, brushes? Who cares? As an accommodation to reality, Hall has cut back the time he devotes to chasing customers. He now spends only two days a week toting his leather binder through San Francisco’s retail and business district. And when he unloads his last boar bristle brush and hangs up his bow tie, he knows he won’t be replaced. “I don’t think people want to do this kind of work anymore,” he told me. Two months after Fuller’s bankruptcy announcement, Encyclopædia Britannica, which rose to prominence because of its door-to-door salesmen, shut down production of its print books. A month later, Avon—whose salesladies once pressed doorbells from Birmingham to Bangkok—fired its CEO and sought survival in the arms of a corporate suitor. These collapses seemed less startling than inevitable, the final movement in the chorus of doom that, for many years, has been forecasting selling’s demise. The song, almost always invoking Arthur Miller’s 1949 play Death of a Salesman, goes something like this: In a world where anybody can find anything with just a few keystrokes, intermediaries like salespeople are superfluous. They merely muck up the gears of commerce and make transactions slower and more expensive. Individual consumers can do their own research and get buying advice from their social networks. Large companies can streamline their procurement processes with sophisticated software that pits vendors against one another and secures the lowest price. In the same way that cash machines thinned the ranks of bank tellers and digital switches made telephone operators all but obsolete, today’s technologies have rendered salesmen and saleswomen irrelevant. As we rely ever more on websites and smartphones to locate and purchase what we need, salespeople themselves—not to mention the very act of selling— will be swept into history’s dustbin.6 Norman Hall is, no doubt, the last of his kind. And the Fuller Brush Company itself could be gone for good before you reach the last page of this book. But we should hold off making any wider funeral preparations. All those death notices for sales and those who do it are off the mark. Indeed, if one were to write anything about selling in the second decade of the twenty-first century, it ought to be a birth announcement. Rebirth of a Salesman (and Saleswoman) Deep inside a thick semiannual report from the Occupational Employment Statistics program of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics lurks a surprising, and surprisingly significant, piece of data: One out of every nine American workers works in sales. Each day more than fifteen million people earn their keep by trying to convince someone else to make a purchase.7 They are real estate brokers, industrial sales representatives, and securities dealers. They sell planes to airlines, trains to city governments, and automobiles to prospective drivers at more than ten thousand dealerships across the country. Some work in posh offices with glorious views, others in dreary cubicles with Dilbert cartoons and a free calendar. But they all sell—from multimillion-dollar consulting agreements to ten-dollar magazine subscriptions and everything in between. Consider: The United States manufacturing economy, still the largest in the world, cranks out nearly $2 trillion worth of goods each year. But the United States has far more salespeople than factory workers. Americans love complaining about bloated governments—but America’s sales force outnumbers the entire federal workforce by more than 5 to 1. The U.S. private sector employs three times as many salespeople as all fifty state governments combined employ people. If the nation’s salespeople lived in a single state, that state would be the fifth-largest in the United States.8 The presence of so many salespeople in the planet’s largest economy seems peculiar given the two seismic economic events of the last decade— the implosion of the global financial system and the explosion of widespread Internet connectivity. To be sure, sales, like almost every other type of work, was caught in the downdraft of the Great Recession. Between 2006 and 2010, some 1.1 million U.S. sales jobs disappeared. Yet even after the worst downturn in a half-century, sales remains the second-largest occupational category (behind office and administration workers) in the American workforce, just as it has been for decades. What’s more, the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that the United States will add nearly two million new sales jobs by 2020. Likewise, the Internet has not had nearly the effect on sales that many predicted. Between 2000 and today, the very period that broadband, smartphones, and e-commerce ascended to disintermediate salespeople and obviate the need for selling, the total number of sales jobs increased and the portion of the U.S. workforce in sales has remained exactly the same: 1 in 9.9 What holds for the United States holds equally for the rest of the world. For example, in Canada, “sales and service occupations”—a broader category than the United States uses—constitute slightly more than 25 percent of the Canadian workforce. Australian Bureau of Statistics census data show that about 10 percent of Australia’s labor force falls under the heading “sales workers.” In the United Kingdom, which uses yet another set of occupation categories, adding up the jobs that involve selling (for example, “sales accounts and business development managers” and “vehicle and parts salespersons or advisers” and so on) totals about three million workers out of a workforce of roughly thirty million—or again, about 1 in 10. In the entire European Union, the figure is slightly higher.10 According to the most recent available data along with calculations by officials at Eurostat, the EU’s statistical agency, about 13 percent of the region’s more than two-hundred-million-person labor force works in sales.11 Meanwhile, Japan employed nearly 8.6 million “sales workers” in 2010, the last year for which data are available. With almost 63 million people in the total workforce, that means more than 1 out of 8 workers in the world’s third-largest economy is in sales.12 For India and China, larger countries but less developed markets, data are harder to come by. Their portion of salespeople is likely smaller relative to North America, Europe, and Japan, in part because a large proportion of people in these countries still work in agriculture.13 But as India and China grow wealthier, and hundreds of millions more of their citizens join the middle class, the need for salespeople will inevitably expand. To cite just one example, McKinsey & Company projects that India’s growing pharmaceutical industry will triple its cadre of drug representatives to 300,000 employees by 2020.14 Taken together, the data show that rather than decline in relevance and size, sales has remained a stalwart part of labor markets around the world. Even as advanced economies have transformed—from hard goods and heavy lifting to skilled services and conceptual thinking—the need for salespeople has not abated. But that’s merely the beginning of the story. The Rise of Non-Sales Selling The men and women who operate the world’s statistical agencies are among the unsung heroes of the modern economy. Each day they gather bushels of data, which they scrutinize, analyze, and transform into reports that help the rest of us understand what’s going on in our industries, our job markets, and our lives. Yet these dedicated public servants are also limited—by budgets, by politics, and, most of all, by the very questions they ask. So while the idea that 1 in 9 American workers sells for a living might surprise you, I wondered whether it masked a still more intriguing truth. For instance, I’m not a “sales worker” in the categorical sense. Yet, as I wrote in the Introduction, when I sat down to deconstruct my own workdays, I discovered that I spend a sizable portion of them selling in a broader sense —persuading, influencing, and convincing others. And I’m not special. Physicians sell patients on a remedy. Lawyers sell juries on a verdict. Teachers sell students on the value of paying attention in class. Entrepreneurs woo funders, writers sweet-talk producers, coaches cajole players. Whatever our profession, we deliver presentations to fellow employees and make pitches to new clients. We try to convince the boss to loosen up a few dollars from the budget or the human resources department to add more vacation days. Yet none of this activity ever shows up in the data tables. The same goes for what transpires on the other side of the ever murkier border between work and life. Many of us now devote a portion of our spare time to selling—whether it’s handmade crafts on Etsy, heartfelt causes on DonorsChoose, or harebrained schemes on Kickstarter. And in astonishing numbers and with ferocious energy, we now go online to sell ourselves—on Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, and Match.com profiles. (Remember: None of the six entities I just mentioned existed ten years ago.) The conventional view of economic behavior is that the two most important activities are producing and consuming. But today, much of what we do also seems to involve moving. That is, we’re moving other people to part with resources—whether something tangible like cash or intangible like effort or attention—so that we both get what we want. Trouble is, there are no data to either confirm or refute this suspicion—because it involves questions that no statistical agency is asking. So I set out to fill the void. Working with Qualtrics, a fast-growing research and data analytics company, I commissioned a survey to try to uncover how much time and energy people are devoting to moving others, including what we can think of as non-sales selling—selling that doesn’t involve anyone making a purchase.  This study, dubbed the What Do You Do at Work? survey, was a comprehensive undertaking. Using some sophisticated research tools, we gathered data from 9,057 respondents around the world. Statisticians at Qualtrics reviewed the responses, disregarded invalid or incomplete surveys, and assessed the sample size and composition to see how well it reflected the population. Because the number of non-U.S. respondents turned out not to be large enough to draw statistically sound conclusions, I’ve limited much of the analysis to an adjusted sample of more than seven thousand adult full-time workers in the United States. The results have statistical validity similar to those of the surveys conducted by the major opinion research firms that you might read about during election seasons. (For example, Gallup’s tracking polls typically sample about 1,000 respondents.)15 Two main findings emerged: 1. People are now spending about 40 percent of their time at work engaged in non-sales selling—persuading, influencing, and convincing others in ways that don’t involve anyone making a purchase. Across a range of professions, we are devoting roughly twenty-four minutes of every hour to moving others. 2. People consider this aspect of their work crucial to their professional success—even in excess of the considerable amount of time they devote to it.* Here’s a bit more detail about what we found and how we found it: I began by asking respondents to think about their last two weeks of work and what they did for their largest blocks of time. Big surprise: Reading and responding to e-mail topped the list—followed by having face- to-face conversations and attending meetings. We then asked people to think a bit more deeply about the actual content of those experiences. I presented a series of choices and asked them, “Regardless of whether you were using e-mail, phone, or face-to-face conversations, how much time did you devote to” each of the following: “processing information,” “selling a product or a service,” and other activities? Respondents reported spending the most time “processing information.” But close behind were three activities at the heart of non-sales selling. Nearly 37 percent of respondents said they devoted a significant amount of time to “teaching, coaching, or instructing others.” Thirty-nine percent said the same about “serving clients or customers.” And nearly 70 percent reported that they spent at least some of their time “persuading or convincing others.” What’s more, non-sales selling turned out to be far more prevalent than selling in the traditional sense. When we asked how much time they put in “selling a product or service,” about half of respondents said “no time at all.” Later in the survey was another question designed to probe for similar information and to assess the validity of the earlier query. This one gave respondents a “slider” that sat at 0 on a 100-point scale, which they could push to the right to indicate a percentage. We asked: “What percentage of your work involves convincing or persuading people to give up something they value for something you have?” The average reply among all respondents: 41 percent. This average came about in an interesting way. A large cluster of respondents reported numbers in the 15 to 20 percent range, while a smaller but significant cluster reported numbers in the 70 to 80 percent range. In other words, many people are spending a decent amount of time trying to move others— but for some, moving others is the mainstay of their jobs. Most of us are movers; some of us are super-movers. Equally important, nearly everyone considered this aspect of their work one of the most critical components in their professional success. For instance, respondents spent the most time on “processing information.” Yet when they listed the tasks that were most vital in doing their job well, they ranked “serving clients and customers” and “teaching, coaching, and instructing others” higher. In addition, even though most people placed “pitching ideas” relatively low on the list of how they allocated their time, more than half of respondents said that this activity was important to their success. The graph below offers a way to understand the striking interplay between what people find valuable and what they actually do. On the vertical axis is a weighted index, based on survey responses, showing the level of importance assigned to non-sales selling tasks. On the horizontal axis is an index, again based on survey responses, showing how much time people actually spent on these tasks. Bisecting the chart on a diagonal is a line indicating a perfect match between time spent and importance. If an activity is plotted below that line, that indicates people are expending time on something that’s not commensurately important and presumably should be doing it less. If it’s above that line, they’re saying that the activity is so critical, they probably should be devoting even more time to it. Look where non-sales selling falls. It’s fairly high on time spent, but even higher on importance. What’s more, as demonstrated by the graph below, which breaks out respondents’ answers by age groups, the older someone is, and presumably the more experience that person has, the more she says that moving others occupies her days and determines her success.  The What Do You Do at Work? survey begins to provide a richer portrait of the twenty-first-century workforce, as exemplified by the world’s largest economy. The existing data show that 1 in 9 Americans works in sales. But the new data reveal something more startling: So do the other 8 in 9. They, too, are spending their days moving others and depending for their livelihoods on the ability to do it well. Whether it’s selling’s traditional form or its non-sales variation, we’re all in sales now. Without fully realizing it, each one of us is doing what Norman Hall has done for nearly half a century and what his Fuller predecessors did for more than a half-century before that. The salesperson isn’t dead. The salesperson is alive. Because the salesperson is us. Which raises a question: How did that happen? How did so many of us end up in the moving business?  2. Entrepreneurship, Elasticity, and Ed-Med In Chapter 7, you will learn something called the “Pixar pitch.” Built on the work of Hollywood’s famed animation studio, the technique involves offering a short summary of the point you’re trying to make, rendered in the narrative structure of a Pixar film. So, in the hope of modeling behavior I’ll later recommend, let me entice you into this chapter with a Pixar pitch. Once upon a time, only certain people were in sales. Every day, these folks sold stuff, the rest of us did stuff, and everyone was happy. One day, the world began to change. More of us started working for ourselves—and because we were entrepreneurs, suddenly we became salespeople, too. At the same time, large operations discovered that segmenting job functions didn’t work very well during volatile business conditions—and because of that, they began demanding elastic skills that stretched across boundaries and included a sales component. Meanwhile, the economy itself transformed so that in the blink of a decade, millions of additional people began working in education and health care—two sectors whose central purpose is moving others. Until finally, in ways we’ve scarcely realized, most of us ended up in sales. That’s the basic story. To understand it more deeply, let’s talk about pickles. Entrepreneurship It’s easy to poke fun at a place like Brooklyn Brine. The company sells artisanal pickled vegetables (no, really). It’s located in Brooklyn. And the people who work there freely use terms like “lavender asparagus,” “garlic scape,” and “vegan blogger.” But ventures like this—one owner, ten employees, fourteen varieties of pickle—are becoming an integral part of the current economy. In the process, they’re placing new importance on selling in all its dimensions. Brooklyn Brine embodies the first of three reasons why more of us find ourselves in sales: the rise of small entrepreneurs. When we think of the differences between very large enterprises and very small ones, we often focus on differences in degree. The former, by definition, have more revenue, more customers, and more employees. But equally important are differences in kind. What people actually do inside tiny operations is often fundamentally different from what they do within massive ones. In particular, large organizations tend to rely on specialization. A two-person company doesn’t need a human resources department. A two-thousand-person company can’t survive without one. In bigger companies, selling is often a specialized function—a department, a division, a task that some people do so that others can specialize in something else. But proprietors of small operations don’t have that luxury. They must wear several hats—often at the same time—and one of these hats is the selling cap. Shamus Jones, the founder of Brooklyn Brine, calls himself a “reluctant capitalist.” He started his career as a chef, grew disenchanted with the restaurant industry, and three years ago ventured out on his own to turn his sometime practice of pickling seasonal vegetables into a full-time business. Without any background in production, operations, or management, he began experimenting with pickle recipes in a restaurateur friend’s commercial kitchen from ten at night until eight in the morning. Word spread—you’ll now find Brooklyn Brine jars on the shelves of high- end food shops in the United States and Asia—and today Jones spends his time moving product and moving others. He works seven days a week meeting distributors, telling the company’s story, and trying to convince stores to stock his wares. When he’s back at his factory-cum-storefront, he says his job is to influence employees—so they do their jobs with zeal and with skill. “I want everyone to be happy. I want everyone to be stoked to come into work.” He hopes to make money, but that’s not the only point. “I want to put out an honest product in an honest company,” and that demands traditional selling and non-sales selling in equal measure. Such is the life of a small entrepreneur. Instead of doing one thing, he must do everything. And everything inevitably involves a lot of moving.  To be sure, the world economy includes plenty of planet-straddling behemoths—companies so enormous that they often have more in common with nation-states than with private firms. But the last decade has also witnessed a substantial increase in very small enterprises—not only those like Brooklyn Brine that offer products, but one- or two-person outfits that sell services, creativity, and expertise. Consider: The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that the American economy has more than twenty-one million “non-employer” businesses—operations without any paid employees. These include everything from electricians to computer consultants to graphic designers. Although these microenterprises account for only a modest portion of America’s gross domestic product, they now constitute the majority of businesses in the United States.1 The research firm IDC estimates that 30 percent of American workers now work on their own and that by 2015, the number of nontraditional workers worldwide (freelancers, contractors, consultants, and the like) will reach 1.3 billion.2 The sharpest growth will be in North America, but Asia is expected to add more than six hundred million new soloists in that same period. Some analysts project that in the United States, the ranks of these independent entrepreneurs may grow by sixty-five million in the rest of the decade and could become a majority of the American workforce by 2020. One reason is the influence of the eighteen-to-thirty-four- year-old generation as it takes a more prominent economic role. According to research by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, 54 percent of this age cohort either wants to start their own business or has already done so.3 In sixteen Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries—including France, Mexico, and Sweden—more than 90 percent of businesses now have fewer than ten employees. In addition, the percentage of people who are either a “nascent entrepreneur or owner-manager of a new business” is far higher in markets such as China, Thailand, and Brazil than in the United States or the United Kingdom.4  In our What Do You Do at Work? survey, we asked a question designed to probe the issue of micro-entrepreneurship, phrasing it in a way that recognized that many people today earn a living through multiple sources: “Do you work for yourself or run your own business, even on the side?” Thirty-eight percent of respondents answered yes. Given these numbers, “Instead of rolling our eyes at self-conscious Brooklyn hipsters pickling everything in sight, we might look to them as guides to the future of the... economy,” says New York Times Magazine columnist Adam Davidson.5 Harvard University’s Lawrence Katz, perhaps the top labor economist of his generation, agrees. He projects that middle- class employment of the future won’t be employees of large organizations, but self-sufficient “artisans.”6 Whether we call them artisans, non-employer businesses, free agents, or micro-entrepreneurs, these women and men are selling all the time. They’re packaging pickles for customers, of course. But because they’re responsible for the entire operation, not merely one facet of it, they’re enticing business partners, negotiating with suppliers, and motivating employees. Their industry may be gourmet food or legal services or landscaping—but they’re all in the moving business. One essential—and ultimately ironic—reason for this development: The technologies that were supposed to make salespeople obsolete in fact have transformed more people into sellers. Consider Etsy, an online marketplace for small businesses and craftspeople. Begun with essentially no outside investment in 2005, Etsy now has more than 875,000 active online shops that together sell upward of $400 million of goods each year.7 Before Etsy came along, the ability of craft makers to reach craft buyers was rather limited. But the Web—the very technology that seemed poised to topple salespeople—knocked down barriers to entry for small entrepreneurs and enabled more of these craft makers to sell. Ditto for eBay. Some three- quarters of a million Americans now say that eBay serves as their primary or secondary source of income.8 Meanwhile, many entrepreneurs find fund- raising easier thanks to Kickstarter, which allows them to post the basics of their creative projects—films, music, visual art, fashion—and try to sell their ideas to funders. Since Kickstarter launched in 2009, 1.8 million people have funded twenty thousand projects with more than $200 million. In just three years, Kickstarter surpassed the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts as the largest backer of arts projects in the United States.9 While the Web has enabled more micro-entrepreneurs to flourish, its overall impact might soon seem quaint compared with the smartphone. As Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist who in the early 1990s created the first Web browser, has said, “The smartphone revolution is underhyped.”10 These handheld minicomputers certainly can destroy certain aspects of sales. Consumers can use them to conduct research, comparison-shop, and bypass salespeople altogether. But once again, the net effect is more creative than destructive. The same technology that renders certain types of salespeople obsolete has turned even more people into potential sellers. For instance, the existence of smartphones has birthed an entire app economy that didn’t exist before 2007, when Apple shipped its first iPhone. Now the production of apps itself is responsible for nearly half a million jobs in the United States alone, most of them created by bantamweight entrepreneurs.11 Likewise, an array of new technologies, such as Square from one of the founders of Twitter, PayHere from eBay, and GoPayment from Intuit, make it easier for individuals to accept credit card payments directly on their mobile devices—allowing anyone with a phone to become a shopkeeper. The numbers are staggering. According to MIT’s Technology Review, “In 1982, there were 4.6 billion people in the world, and not a single mobile-phone subscriber. Today, there are seven billion people in the world —and six billion mobile cellular-phone subscriptions.”12 Cisco predicts that by 2016, the world will have more smartphones (again, handheld minicomputers) than human beings—ten billion in all.13 And much of the action will be outside North America and Europe, powered “by youth- oriented cultures in... the Middle East and Africa.”14 When everyone, not just those in Tokyo and London but also those in Tianjin and Lagos, carries around her own storefront in her pocket—and is just a tap away from every other storefront on the planet—being an entrepreneur, for at least part of one’s livelihood, could become the norm rather than the exception. And a world of entrepreneurs is a world of salespeople. Elasticity Now meet another guy who runs a company—Mike Cannon-Brookes. His business, Atlassian, is older and much larger than Brooklyn Brine. But what’s happening inside is both consistent with and connected to its tinier counterpart. Atlassian builds what’s called “enterprise software”—large, complex packages that businesses and governments use to manage projects, track progress, and foster collaboration among employees. Launched a decade ago by Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar upon their graduation from Australia’s University of New South Wales, Atlassian now has some twelve hundred customers in fifty-three countries—among them Microsoft, Air New Zealand, Samsung, and the United Nations. Its revenue last year was $100 million. But unlike most of its competitors, Atlassian collected that entire amount—$100,000,000.00 in sales—without a single salesperson. Selling without a sales force sounds like confirmation of the “death of a salesman” meme. But Cannon-Brookes, the company’s CEO, sees it differently. “We have no salespeople,” he told me, “because in a weird way, everyone is a salesperson.” Enter the second reason we’re all in sales now: Elasticity—the new breadth of skills demanded by established companies. Cannon-Brookes draws a distinction between “products people buy” and “products people are sold”—and he prefers the former. Take, for instance, how the relationship between Atlassian and its customers begins. In most enterprise software companies, a company salesperson visits potential customers prospecting for new business. Not at Atlassian. Here potential customers typically initiate the relationship themselves by downloading a trial version of one of the company’s products. Some of them then call Atlassian’s support staff with questions. But the employees who offer support, unlike a traditional sales force, don’t tempt callers with fast-expiring discounts or badger them to make a long-term commitment. Instead, they simply help people understand the software, knowing that the value and elegance of their assistance can move wavering buyers to make a purchase. The same goes for engineers. Their job, of course, is to build great software—but that demands more than just slinging code. It also requires discovering customers’ needs, understanding how the products are used, and building something so unique and exciting that someone will be moved to buy. “We try to espouse the philosophy that everyone the customer touches is effectively a salesperson,” says Cannon-Brookes.  At Atlassian, sales—in this case, traditional sales—isn’t anyone’s job. It’s everyone’s job. And that paradoxical arrangement is becoming more common. Palantir is an even larger company. Based in Palo Alto, California, with offices around the world, it develops software that helps intelligence agencies, the military, and law enforcement integrate and analyze their data to combat terrorism and crime. Although Palantir sells more than a quarter- billion dollars’ worth of its software each year, it doesn’t have any salespeople either. Instead, it relies on what it calls “forward-deployed engineers.” These techies don’t create the company’s products—at least not at first. They’re out in the field, interacting directly with customers and making sure the product is meeting their needs. Ordinarily, that sort of job —handholding the customer, ensuring he’s happy—would go to an account executive or someone from the sales division. But Shyam Sankar, who directs Palantir’s band of forward-deployed engineers, has at least one objection to that approach. “It doesn’t work,” he told me. The more effective arrangement, he says, is “to put real computer scientists in the field.” That way, those experts can report back to home- base engineers on what’s working and what’s not and suggest ways to improve the product. They can tackle the customer’s problems on the spot —and, most important, begin to identify new problems the client might not know it has. Interacting with customers around problems isn’t selling per se. But it sells. And it forces engineers to rely on more than technical abilities. To help its engineers develop such elasticity, the company doesn’t offer sales training or march recruits through an elaborate sales process. It simply requires every new hire to read two books. One is a nonfiction account of the September 11 attacks, so they’re better attuned to what happens when governments can’t make sense of information; the other is a British drama instructor’s guide to improvisational acting, so they understand the importance of nimble minds and limber skills.* In short, even people inside larger operations like Atlassian and Palantir must work more like the shape-shifting pickle-maker Shamus Jones. This marks a significant change in the way we do business. When organizations were highly segmented, skills tended to be fixed. If you were an accountant, you did accounting. You didn’t have to worry about much outside your domain because other people specialized in those areas. The same was true when business conditions were stable and predictable. You knew at the beginning of a given quarter, or even a given year, about how much and what kind of accounting you’d need to do. However, in the last decade, the circumstances that gave rise to fixed skills have disappeared. A decade of intense competition has forced most organizations to transform from segmented to flat (or at least, flatter). They do the same, if not greater, amounts of work than before—but they do it with fewer people who are doing more, and more varied, things. Meantime, underlying conditions have gone from predictable to tumultuous. Inventors with new technologies and upstart competitors with fresh business models regularly capsize individual companies and reconfigure entire industries. Research In Motion, maker of the BlackBerry, is a legend one day and a laggard the next. Retail video rental is a cash cow—until Netflix carves the industry into flank steak. All the while, the business cycle itself swooshes without much warning from unsustainable highs to unbearable lows like some satanic roller coaster. A world of flat organizations and tumultuous business conditions—and that’s our world—punishes fixed skills and prizes elastic ones. What an individual does day to day on the job now must stretch across functional boundaries. Designers analyze. Analysts design. Marketers create. Creators market. And when the next technologies emerge and current business models collapse, those skills will need to stretch again in different directions. As elasticity of skills becomes more common, one particular category of skill it seems always to encompass is moving others. Valerie Coenen, for instance, is a terrestrial ecologist for an environmental consulting firm in Edmonton, Alberta. Her work requires high-level and unique technical skills, but that’s only the start. She also must submit proposals to prospective clients, pitch her services, and identify both existing and potential problems that she and her firm can solve. Plus, she told me, “You must also be able to sell your services within the company.” Or take Sharon Twiss, who lives and works one Canadian province to the west. She’s a content strategist working on redesigning the website for a large organization in Vancouver. But regardless of the formal requirements of her job, “Almost everything I do involves persuasion,” she told me. She convinces “project managers that a certain fix of the software is a priority,” cajoles her colleagues to abide by the site’s style guide, trains content providers “about how to use the software and to follow best practices,” even works to “get my own way about where we’re going for lunch.” As she explains, “People who don’t have the power or authority from their job title have to find other ways to exert power.” Elasticity of skills has even begun reshaping job titles. Timothy Shriver Jr. is an executive at The Future Project, a nonprofit that connects secondary school students with interesting projects to adults who can coach them. His work reaches across different areas—marketing, digital media, strategy, branding, partnerships. But, he says, “The common thread is activating people to move.” His title? Chief Movement Officer. And even those higher on the org chart find themselves stretching. For instance, I asked Gwynne Shotwell, president of the private space transportation firm Space Exploration Technologies Corporation (SpaceX), how many days each week she deals with selling on top of her operational and managerial duties. “Every day,” she told me, “is a sales day.” Ed-Med Larry Ferlazzo and Jan Judson are a husband and wife who live in Sacramento, California. They don’t pickle cucumbers or parse code. But they, too, represent the future. Ferlazzo is a high school teacher, Judson a nurse-practitioner—which means that they inhabit the fastest-growing job sector of the United States and other advanced economies. One way to understand what’s going on in the world of work is to look at the jobs people hold. That’s what the U.S. Occupational Employment Statistics program, which I cited here, does. Twice a year, it provides an analysis of twenty-two major occupational groups and nearly eight hundred detailed occupations. But another way to understand the current state and future prospects of the workforce is to look at the industries where those jobs emerge. For that, we go to the Monthly Employment Report—and it shows a rather remarkable trend. The chart below depicts what has happened so far this century to employment in four sectors—manufacturing, retail trade, professional and business services (which includes law, accounting, consulting, and so on), and education and health services.  While jobs in the manufacturing sector have been declining for forty years, as recently as the late 1990s the United States still employed more people in that sector than in professional and business services. About ten years ago, however, professional and business services took the lead. But their ascendance proved short-lived, because rising like a rocket was another sector, education and health services—or what I call Ed-Med. Ed- Med—which includes everyone from community college instructors to proprietors of test prep companies and from genetic counselors to registered nurses—is now, by far, the largest job sector in the U.S. economy, as well as a fast-growing sector in the rest of the world. In the United States, Ed-Med has generated significantly more new jobs in the last decade than all other sectors combined. And over the next decade, forecasters project, health care jobs alone will grow at double the rate of any other sector.15 At its core, Ed-Med has a singular mission. “As teachers, we want to move people,” Ferlazzo, who teaches English and social studies in Sacramento’s largest inner-city high school, told me. “Moving people is the majority of what we do in health care,” added his nurse-practitioner wife. Education and health care are realms we often associate with caring, helping, and other softer virtues, but they have more in common with the sharp-edged world of selling than we realize. To sell well is to convince someone else to part with resources—not to deprive that person, but to leave him better off in the end. That is also what, say, a good algebra teacher does. At the beginning of a term, students don’t know much about the subject. But the teacher works to convince his class to part with resources—time, attention, effort—and if they do, they will be better off when the term ends than they were when it began. “I never thought of myself as a salesman, but I have come to the realization that we all are,” says Holly Witt Payton, a sixth-grade science teacher in Louisiana. “I’m selling my students that the science lesson I’m teaching them is the most interesting thing ever,” which is something Payton firmly believes. The same is true in health care. For instance, a physical therapist helping someone recover from injury needs that person to hand over resources— again, time, attention, and effort—because doing so, painful though it can be, will leave the patient healthier than if he’d kept the resources to himself. “Medicine involves a lot of salesmanship,” says one internist who prefers not to be named. “I have to talk people into doing some fairly unpleasant things.”16 Of course, teaching and healing aren’t the same as selling electrostatic carpet sweepers. The outcomes are different. A healthy and educated population is a public good, something that is valuable in its own right and from which we all benefit. A new carpet sweeper or gleaming Winnebago, not so much. The process can be different, too. “The challenge,” says Ferlazzo, “is that to move people a large distance and for the long term, we have to create the conditions where they can move themselves.” Ferlazzo makes a distinction between “irritation” and “agitation.” Irritation, he says, is “challenging people to do something that we want them to do.” By contrast, “agitation is challenging them to do something that they want to do.” What he has discovered throughout his career is that “irritation doesn’t work.” It might be effective in the short term. But to move people fully and deeply requires something more—not looking at the student or the patient as a pawn on a chessboard but as a full participant in the game. This principle of moving others relies on a different set of capabilities —in particular, the qualities of attunement, which I’ll explore in Chapter 4, and clarity, which I’ll cover in Chapter 6. “It’s about leading with my ears instead of my mouth,” Ferlazzo says. “It means trying to elicit from people what their goals are for themselves and having the flexibility to frame what we do in that context.”  For example, in his ninth-grade class last year, after finishing a unit on natural disasters, Ferlazzo asked his students to write an essay about the natural disaster they considered the very worst. One of his students— Ferlazzo calls him “John”—refused. This wasn’t the first time he had done so, either. John had struggled throughout school and had written very little. But he still hoped eventually to graduate. Ferlazzo told John that he wanted him to graduate, too, but that graduation was unlikely if he couldn’t write an essay. “I then told him that I knew from previous conversations that he was on the football team and liked football,” Ferlazzo said. “I asked him what his favorite football team was. He looked a little taken aback since it seemed off topic—it looked like he had been expecting a lecture. ‘The Raiders,’ he replied. Okay, then, what was his least favorite team? ‘The Giants.’” So Ferlazzo asked him to write an essay showing why the Raiders were superior to the Giants. John stayed on task, said Ferlazzo, asked “thoughtful and practical questions,” and turned in a “decent essay.” Then John asked to write another essay—this one about basketball—to make up for previous essays he hadn’t bothered to do. Ferlazzo said yes. John delivered another pretty good piece of written work. “Later that week, in a parent-teacher conference with all of his teachers, John’s mother cried when I showed her the two essays. She said he’d never written one before” during his previous nine years of schooling. Ferlazzo says he “used agitation to challenge him on the idea of graduating from high school and I used my ears knowing that he was interested in football.” Ferlazzo’s aim wasn’t to force John to write about natural disasters but to help him develop writing skills. He convinced John to give up resources—ego and effort—and that helped John move himself. Ferlazzo’s wife—the Med to his Ed—sees something similar with her patients. “The model of health care is ‘We’re the experts.’ We go in and tell you what to do.” But she has found, and both experience and evidence confirm, that this approach has its limits. “We need to take a step back and bring [patients] on board,” she told me. “People usually know themselves way better than I do.” So now, in order to move people to move themselves, she tells them, “I need your expertise.” Patients heal faster and better when they’re part of the moving process. Health care and education both revolve around non-sales selling: the ability to influence, to persuade, and to change behavior while striking a balance between what others want and what you can provide them. And the rising prominence of this dual sector is potentially transformative. Since novelist Upton Sinclair coined the term around 1910, and sociologist C. Wright Mills made it widespread forty years later, experts and laypeople alike have talked about “white-collar” workers. But now, as populations age and require more care and as economies grow more complex and demand increased learning, a new type of worker is emerging. We may be entering something closer to a “white coat/white chalk” economy,17 where Ed-Med is the dominant sector and where moving others is at the core of how we earn a living. — Does all of this mean that you, too, are in the moving business—that entrepreneurship, elasticity, and Ed-Med have unwittingly turned you into a salesperson? Not necessarily. But you can find out by answering the following four questions: 1. Do you earn your living trying to convince others to purchase goods or services? If you answered yes, you’re in sales. (But you probably knew that already.) If you answered no, go to question 2. 2. Do you work for yourself or run your own operation, even on the side? If yes, you’re in sales—probably a mix of traditional sales and non-sales selling. If no, go to question 3. 3. Does your work require elastic skills—the ability to cross boundaries and functions, to work outside your specialty, and to do a variety of different things throughout the day? If yes, you’re almost certainly in sales—mostly non-sales selling with perhaps a mix of traditional sales now and then. If no, go to question 4. 4. Do you work in education or health care?  If yes, you’re in sales—the brave new world of non-sales selling. If no, and if you answered no to the first three questions, you’re not in sales. So where did you end up? My guess is that you found yourself where I found myself—living uneasily in a neighborhood you might have thought was for someone else. My guess, too, is that this makes you uncomfortable. We’ve seen movies like Glengarry Glen Ross and Tin Men, which depict sales as fueled by greed and founded on misdeed. We’ve been cornered by the fast-talking commissioned salesman urging us to sign on the line that is dotted. Sales—even when we give it a futuristic gloss like “non-sales selling”—carries a seamy reputation. And if you don’t believe me, turn to the next chapter so I can show you a picture.  3. From Caveat Emptor to Caveat Venditor What do people really think of sales? To find out, I turned to an effective, and often underused, methodology: I asked them. As part of the What Do You Do at Work? survey, I posed the following question to respondents: When you think of “sales” or “selling,” what’s the first word that comes to mind? The most common answer was money, and the ten most frequent responses included words like “pitch,” “marketing,” and “persuasion.” But when I combed through the list and removed the nouns, most of which were value-neutral synonyms for “selling,” an interesting picture emerged. What you see below is a word cloud. It’s a graphic representation of the twenty-five adjectives and interjections people offered most frequently when prompted to think of “sales” or “selling,” with the size of each word reflecting how many respondents used it. For instance, “pushy” was the most frequent adjective or interjection (and the fourth-most-mentioned word overall), thus its impressive size. “Smarmy,” “essential,” and “important” are tinier because they were mentioned less often.  Adjectives and interjections can reveal people’s attitudes, since they often contain an emotional component that nouns lack. And the emotions elicited by “sales” or “selling” carry an unmistakable flavor. Of the twenty- five most offered words, only five have a positive valence (“necessary,” “challenging,” “fun,” “essential,” and “important”). The remainder are all negative. These negative words assemble into two camps. A few reflect people’s discomfort with selling (“tough,” “difficult,” “hard,” “painful”), but most reflect their distaste. Words like “pushy” and “aggressive” figure prominently, along with a batch of adjectives that suggest deception: “slimy,” “smarmy,” “sleazy,” “dishonest,” “manipulative,” and “fake.” This word cloud, a linguistic MRI of our brains contemplating sales, captures a common view. Selling makes many of us uncomfortable and even a bit disgusted (“ick,” “yuck,” “ugh”), in part because we believe that its practice revolves around duplicity, dissembling, and double-dealing. To probe people’s impressions further, I asked a related question, one better suited to visual thinkers: When you think of “sales” or “selling,” what’s the first picture that comes to mind? (Respondents had to describe their picture in five or fewer words.) To my surprise, the responses—in overwhelming numbers—took a distinct form. They involved a man in a suit selling a car, generally a used one. Take a look at the resulting word cloud for the twenty-five most popular answers:  The top five responses, by a wide margin, were: “car salesman,” “suit,” “used-car salesman,” “man in a suit,” and our old friend, “pushy.” (The top ten also included both “car” and “used car” on their own.) The image that formed in respondents’ minds was uniformly male. The word “man” even made the top twenty-five. Very few people used the gender- neutral term “salesperson” and nobody answered “saleswoman.” Many respondents emphasized the sociable aspects of sales—with “outgoing,” “extrovert,” and “talker” all making the top twenty-five. Others settled on more metaphorical or literary images, including “shark” and “Willy Loman.” And some people still couldn’t resist offering adjectives: “slick,” “sleazy,” and “annoying.” It turns out that these two word clouds, taken together, can help us puncture one of the most pervasive myths about selling in all its forms. The beliefs embedded in that first image—that sales is distasteful because it’s deceitful—aren’t so much inherently wrong as they are woefully outdated. And the way to understand that is by pulling back the layers of that second image. Lemons and Other Sour Subjects In 1967, George Akerlof, a first-year economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote a thirteen-page paper that used economic theory and a handful of equations to examine a corner of the commercial world where few economists had dared to tread: the used-car market. The first two academic journals where young Akerlof submitted his paper rejected it because they “did not publish papers on topics of such triviality.”1 The third journal also turned down Akerlof’s study, but on different grounds. Its reviewers didn’t say his analysis was trivial; they said it was mistaken. Finally, two years after he’d completed the paper, The Quarterly Journal of Economics accepted it and in 1970 published “The Market for ‘Lemons’: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism.” Akerlof’s article went on to become one of the most cited economics papers of the last fifty years. In 2001, it earned him a Nobel Prize. In the paper, Akerlof identified a weakness in traditional economic reasoning. Most analyses in economics began by assuming that the parties to any transaction were fully informed actors making rational decisions in their own self-interest. The burgeoning field of behavioral economics has since called into question the second part of that assumption—that we’re all making rational decisions in our own self-interest. Akerlof took aim at the first part—that we’re fully informed. And he enlisted the used-car market for what he called “a finger exercise to illustrate and develop”2 his ideas. Cars for sale—he said, oversimplifying in the name of clarifying—fall into two categories: good and bad. Bad cars, what Americans call “lemons,” are obviously less desirable and therefore ought to be cheaper. Trouble is, with used cars, only the seller knows whether the vehicle is a lemon or a peach. The two parties confront “an asymmetry in available information.”3 One side is fully informed; the other is at least partially in the dark. Asymmetrical information creates all sorts of headaches. If the seller knows much more about the product than the buyer, the buyer understandably gets suspicious. What’s the seller concealing? Am I being hoodwinked? If the car is so great, why is he getting rid of it? As a result, the buyer might be willing to pay only very little—or perhaps forgo purchasing the car altogether. But Akerlof theorized that the problems could ripple further. Suppose I’ve got a used car that I know is a peach, and I decide to sell it. Buyers still treat me the same way they treat any seller—as a presumptive lemon peddler. What’s this guy Pink keeping secret? Is he bamboozling us? If the car is so peachy, why is he unloading it? One consequence is that as the seller, I settle for a price lower than the auto is worth. The other is that I give up and don’t even bother trying to sell my car. “Dishonest dealings tend to drive honest dealings out of the market,” Akerlof wrote. “The presence of people who wish to pawn bad wares as good wares tends to drive out the legitimate business.” And it’s not just autos, he said. The same reasoning applies to insurance, credit, or one’s own labor. When honest sellers opt out, the only ones who remain are the shysters and the charlatans—pushy guys in suits using sleazy tactics to stick you with a heap of junk. Ick. Of course, individuals and institutions have devised ways to make Akerlof’s commercial landscape less forbidding. Sellers offer warranties on their goods. Brand names provide some assurance of quality. Legislatures pass “lemon laws” to protect consumers. But most important, prospective purchasers are on notice. When sellers know more than buyers, buyers must beware. It’s no accident that people in the Americas, Europe, and Asia today often know only two words of Latin. In a world of information asymmetry, the guiding principle is caveat emptor—buyer beware. Akerlof’s provocative thought piece recast how economists and others reckoned with individual transactions and entire markets. So with this example as a model, let’s try another intellectual finger exercise. Imagine a world not of information asymmetry, but of something closer to information parity, where buyers and sellers have roughly equal access to relevant information. What would happen then? Actually, stop imagining that world. You’re living in it. Go back to used cars. In the United States today, a prospective purchaser of, say, a used Nissan Maxima can arm herself with all manner of relevant information before even approaching a seller. She can go online and find most of the places offering that particular car within a certain radius of her home, thereby giving her a wider set of choices. She can tap her social network or visit websites to discover each dealer’s reputation and whether previous customers have been satisfied. For individual sellers, she can spend fifteen minutes on a search engine checking the person’s bona fides. She can visit online forums to see what current Maxima owners think of the car. She can check Kelley Blue Book, Edmunds, or AutoTrader.com to find out the price used Maximas are going for. And once she sees a car she likes, she can take the auto’s Vehicle Identification Number and, with a quick online search, find out whether it’s been in accidents or had major repairs. She’s not fully protected from unethical sellers, of course. But if she encounters any dirty dealing, or ends up dissatisfied, she can do more than simply gripe to a neighbor. She can tell a few hundred Facebook friends, all her Twitter followers, and the readers of her blog—some of whom may pass her story on to their own networks, undermining the seller’s ability to deceive again. Now extend the realities of the market for used cars to the market for just about anything else. Buyers today aren’t “fully informed” in the idealized way that many economic models assume. But neither are they the hapless victims of asymmetrical information they once were. That’s why that first word cloud isn’t wrong. It’s just out of date. The belief that sales is slimy, slick, and sleazy has less to do with the nature of the activity itself than with the long- reigning but fast-fading conditions in which selling has often taken place. The balance has shifted. If you’re a buyer and you’ve got just as much information as the seller, along with the means to talk back, you’re no longer the only one who needs to be on notice. In a world of information parity, the new guiding principle is caveat venditor—seller beware. Finding Your Kowalskis Joe Girard might as well have parachuted down from that second word cloud, ready to do whatever it takes to put you in a Chevy Malibu this afternoon. He is the world’s greatest salesman. I know because he told me. Then he sent me a few pages from Guinness World Records testifying to his achievement and confirmed by a major accounting firm. In one year, he sold 1,425 cars at Merollis Chevrolet in Detroit. These weren’t fleet sales either. These were one-at-a-time, belly-to-belly sales—several cars every day for an entire year. It’s a remarkable achievement. So how did he do it? His book, How to Sell Anything to Anybody—whose cover claims “2 million copies in print!”—reveals the secrets, which he also shares with live audiences around the world. “I guarantee you that my system will work for you, if you understand and follow it,” he promises.4 The centerpiece is “Girard’s Rule of 250”—that each of us has 250 people in our lives we know well enough to invite to a wedding or a funeral. If you reach one person, and get her to like you and buy from you, she will connect you to others in her 250-person circle. Some of those people will do the same. And so on and so on in ever-widening cascades of influence. Girard advises us to “fill the seats on the Ferris wheel” with as many prospects as we can, to let them off the Ferris wheel for a while after they buy, and then to turn them into your “birddogs” by paying them $50 for every new sale they subsequently send you. “A Chevrolet sold by Joe Girard is not just a car,” he writes. “It is a whole relationship between me and the customer and his family and friends and the people he works with.”5 Alas, many of the techniques Girard recommends to establish that relationship invite the unsavory adjectives of that first word cloud. For instance, if prospects mention they’ve recently been on vacation somewhere, Girard will say that he’s been there, too. “Because wherever that guy has been, I have been. Even if I never heard of the place,” he writes. “A lot of people out there, maybe millions, have heard of me. And thousands have bought from me. They think they know a lot about me, because I know a lot about them. They think I have been to Yellowstone National Park. They think I have fished for salmon near Traverse City, Michigan. They think I have an aunt who lives near Selfridge Air Force base.”6 Take your pick: “dishonest,” “smarmy,” or “ugh.” Girard also describes in three lengthy but glorious paragraphs one of his favorite tactics for cold-calling prospective customers. It begins by choosing a name from the phone book and placing a call. Now a woman answers the phone. “Hello, Mrs. Kowalski. This is Joe Girard at Merollis Chevrolet. I just wanted to let you know that the car you ordered is ready,” I tell her. Now remember: this is a cold call, and all I know for sure from the phone book is the party’s name, address, and phone number. This Mrs. Kowalski doesn’t know what I’m talking about. “I’m afraid you have the wrong number. We haven’t ordered a new car,” she tells me. “Are you sure?” I ask. “Pretty sure. My husband would have told me,” she says. “Just a minute,” I say. “Is this the home of Clarence J. Kowalski?” “No. My husband’s name is Steven.”... “Gee, Mrs. Kowalski, I’m very sorry to have disturbed you at this hour of the day. I’m sure you’re very busy.” But Girard doesn’t let her go. He keeps her talking so he can bait the hook. “Mrs. Kowalski, you don’t happen to be in the market for a new car, do you?” If she knows they are, she’ll probably say yes. But  the typical answer will be: “I don’t think so, but you have to ask my husband.” There it is, what I’m looking for. “Oh, when can I reach him?” And she’ll say, “he’s usually home by 6.” Okay, I got what I wanted. “Well, fine, Mrs. Kowalski, I’ll call back then, if you’re sure I won’t be interrupting supper.” I wait for her to tell me they don’t eat until about six-thirty, and then I thank her. From there, Girard moves to the next stage. You know what I am going to be doing at six o’clock. That’s right. “Hello, Mr. Kowalski, this is Joe Girard at Merollis Chevrolet. I spoke to Mrs. Kowalski this morning and she suggested I call back at this time. I was wondering if you are in the market for a new Chevrolet?” “No,” he says, “not just yet.” So I ask, “Well, when do you think you might start looking at a new car?” I ask the question straight out, and he is going to think about it and give me an answer. Maybe he only wants to get rid of me. But whatever the reason what he says is probably going to be what he really means. It’s easier than trying to dream up a lie. “I guess I’ll be needing one in about 6 months,” he says, and I finish with: “Fine, Mr. Kowalski. I’ll be getting in touch with you then. Oh, by the way, what are you driving now?” He tells me, I thank him, and hang up.7 Girard files Mr. Kowalski’s name, along with a reminder in his calendar to call him, and moves to the next name on this list. “After the easy ones,” Girard writes, “there are many Kowalskis, if you keep searching.”8 That Girard found enough clueless Kowalskis to become the world’s greatest salesman—and that he remains out and about teaching sales skills —might seem to validate that information asymmetry and the ignoble tactics it allows are alive and well. But there’s one more thing you should know about Joe Girard. He hasn’t actually sold a car since 1977. He quit the business more than three decades ago to teach others how to sell. (The Deloitte & Touche audit his office sent me verifying his record is dated 1991 and covers a fifteen-year period beginning in 1963.) Girard’s techniques might have gleamed in the mid-1970s. But in the mid-2010s, they have the whiff of old boxes forgotten in the attic. After all, these days, Mrs. Kowalski is at work. Her household has caller ID to prevent telephonic intrusions. And if a salesman did circumvent her family’s defenses, she would dispatch him quickly, maybe Google his name afterward, and tell her Facebook friends about the creepy call she received that night. When I reached Girard by phone one afternoon* to ask how the world of sales had changed since he last commanded the showroom, he insisted that it hadn’t. The effect of the Internet? “That is junk. I don’t need that crap,” he told me. Now that consumers have ample access to information, how does that alter the sales process? “Not at all. There’s only one way. My way.” Could he be as successful on today’s landscape as he was in the 1970s? “Give me nine months and I’ll rule the world.” To be fair, much of what Girard advocates remains sensible and enduring. He’s a staunch advocate of service after the sale. “Service, service, service,” he told me during our conversation. He offers one of the clearest aphorisms on effective selling I’ve heard: “People want a fair deal from someone they like.” But more broadly, his worldview and his tactics resemble one of those old movies in which a soldier stuck on a remote island continues fighting because he hasn’t gotten word that the war has ended. Contrast that to Tammy Darvish. When Girard was selling Chevys in Detroit, Darvish was in primary school. Now she’s vice president of DARCARS Automotive Group, one of the largest auto dealers on the East Coast. If her home is any indication, the car business has been very good to her. The fifteen-thousand-square-foot manor where I sat down with her one afternoon contains a foyer that could double as an awesome basketball court. Darvish has dark hair that falls just past her shoulders. She’s petite, friendly, and semi-intense, though the intense part seems natural and the semi- an effort. Nobody in the survey pictured her when they conjured an image of sales. Darvish came to the industry the old-fashioned way: Her father owned automobile dealerships in the Washington, D.C., area. After graduating from Northwood University in Midland, Michigan, with a degree in automotive marketing, she began at the bottom, a junior sales consultant facing scorching skepticism. She was a twenty-year-old woman—the boss’s daughter, no less—in a heavily male field. In her first month, she outsold her peers and was named “salesman” of the month. Then she did it again in month two. A career was born. Nearly thirty years later, she has watched the decline of information asymmetry reshape her business. In the old days, customers drove from dealership to dealership collecting what intelligence they could. “Today most of that is done before they show up. And in many cases they are more educated than we are,” she said. “When I graduated from college, the factory invoice of a car was locked in a safe. We didn’t know the cost [of the cars we were selling]. Today, the customer is telling me.” When buyers can know more than sellers, sellers are no longer protectors and purveyors of information. They’re the curators and clarifiers of it—helping to make sense of the blizzard of facts, data, and options. “If a customer has any question at all,” Darvish told me, “I can say, ‘Let’s go to Chevy.com’” and figure out the answer together. She acknowledges that “when you go into a car dealer, you expect a plaid jacket and polyester pants.” But just as those questionable fashion choices have become outmoded, so have the skeezy practices they conjure. Indeed, much of what we believe about sales derives not from the inherent nature of selling but from the information asymmetry that long defined the context in which people sold. Once that asymmetry diminishes, and the seesaw rebalances, everything gets upended. For example, DARCARS has an unusual policy of rarely hiring experienced salespeople, who might have learned bad habits or acquired old-school perspectives. Likewise, Darvish believes that many sales training programs are “a little mechanical,” that they risk turning people into selling robots who recite memorized scripts on cue and try to steamroll customers into decisions. “We bring them in and we put them in a one-week training course that’s not just about sales. We talk about customer service and social media.” Most of all, what makes someone effective on this shifted terrain is different from the smooth-talking, backslapping, pocket-picking stereotype of the past. Darvish says the qualities she looks for most are persistence— and something for which a word never appeared in either of the word clouds: empathy. “You can’t train someone to care,” she told me. To her the ideal salespeople are those who ask themselves, “What decision would I make if that were my own mom sitting there trying to get service or buy a car?” It sounds noble. And maybe it is. But today, it’s how you sell cars.  Joe Girard is a reason why we had to live by caveat emptor. Tammy Darvish survives—and thrives—because she lives by caveat venditor. The decline of information asymmetry hasn’t ended all forms of lying, cheating, and other sleazebaggery. One glimpse of the latest financial shenanigans from Wall Street, the City, or Hong Kong confirms that unhappy fact. When the product is complicated—credit default swaps, anyone?—and the potential for lucre enormous, some people will strive to maintain information imbalances and others will opt for outright deception. That won’t change. As long as flawed and fallible human beings walk the planet, caveat emptor remains useful guidance. I heed this principle. So should you. But the fact that some people will take the low road doesn’t mean that lots of people will. When the seller no longer holds an information advantage and the buyer has the means and the opportunity to talk back, the low road is a perilous path. Caveat venditor extends well beyond car sales to refashion most encounters that involve moving others. Take travel. In the old days—that is, fifteen years ago—travel agents maintained an information monopoly that allowed the unscrupulous ones to overcharge and mistreat their customers. Not anymore. Today, a mom with a laptop has about the same access to airfares, hotel rates, and reviews as a professional. Or consider selling yourself for a job. You can no longer control all the information about yourself, some of which you selectively include in your sales document, the résumé. Today, a company might still look at that résumé but, as CNN notes, the company will also “browse your LinkedIn and Facebook profiles, read the gory details in your blog and hit Google to find out more about you —good or bad—all in one sitting.”9 The new rules of caveat venditor also govern the booming Ed-Med sector. Today, it’s possible for a motivated secondary school student with Internet access to know more about the causes of the Peloponnesian War or how to make a digital film than his teacher. Physicians, once viewed as imperial dispensers of specialized knowledge, now might see patients who’ve researched their ailment and arrive with a clutch of studies and a course of action. Today’s educators and health care professionals can no longer depend on the quasi-reverence that information asymmetry often afforded them. When the balance tilts in the opposite direction, what they do and how they do it must change. Ed-Med, beware. A Tale of Two Saturdays Steve Kemp is a man in a suit who sells used cars. His business, SK Motors (“Where everybody rides!”) in Lanham, Maryland, sits on a colorless patch of Maryland State Route 564, down the road from a roller rink and Grace Baptist Church. Kemp is an old-fashioned businessman—a cheerful fellow, ruddy and heavyset, who belongs to the local Rotary Club and whose service shop offers free detailing to the teacher of the month at a neighborhood school. And SK Motors is an old-fashioned place. Its inventory of about fifty used cars—from a Mercedes-Benz SL to a Hyundai Elantra—sits in an asphalt lot ringed with starter flags. At the edge is a compact one-story, five-room structure that serves as the office. One sunny Saturday morning, two salesmen, Frank and Wayne, sip coffee in the front room, waiting for the first customer on what is always the busiest day of the week. Frank is a soft-spoken African-American man who’s seventy-four years old but looks fifty-five. He’s been selling cars since 1985. Wayne is about the same age, white and cantankerous, with a baseball cap and plaid shirt. Onto the lot drives a chain-smoking man in a parka and his rail-thin twenty-something son, who sports a valiant attempt at a beard and a jacket that bears the name of the local electric utility. The younger man needs a car. He admires the three-year-old Nissan Altima but can’t afford its $16,500 price. So he goes for the 1993 Ford Escort with 117,000 miles. With Frank in the front seat, he takes the car for a test drive. Then they return to the front room to make a deal. He fills out a credit application. Steve’s right-hand man, Jimmy, takes the application and heads to his office, which houses one of the company’s two computers, to do a credit check. Whammo. The report reads like a rap sheet. The young customer has had collection actions aplenty. He’s also had cars repossessed, including one he purchased from SK Motors. Frank summons Steve. They confer briefly and Steve enters the room. “We’re now at the woodyaiff stage,” he whispers to me. Huh? “Would you if we did this? Would you if we did that?” he whispers again. Steve is willing to offer a loan—at SK’s standard interest rate of 24 percent and with a tracking device attached to the car—if the young man makes a $1,500 down payment. Woodyaiff those were the terms? The man doesn’t have any money for a down payment. He leaves. Two more customers come in, neither serious. In the midst of lunch, a tall man wearing a cowboy hat and jacket emblazoned with Jack Daniel’s logos arrives. He’s looking for a cheap car —everyone who comes in is—and finds a burnt-orange Acura for $3,700. He and Frank do a test drive. When they return, he’s ready to buy. Frank doesn’t