Industry and love — tough love, as it were — ruled in that one-room schoolhouse where Bjørnson went to school.  The young teacher from Ohio was brilliant, and he was the reincarnation of Baard Skolemester so carefully described in Bjørnson’s book.

 I went home full of ideas.  I worked on a diagnostic tool that would reveal their problems to me.  I outlined what I had promised they would learn, and memorized far more material than I would use.  I also memorized the names and backgrounds of the next class.  I revamped the illustrations I had used, focusing on the principles I wanted them to internalize, and resolved to be honest, fair, non-judgmental and open-minded about the group, and their concerns.  I decided to write down any questions that I could not answer, research them, and respond to them within a week.

 The next time, I asked for a meeting of the Center staff before the session.  I needed help with the collection and analysis of the data that I would ask for from the participants.  It would take three people working the entire day to do this, and to prepare the illustrations from the findings.  Being IBMers, and executives, they agreed to do it.

 The results were dramatic.  For the first time, I knew the key concerns and challenges of the group.  My faith in the principles I taught was strengthened when I saw the participants address and resolve their own problems quickly and elegantly before the day was done.  My three “assistants” were exhausted, but proud of their work.  So was I.

 This experience changed my life.  I pored over the data from group to group, noted the trends over time until the database was stable, and then addressed the “logjam”®™ that the data had produced:  The Logjam of IBM.

 I remember one particular group:  The IBM Fellows.  The session was held in the library of the Guggenheim Estate on Sands Point by the Long Island Sound.  In the group was the leader that were to develop the PC — a watershed in IBM’s history.  IBM would change from Big Iron to Distributed Computing, from hardware to software and services, from formal to informal, from structured to loose.

 All of these changes showed up in my data.  Without conscious effort, I began using what I had learned at IBM at the University of Minnesota — then in the work with all our clients.  I trained our staff, and the staff of the companies we worked with, to do what I had learned.

 I began to notice the characteristics and practices of the outstanding teachers I had seen on “the circuit” — Zig Ziglar, Peter F. Drucker, Joel Barker, Manny Steil, Tom Peters, Ken Blanchard, and many others.

 I believe that the young professor from Ohio could hold his own among these renowned speakers.  To be a world class speaker, the presentation skills are as important as the mastery of content.  That is very, very rare among speakers.  When a speaker walks out in front of an audience, he/she is always judged anew:  The greater the reputation, the tougher the judgment, and the greater the challenge.  When Dr. Darrell Lewis and I published a series of papers on what effects students’ learning of introductory economics, it was the teachers’ communications skills that was the most important factor — not her degrees, or grades, or the textbook used, or the home environment of the students.

 A few years later, Jim Alles of ICI Films watched as members of our staff walked up to a group of ICI executives whom he knew they had never met.  He was amazed to learn that all of our staff addressed his people by their correct names, and that they knew the ICI executives’ backgrounds —  AND their deepest concerns.  Everyone’s.  He later told me that right then and there he decided to have his own people trained like ours were.  He made good on his promise, and the performance of ICI Films skyrocketed.

 I smiled when he told me that story.  I remembered the last daylong seminar I had taught at IBM — four years after my miserable first-time score.

 The score was 1.0.

 Little did they know that the score did not belong to me; it belonged to an IBM executive and his two colleagues, who cared about their company — and cared about me — and to a young professor from Ohio, who was the best teacher I had ever met.