Cliff Jones: Hello everybody, I’m Cliff Jones, Chief Executive Officer of Harvey Mackay Academy. I’m delighted to have with us today, Harvey Mackay, of course, Chairman of Harvey Mackay Academy and Dr Tony, Alessandra. Tony, good morning and welcome.

Tony Alessandra: Thank you. Looking forward to this interview and spending some time with Harvey.

Cliff Jones: Good to have you guys together. I want to make sure our audience is clear Tony on who you are. So, forgive me for taking a look here at your bio and sharing it with everybody because you’ve got quite a background and we’re excited to have you today on the academy. So Dr Tony Alessandra helps companies turn prospects into promoters. He is two speakers in one, a professor and a performer, and as a one client put it, delivers college level features in a comedy store format. I love that. Dr Tony offers audiences the opportunity to enjoy themselves by learning practical immediately applicable skills that positively affect their relationships with prospects, customers, and coworkers. Your focus, Tony, is on how to create instant rapport with prospects, employees, and vendors, how to convert prospects and customers into business apostles, great word, who will preach the Gospel about your company and products and how to out market, out sell and service, the competition. You’re a streetwise smart perspective on business having been raised in the housing projects of New York City to eventually realizing success as a graduate professor, Marketing Internet, entrepreneur, business, author and hall of fame keynote speaker. You earned your DBA from Notre Dame, an MBA from the University of Connecticut, and a PhD, impressive marketing PhD, Georgia State University in 1976. Holy Cow. No wonder Harvey was so excited about having you today with us. Let’s start with this. What got you into this profession of yours? Help our audience and everybody understand how that started?

Tony Alessandra: Well, as I was going through college, I worked my way through college selling. I sold cookware. I sold life insurance. I sold burglar and fire alarms. I even sold mausoleums anM I had a lot of success in those industries and it sort of led me into not just majoring in marketing, but going all the way through getting a Masters and PhD in marketing. I became a college prof, taught at the university level for eight and a half years, but then I had to make a decision, you know, sort of the crossroad at, you know, do I stay at college prof or do I go out and practice what I’d been to my students in the business world and that’s when I decided in 1978 to quit teaching, become a full time professional speaker, mostly on the subject of sales that’s been near and dear to my heart. January of 1979, I published my first book, which was called Non Manipulative Selling. Try to say that fast three times. But, you know, my whole career has been a sales and speaking, but then in 2000 I decided to develop this online assessment company. And uh, I lucked out. Harvey, my first customer was Ken Blanchard. That really propelled that business, uh, and uh, as the years went on as that business, the assessment business grew and primarily really to help salespeople, but then it expanded beyond just sales people. Uh, as that business grew, I cut back on my professional speaking just so that I can devote more time to building this online internet business. And here we are today where the bulk of my time is spent developing the online assessment business.

Harvey Mackay: I would be remiss if I did that say the following, a congratulations on a brilliant career. Not only that, but back in ’78 you made a great decision. And that’s what life’s all about, judgment and decisions because what could be further than the hottest topic around. Lee Iacocca, uh, he was, he got to go back to the fifties and sixties was the icon CEO Chrysler turned it around, took it through the roof, through the moon to the moon. And what did he say? One little sentence. That’s all. Anyone who doesn’t get along with people has earned the kiss of death because got around people and that boy are you in the people business. And when you can, we know all the stats, 60 percent, 70, 75 percent people. People do not leave companies. People leave managers. Exactly. I’ll just let you continue on with the questions. Can’t wait to hear your answers, but you are in a hot industry. I salute and applaud all you deserve, all the accolades you’ve received and more. Thank you.

Cliff Jones: Well Gentlemen, what we’re talking about today is hiring. Harvey, you’ve written the book in a way on hiring. You talk a lot about it and everything you teach. Tony, this is really about hiring and the power of assessments in the hiring process. So I’m going to ask you both this question and it you on the spot a little bit. Mentors, Tony, if you had to pick one mentor Harvey, you can think about this for a minute. You had to pick one mentor in terms of helping you get where you are today. Who would that be?

Tony Alessandra: Well, for me, it would be probably Dr David Schwartz. Dr David Schwartz was the author of a multimillion bestseller called The Magic of Thinking Big. And he was my doctoral dissertation chairman at Georgia State University, so I mean, I really had a lot of interaction with them and at the time he was not just a professor but also a motivational speaker and I think that really had an impact on me. So he was my first big professional mentor, but I’ve had many. And I have to say rather than naming all of them, one of them you might know is a gentleman named Harvey Mackay and, Harvey, your, your concepts, uh, particularly, the one about a gathering all the information about your clients, both business and personal, is something that I’ve carried with me. It’s something that I preach and I often quote you and your book and it really has had an impact on me so

Harvey Mackay: Very succinctly before I answered the question Cliff. Uh, as far as mentors, very briefly, when I was 21 years old and I got thrown into a sales organization selling envelopes, I was calling on two to 300 different accounts. I came up with what you refer to as the 66 question customer profile. And you wouldn’t believe how much we know about our customers. IRS would that believe on what’s reasonable about our customers. And I’m not talking about their taste in envelopes either. We just want to know based on routine conversation and observation, what a customer is like as a human being, but he or she feels strongly about what he’s most proud of having achieved any status symbols in his or her offices, and that has carried Swim with the Sharks, and the six following books I’ve written quite frankly, to a 80 countries and 50 languages, which of course I’m very proud of as the mentors. Um, I got very lucky when my father, Jack Mackay headed the Associated Press, St Paul, Minnesota for 35 years. He was a writer and a nationally syndicated columnist. I lost my mother at age 21 right after I graduated college, uh, to breast cancer. And so I live with my father for five years. And my father was three things. Number one, he was a hungry fighter. Number two, hungry fighter. And number three, hungry fighter. You can’t be a newspaper man unless you’ve got scoops. And was he resourceful and did he teach me all the street smarts. So he was my number one mentor. And then just one more thought for the audience. Most people think that mentors have to be older than you are. Nothing could be further from the truth. I have mentors in their thirties and their techies, and a few of them are from China, and I just want to tell you, they have really helped me, of course, with the transition in the what we call 1984 fast in the 2018. So just the thought, again, mentors do not, and you’d change mentors over a lifetime and they do not have to be older than you are.

Cliff Jones: Gentlemen, let’s transition into the power of the golden rule. Tony, you have something known as the platinum rule. Help us understand what that’s all about, please.

Tony Alessandra: Well again, the golden rule, just so everybody remember is, is do unto others as you would have them do unto you. And, and I believe in that rule 110 percent, but when it comes to values, ethics, honesty, consideration. There’s no better rule than the golden rule, but when it comes to relationship building in a world of increasing diversity, sometimes that can backfire. I mean it happened to me. I grew up in New York City in the projects of New York City. Eventually I moved to San Diego and treating the people in San Diego as if they were New Yorkers, backfired. I rubbed him the wrong way, came on too strong, too fast, too aggressive, so I came up with my platinum rule, which very simply stated is do unto others as they would have you do unto them. In other words, treat people the way they want and need to be treated.

Cliff Jones: Harvey, what would you have to add to that? Because you also wrote the book on relationships and networking.

Harvey Mackay: It’s a fabulous philosophy and you can’t go wrong. I would just piggyback on that and and talk about my philosophy again, back to my father, Jack Mackay, and I’ve been doing it ever since. I graduated from the University of Minnesota, but he told me that every person you meet the rest of your life. “Hi, I’m Harvey,” “Hello. I’m Tony.” Right to my brain bank, I say the following, what can I do for Tony Alessandra, and then I carried that one step further and not only say that to myself now, but I also add and expect nothing in return. If you live your life that way as I have, it’s just unbelievable. The opportunities now you have to love people. You have to believe in them. You have to trust them and the persons that you’re saying that to, once you meet that person, you know, spend second or two, then you would tell them that and to be thinking about you want to keep in touch with this contact personal friend forever. So you take Tony’s philosophy plus mine. I don’t think you can go

Cliff Jones: Gentlemen. I think what you’re both saying then is if we embrace and practice the golden rule, the platinum rule, especially in the workplace, especially if you’re a sales professional, a manager, a leader, and everybody’s a leader. I think we all agree on that. You guys set, set the example, but that shows up at work and what we’re really talking about today is creating a culture and hiring process. And Tony, you’re the expert when it comes to assessments and you built the company called assessments 24×7, 24×7.com, everybody. I want everybody to know about that because you picked assessments for reason. Tell us what that’s about. And then I’ll have Harvey share his philosophy on that.

Tony Alessandra: Well, assessments, uh, you know, if you go to a doctor in something’s wrong, uh, one of the tests that they might have as a CAT scan or an MRI, something that really looks inside of you to see what’s wrong, but what do we do in terms of looking inside of an individual in a business environment? Assessments are like an MRI of the mind, an MRI of the mind you get inside to understand what makes people tick. Particularly in the hiring process. And Harvey, you can give us your take on this, but many of the aspects of the hiring process are very subjective. For instance, you submit your resume, the old saying about a resume, a resume is like a balance sheet with no debits. Uh, you know, no liabilities. So a person submits a resume, they go on an interview and interview just like a first date. You always show the best part of yourself. There’s a bias in terms of the interviewer, do I like this person? Don’t I like this person? So many aspects of the hiring process are subjective. The beauty of assessments is that they give an objective aspect to the entire hiring process. I’m not saying to use assessments as the only aspect you should not, but as an additional aspect to give us an objective look into the individual. Harvey, what do you think?

Harvey Mackay: No question in my tool is going back to the 66 question customer profile. If we’re interviewing, I want a CAT scan them as well as MRI them. And I have those 66 questions, you know, how do they really feel about a, b, c, and d? What was their last job? Who did they, who reported to them, and what did you do? What did you learn on the job? What did you learn when you were terminated? Uh, go back to. I go back to kindergarten quite frankly, and I actually call kindergarten teachers if Tony I’m interviewing you to get the job. So the 66, that’s why 66 is a great tool and one on one of course when they come in, I’ve got a favorite question that I asked. I’ve been doing this for over 40 slash 50 years. And Tony, if you’re coming in for a job, here’s my first sentence. I say if I were to go to a doctor and I had migraines and I had heart problems, okay, and I only told you or the doctor Tony about my heart problems didn’t tell you about migraine. Which guess what? Okay. That doctor can’t help me. What I’m saying to you is you can’t help me, Tony. All right. Unless you tell me everything. So that’s how I get them to relax immediately. No question you’re gonna ask me that I won’t try to give you an answer if I know the answer and vice versa. So that’s just a little trick, but it works for me.

Tony Alessandra: Yeah, and Harvey, the interesting thing, and I would say almost the sad thing is that the vast majority of interviewers do not use your technique. If they did, they in fact would get deeper into the person’s psyche. What makes them tick, why they do what they do, how they do what they do, but they do not. And as a result, there is where the assessments come in. I really believe that if we can blend the two of them, the assessments with the Mackay 66, we’ve got the answer

Harvey Mackay: Let me blend one other thing. The person coming in to see you to get the job he or she has to prepare to win a must do their homework. I call it humanize your selling strategy. So once again, if I’m coming to you, you told me and I want the job, I want to do everything. Social Media, I want to go back, call her body. I can. I want to see if you graduated from Michigan, for example, call up the Michigan Alumni Association. Find out what’s going on, all different things I want to know about you. I’m CAT scanning you before I come in for the interview. That will dramatically increase the probability I will get the job. One other little thing after I leave the interview, this is the best thing that I’ve learned on the street smart, uh, strategy. After I’ve interviewed you, I’ll go out to my car. I won’t even start it. I’ll just, because you forget 50 percent of what you’re hear in four hours, but I’ll jot down everything about the interview. Then if I really want the job, I’ll write you a short brief note and it will say, Dear Mr. Alessandra. Okay. I’ve been out there three and a half months in the marketplace. This is the job I really want. Here are the reasons why from our interview, one, two, three, four, five. And then the home run is. Here’s what I think I bring to your company.

Cliff Jones: Gentlemen. Let’s talk about attracting, recruiting, training, retaining top talent today. I think it’s fair to say it’s hard to find great talent. Is that a fair statement, gentlemen? Okay, so let’s talk about how assessments, whether there are assessments in the pre-hiring, hiring process or your 360 degree assessments, feedback surveys. You’re both talking about doing the same thing. It’s, it’s humanizing and getting to know people, manager to employee in a way that creates a culture. So you look at Harvey Mackay, MackayMitchell Envelope Company, huge tenure in people in the company culture is rock solid, no turnover and sales Harvey the last three years, which is almost unheard of. That has to do with hiring practices and how people perform at work. So Tony and then Harvey, please address how assessments and what Harvey’s talking about creates that company culture and that unity.

Tony Alessandra: What I would suggest is let’s say I’m going to use Harvey’s company as an example. So what I would suggest is to benchmark the top salespeople. Let’s just say we’re looking at hiring salespeople. So we benchmark that and I say the top salespeople, we can benchmark everybody. We have everybody take this. A mixture of assessments. It could be two assessments, three assessments, doesn’t matter. And what we do is we look at a specific accomplishments, how long these salespeople had been on the job, what’s their client retention rate, what are their sales? And what we do is we try to differentiate, this is what benchmarking is, differentiate the top 20 percent of performers from the bottom 20 percent of performers. Now when we get a profile of the top 20 percent that can actually help us write ads to attract candidates who fit the profile of the top 20 percent. And if we then for all the candidates, if we then use the same assessments that we use to benchmark the top 20 percent, we could match the profiles of the candidates that the top 20 percent to see which ones come closest to matching that top 20 percent. When we hire them, we now have indepth reports about their behavior, about what motivates them, about how make decisions they’re thinking style. And that can help us in terms of onboarding and training, which will help us retain those salespeople. So in depth. But that’s what I would do.

Cliff Jones: So Harvey, you, you have your own process because you’ve been doing this for decades. Talk about this in the context that you’ve made MackayMitchell so successful.

Harvey Mackay: First of all, Cliff, if you have integrity, nothing else matters. If you don’t integrity, nothing else matters. So it all starts out, of course with the word trust and when you’re trying to attract people and keep them, if your word isn’t your bond, you will have a company with a revolving door. That will process down to Chapter 11. So the integrity and the trust. And of course everything that Tony says, he’s spot on. I mean, I agree with every single word which improves. His tools are incredible. I have a street smart, a strategy that I do with candidates. Uh, number one, okay. Uh, I will take them to different venues and interview them, not just in their stuffy suit and tie, but I’ll take them to a restaurant. I’ll play golf with him or her. If they’re golfers, I’ll take, if it’s a key position, a CFO or HR or whatever, I’ll take him and his wife or spouse, vice versa. All right, out to dinner. I will play golf with them if they’re golfers, so I see them in different venues of. That’s number one, the acid test, and Tony, you mentioned if you’re hired a salesperson. I’ve been doing this for a long time, but if I’m hiring a sales person, they don’t know how long the meeting’s going to be, whether it’s maybe five or 10 minutes or an hour, but after five or 10 minutes, right to my brain bank. What do I say? This is the acid test of hiring. How would I feel if this person was working for my competitors. Okay, are not worried about them? How would I feel if they hired him and he was selling against me? And then that’s the end of the interview, if I’m not fearful of him walking across the street going to work for my competitor. All right? And I’m not, I’m not worried. So that’s the end of the interview, uh, that, that’s number two. I do. As I told you, I go back to kindergarten and I start to see when a person comes in and they say, here’s my five references, I throw that right away in the wastebasket. What I want to do is during the interview, learn about a few things about them where before he walks out or as he walks out, I’ll be calling that person right away so he hasn’t had an opportunity to get to him or her. Again, just to just another little street smart in hiring. Then my biggest probably, and I don’t know I have. I don’t have any idea, Tony, whether you agree with me or not, but I’ve been using industrial psychologist for all of my key hires over my lifetime. Now. They do not make okay the decision for you, but if you’ve got one or two areas that are areas that you’re worried about, you ask that industrial psychologist, here’s what I’m concerned about. What about A? What about B? And then they come back. It’s your decision, not theirs, but boy, I’ll tell Ya. Even the Lone Ranger had Tonto and I feel sometimes you can’t do it all by herself and then on top of that, of course I let them interview anybody on our payroll once we’re into the second or third interview. And then lastly, a very quick and I could go on and on, but very quickly I just want to tell you about the last CEO I hired. I hired Heidrick and Struggles. Do you remember them? Tony and Korn Ferry also. I’ve used them, we’ll say use Korn Ferry. So they came up with the candidate and the CEO took three months. Uh, got it from 12 down to three. I’ve interviewed the three off and on during the process. I now bring them in final day, morning, afternoon and evening. And I interview all three of them and then I call up the … guy. And I said, well, I got three nines on a one to 10. Oh, which one? Which one did you hire? Start the process all over again. The $280 million living Americans. And there’s a 10 out there. I will not lower my standards. And you could hear a thud at the end of the call.

Cliff Jones: It’s a great, great story. Gentlemen, let’s talk about. We get it right in the hiring process in the beginning. We get them onboard. Tony, help us understand how assessments and training help in the retention process because we all agree losing people good or bad is a major cost. So how do you address that?

Tony Alessandra: Well, one of the beauties of the assessment process is that it tells you the strengths and the struggles of the individual. Again, whether it’s a salesperson, whether it’s a manager or a line employee, does not matter. The assessments should be able and ours do point out the strengths and the struggles of people. And that helps in the, the actual training process. Typically in training over the years, and I’ve been a trainer for many, many years. What we typically would do is we’d go in and we do a sales workshop for all the salespeople, whether they needed it or not. Now maybe some salespeople needed work on prospecting and others needed work on, uh, the presentation others needed work on, uh, after sale service. But we would cover all the for everybody. What assessments allow us to do is to target the training specifically to each individual employee based on their unique strengths and weaknesses. So it really allows us to laser focus our training specifically to each individual’s needs so that that’s one of the beauties of assessments.

Cliff Jones: Well Harvey clearly you know, training and talk about your philosophy on training and retaining people because you’ve done incredibly well with that at MackayMitchell Envelope Company.

Harvey Mackay: I’m waiting for Tony to say something I don’t agree with is right on. Well I have several philosophies. You, you don’t go to school once, but for a lifetime. You’re in school all of your life. And the biggest room in the world, is the room for improvement. So in retaining people and our particular company with 450 employees approximately. Okay. We call it over here at TGIM. Thank God it’s Monday. We know that our people, 80 percent of them can’t wait to get to work on Monday. How do we know that? Well, because there’s an open door policy here. Anyone can talk to anyone. Anyone can go over the head of their boss and if their boss gives them trouble, then they are terminated. That’s the philosophy of our company. So the training of course train, train, train. You cannot train enough and of course it’s beautiful when you grow your people and that’s what we’re trying to do all the time through training.

Cliff Jones: Gentlemen, let’s talk about behavioral types. How people behave when they show up at work because what Harvey just mentioned is 80 percent of the people can’t wait to get to work on Monday. Well, the more shocking statistic is that 60 percent of the people who go to work in America everyday don’t like going to work. So what you guys are talking about, what you’re teaching our audience and everybody as you speak and publish around the world, is the mastery of retention. But that relates to personality types. So let’s talk about them. You have four big ones, Tony.

Tony Alessandra: I used the DISC model, which is influence, steadiness, conscientiousness, and what’s important is each, as I mentioned earlier, each of these styles have inherent strengths and inherent struggles. For instance, the dominant style, which by the way, that’s my style, a hot, I’m a high D, so one of my unique potential weaknesses is a lack of listening. Now that I know that, can I in fact improve that aspect of my behavior? And the answer is yes. I. So what we need to do is understand that each of the four styles the D’s, the I’s, the S’s and the C’s have their unique strengths and weaknesses. And I think one of the reasons Harvey, you mentioned one of the reasons for turnover was possibly a conflict between the employee and a manager. People don’t leave companies, they leave people, they leave managers, but another aspect of those 60 percent of the people Cliff that you mentioned that that just don’t like their jobs. Maybe they’re in the wrong position within the job. For instance, take a high I style the influence, the interacting person. Put that person in a position in a company that has little people-contact and is very detail oriented and they will struggle. They will not be happy. Put a C style, the cautious, conscientious think our style in a, in a, in a position where they have to go out and persuade people and be up and motivate people. That is not their natural strength. Now it’s not to say they can’t do it, but they have to get outside of their comfort zone, which increases their stress level when people have stress, especially over long periods of time when they’re in a job that doesn’t suit their natural style, it creates internal stress and over a long period of time, unhappiness.

Cliff Jones: Harvey, how do you get people to get along so darn well for so long and 80 percent of them are still happy to come to work on Monday? How do you, uh, how have you done it? You’ve highlighted a couple of things that relate to what’s Tony talking about in terms of personality types and getting everybody to live and work together well.

Harvey Mackay: Well, first of all, let me put it in reverse and tell you a quickie about listening, as long as Tony underlined that. And that’s a story about my wife. She talks to everyone very, very friendly. We’re in Los Angeles. She jumps into a cab. I wasn’t whether she has to go one hour across Los Angeles. She always talks to the drivers. First question, where are you from? He says he’s from Pakistan. Oh, she said, Pakistan. Well, we just got back. My husband and I just got back, which we did and she starts talking about the Khyber Pass and all the problems in Pakistan and yet all the people that she loved, just for two minute opener from her, and then he talks, you know the question, why did you come here and when did you come here? He goes, for 58 minutes. My wife never says one single word. Taxi stops. She gets out, gives him a gratuity. He says to her, ma’am, you’re the nicest person I’ve ever met in my life. She never said a word and he just talked. So that’s a listening lesson. There are for our viewers right now. Back to your question Cliff. Uh, how do I, how do we get our people engaged? How do I get them like each other? Well, guess what, a God, another invention. And as you might’ve guessed, it’s not an envelope. It’s not the 66 question customer profile, it’s the 33 question profile for our managers. Example, we have 20 people say in our printing department and our manager, okay, is the head, he has 33 questions over a period of time that he wants to know. He wants to know where the daughter is graduating or how many children they have. He wants to know how many jobs they’ve had. He wants to know, again, the husband, where does he work or what is the spouse work, whatever. So those 33 questions in when he studies them, he is CAT scanning again, the people that report to him, example, all right, all of a sudden these checking out his people one day and we get a complaint and bingo, 10 million envelopes are smeared. Okay. Too fast to the printing presses, whatever, operator error and it has to go up and talk to that operator and he or she, whomever it is. Okay. He has to tell them what’s happened. We have to do it over the responsibility. In other words, the has be quite critical, but when he says, Goodbye, Oh, I see Mary graduated from high school last week, Bingo. Alright, he’s got the production out of that employee, but he’s also humanized his selling strategy with the people that are reporting to him.

Cliff Jones: That is wonderful because you’re talking about a company culture that begins with hiring process. Now Tony talked about personality, behavior types. Excuse me. How can somebody figure out what their own unique style is?

Tony Alessandra: Well, they can take an online assessment that you know, that’s the easy way to do it, or they can answer a couple of questions, am I more guarded or open, and am I more direct or indirect based on those two answers. And, and there’s a series of behaviors for each of those. You know, what are the behaviors of a guarded person? What are the behaviors of a, a direct person. But if you make those two simple decisions, it will lead you to one of the four styles. So for instance, if I determined that I am direct, but guarded, I am a high d, a dominant style, but if I am direct and open, I’m an I style interactive, influencing more expressive if I am indirect, but guarded, I am a high c, the conscientious thinker, an analytical style, and if I am indirect but open, I am that steady style who is more amiable and more of what we would call a relater. I do want to Cliff, if you allow me want to play off something that Harvey mentioned. Uh, we have, uh, a new piece of software, uh, that allows people to use the assessments a day to day in their work environment. One of the problems over the years with assessments is the problem of what they call one and done. Somebody takes the assessment, they read it, they say, hey, yeah, that’s me. They file it away. And that’s it. How does a company actually use assessments on a day to day basis? Make it part of their culture? We have something that is called Team Keeper and Harvey, I think you’ll be interested. We’ve taken some of your ideas and in this Team Keeper, it has all of the results of the various assessments that people have taken, the DISC assessment, the motivators which, which indicates what moves and motivates this person, what their thinking style is, etc., but a lot of personal information. What’s your favorite coffee, let’s say at Starbucks? What do you like? What’s your favorite pizza? Toppings? What about your children, your school, your sports, what you do as a hobby. And it allows every employee to see this picture of every other employee to get to know them, not just in a cursory way, but in a deeper level that you’ve talked about that your people already do. So it’s a, it’s a way to blend all of the Mackay 33 with the assessment data, uh, that allows people to really get to know each other at a deep, deep level.

Cliff Jones: Thanks for that. So I’m going to go on just a minute, but I want everybody watching this. To know that there are two ways that Tony just highlighted. We can learn about our behavioral types. Number one is an online assessment. Uh, there’s a url on the page below this video and available, uh, on Tony’s website, assessments 24×7.com. So get that url for us. And the other thing, Tony, you highlighted is, Harvey, you do this all the time. I’ve watched you and I’m a student. You listened to people, you ask them questions and through conversation you’re saying we can learn a lot about people, helps us build a good team if the team and the company cultures align, people stick around, profits soar. Everybody loves coming to work on Monday. Let’s talk quickly in closing. Gentleman, about the key business applications that DISC a disk does really relevant to behavioral styles, and assessments.

Tony Alessandra: I would say personal development where I can really get a sense of, uh, my strengths and my, my struggles, uh, team building this is crucial. Putting together a team that understands each person’s contributions to the team, uh, and, and clarifies that differences are not roadblocks but differences. Uh, you know, if we’re opposites, your strengths compensate my weaknesses and my strengths compensate your weaknesses. So the whole team building process, the selection process, conflict resolution. We actually have two people have taken a desk and they’re not getting along, let’s say it could be the, an employee and a manager or even to managers who are in different departments, but they have to work together. They don’t see eye to eye. We can do what’s called a collaboration report where we have a look at one half of the page is one person what happened to the page is the other person and sit him down and let them understand each other a little bit better. There are so many aspects to this, how to adjust your selling style to fit the customer’s buying style, you name it there. It just goes on and on. How a variety of assessments. This only being one of them, but a very popular one. It’s our biggest seller. But uh, a combination of assessments really help you manage the employees of your company and manage their interactions with your customers and your vendors.

Cliff Jones: Harvey, comment on team, team building, because I’ve heard you teach and you write about it often.

Harvey Mackay: Same building sounds corny, sounds sophomore, sounds corny, sounds ho-hum. Nothing could be further from the truth, as Tony just said. And that is as follows. What is teamwork? What is team building? It’s a collection of diverse people who respect each other and are committed to each other’s successes. When you get that chill, slam your competitors into the pavement and they’ll hand them their heads. And so that of course is very important. Let me just two things. I make one suggestion to our audience and then the wind up with a brief little story and that is what we’ve been talking about off and on. There have been a lot of great books written, uh, in, in the coral over a period of time. And I think the number one book that nails what Tony and I are sharing here is Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. And if you haven’t read it, then I urge each and every one of you to go out and buy it. And I think you’ll send Tony or me a thank you for that suggestion. If you have read it, listen up. It’s more important you go back and read it again. See when you get a great self help book, you don’t just read it, you study it, underline it, highlight it, posted notes. That’s what you have to do, and then read it every two, three years. Why? Because a person’s life equals the total sum of his or her experiences and what you learned three, four, five years ago, five years later, it might’ve been double crossed by the. I had all kinds of problems that didn’t fit them five years ago. So you have to pick up those self help books. Tony’s got some great ones out there. Want to read them, but don’t read them, study them. Then let me, uh, ended up with the teamwork team. Building a story. There was a driver a 10 miles outside the city and just the rain came up, rainstorm came up immediately. His car get stuck in the mud and he sees the farm yard about two minutes away, households over the knocks on the farmer’s door and my car is stuck up on the highway. Two minutes from here. Might you be able to help? Well, he says, I got a blind mule named Elmo out in the back. Fine. They trudge Elmo across the muck and mire. Farmer hooks him up to the car and he hollers out, pull Sam, and nothing happened. Pull Betsy, pull. Nothing happens. Pull, Jackson pull. Nothing happens. Pull Elmo, pull. We’ll Elmo rips and roars right out of the mud. Driver’s confused and perplexed and he says, I don’t understand. Why did you have to call out all those different names for? Look, if he didn’t think he had any help, he wouldn’t even try.

Cliff Jones: Thanks for that story, Tony. Thank you for your time today. In closing, Tony, uh, you’re out there climbing mountains all the time. Help everybody understand how you’re just talking about the power of learning and reading and biggest room in the world being improvement. Share some additional resources in closing for our audience. And again, if you’re watching this video, the urls, the websites will be listed for you if you miss with Tony saying, but Tony, help every understand how they learn more about what you’re doing.

Tony Alessandra: Okay, so for instance, if you want to look at any of the books that I’ve written, you can probably just go to Amazon.com, put in my name, Tony Alessandra. You’ll see a variety of books, and some of them certainly influenced by Harvey and I appreciate that Harvey, you and I go back many, many years. People, if you think this is the first time were on together. It is not. We go way back, uh, in two of our, our colleagues or one colleague for both of us is Lou Holtz. Uh, you know, being from Notre Dame, he was a coach at Notre Dame. Wasn’t he also a coach over at Minnesota?

Harvey Mackay: Well, there’s a little irony. Ninety seconds before I went on, I just talked to him. My best friend joined at the hip outside of my family and he is, of course, as everyone knows, one of the greatest speakers, fantastic. Fantastic. I was going to raz you, when he left Notre Dame’s has some down years,

Tony Alessandra: Some down years? No. How about 25 down years since he’s left.

Harvey Mackay: I want to be kind of the Notre Dame alumni. We’re talking about managers. Okay. One person can make all the difference in the world and that’s why your work is so important. Hire the right person and the university, the school, the business goes to the moon. Hire the wrong one. Bingo. Straight in the bankruptcy.

Tony Alessandra: Thank you Harvey. So Cliff. They can go to Amazon, put in my name, you can go to Alessandra.com if you want to learn about me personally, which is Alessandra.com, but most importantly because of the focus of our conversation today, it’s the assessment site, so assessments, that’s pural, assessments24x7.com. Look around, see the variety of assessments that we have and if you want to contact me directly, it can be at drtony@assessments24x7.com.

Cliff Jones: Harvey, have any comments and closing

Harvey Mackay: Just in closing, I love sharing the screen with Tony.

Cliff Jones: Tony, we’ll have you back very soon. Thank you again. Bye everybody.