John Wareham - Secrets of a Corporate Headhunter

This book made available by the Internet Archive.

To the nomadic spirit

of my wife and children^

but for whose willingness to share

in my adventures

there might not have been any.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I SHOULD like to thank my directors, colleagues and staff but for whose efforts I should not have had the time to put my thoughts to papernor, indeed, as many thoughts. Also Mary Copeland for interpreting my handwriting, and retyping those pieces that didn't quite come out right the first time.

Contents

PART III SECRETS OF A CORPORATE HEADHUNTER

14 The Art and Alchemy of the Corporate Headhunter 141

15 Secrets of Negotiation and Psychic Enticement 152

16 Secrets of Executive Appraisal, or How to

Build a Magnificent Management Team 164

17 How to Appraise an Executive over Lunch 187

18 How to Appraise an Executive and His Spouse

in Their Own Home 197

19 How to Detect the Dishonest Candidate 203

20 Secrets of Psychological Testing and Its Place

in Executive Appraisal in a Nutshell 209

21 How to Choose and Use a Headhunter 213

22 How Ethical Is Headhunting? 226

23 How to Make a Headhunter Call You and

Other Priceless Advice to the Quarry 233

PART IV

HOW TO TURN A $1,000 lOU INTO A

MULTIMILUON-DOLLAR CORPORATION

24 How to Become Established Immediately 247

25 Two Shortcuts to Get You Moving Faster

than the Competition 252

26 How to Win Clients 254

Vlll

SECRETS OF A

CORPORATE HEADHUNTER

How to Get Out of a Funeral Parlor Without Being Embalmed

An Introduction and Two Semi-apologies

Above an antipodean funeral parlor sixteen years ago, clutching the proceeds of a $1,000 lOU scrawled upon the back of an envelope, I took my first office and hung my first shingle outside a 200-square-foot walk-up office suite. It boasted ratholes and the solid vista of a decaying brick wall. I was so thrilled not to have a boss, it looked like a clear view of the Swiss Alps.

My credentials included unspectacular careers in banking, advertising, and chartered accounting. I resigned from the bank the day I happened, by accident, to see what the president got paid. I made up my mind to leave the accounting practice the day I saw the senior partner's home; if that was the end of the road, I didn't want to follow the path.

Four years ago, when I left the antipodes for New York, my net audited fees exceeded the magic million-dollar mark and were being calculated in what my banker friends term "the substantial seven figures." On a good day I was employing a full-time staff of fifty-one in five offices spread-eagled across Australasia.

Now my view is framed by Rockefeller Plaza windows and I can see right through this jagged city skyscape to the green green grass of Central Parkand sometimes if I close my eyes, I can see even further.

How to Get Out of a Funeral Parlor without Being Embalmed

The chattering of the Telex outside my door reminds me that Wareham Associates is now established in four countries on three continents: we have offices in New York, Chicago, London, Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, Wellington, and Christ-church, where I was bom, as I try to tell my disciples, in a manger.

Just to carry the flag to those offices now requires some thirty-six hours of jet travel. I arrived in one office unshaven and so jet-lagged that the receptionist took me for a down-and-outer and would not allow me to impede her entrance.

When I started out and met with modest success, a friend told me that I was living in a fool's paradise. \ dim. We me. I remain in awe of my very presence in New York. Some days I pinch myself just to be sure that I really am dreaming.

My United States chairman, the oracle from Chicago, world renowned psychologist Dr. Robert N. McMurry, once told me that the key to success was very simple: (1) find something you like doing; (2) get good at it. "Do that," he said, "and you can't fail."

Once, in my cups, in a wide-bodied jet forty thousand feet above the earth, I asked my other chairman. Sir Arthur Harper (there are two chairmen and me, a sort of holy trinity), what life was all about. "I don't know that," he said, "but I can tell you what the queen of England thinks it's all about, because she told me."

One morning at Buckingham Palace the queen told Sir Arthur, over a breakfast of mushrooms (which, because he is allergic to the fungus, subsequendy gave him food poisoning*) that she had been put on earth, as each of us has been put on earth, "To do our duty." Her duty, she said, was to be the best queen possible.

You and I are luckier than the queen. She inherited her job and has to make the most of it. We are free to set about finding a job we enjoy. Then, perhaps, we have a duty to become good at it.

* Now he says he won't ever eat mushrooms again, not for the queen of England, not ior anyone.

How to Get Out of a Funeral Parlor without Being Embalmed

That's why I'm twelve thousand miles from home. I just fell into headhunting, I liked it, and more or less unconsciously I set out to fulfill my duty of becoming the best (and, therefore, the best-paid) headhunter in town. And when the world shrank to a global village, there seemed no choice but to move to New York.

Before you even turn another page, let me confess that I fear I already owe you at least two semi-apologies.

First, I need to assure half of the human race that I mean no slight by writing most of my material in the masculine mood. You just run out of neuter words after a while, and there also sometimes seems no alternative but to pen either "he" or "she." I chose the former not just because, in spite of many social advances, business still tends to be a masculine sport but equally because it seems easier on the reader. I meditated the point for quite a while and, at the end of it, got the feeling that, if there really is a God, She will forgive me.

Second, I beg to be excused for choosing to see the lighter side of some deadly serious situations. Oscar Wilde said that the gods bestowed upon Max Beerbohm the gift of perpetual old age. I was not so blessed: where a situation is so bad that you could just weepwhich is often the way in businessI sometimes laugh instead. I'm terribly sorry.

But, anyway, here I am, sitting atop Manhattan, running my little empire, talking to you, and checking to see that the city lights have not yet been overtaken by the gray-white tendrils of another rising sun. It's a great life, isn't it?

PART ONE

HOW TO UNDERSTAND AND LEAD PEOPLE AND ORGANIZATIONS

I. How to Manage an International Organization