Mark H. McCormack - What They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School: Notes from a Street-smart Executive

What They Dont Teach You at Harvard Business School

MARK MCCORMACK, who Sports Illustrated called the most powerful man in sport, founded IMG (International Management Group) on a handshake. It was the worlds first sports management company, representing golfers such as Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player. Today it is the worlds largest sports and lifestyle management company, marketing the likes of Tiger Woods, Michael Schumacher, Serena Williams, Kiri te Kanawa and Elizabeth Hurley.

IMG now has 3000 employees and operates out of 85 offices in 33 countries. Its businesses now include the worlds largest licensing agency, a prominent literary agency, an agency that manages world-renowned classical artists and three international modelling agencies. Its broadcast division, Trans World International (TWI), is the worlds largest independent producer and distributor of sports programming.

Mark McCormack, who died in May 2003, never attended Harvard Business School, but the success of his company has been taught there as a case study.

ALSO BY MARK MCCORMACK

What They Didnt Teach Me at the Yale Law School

MARK H. MCCORMACK

WHAT THEY DONT TEACH YOU AT HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL

This edition published in 2014 by

PROFILE BOOKS LTD

3 Holford Yard

Bevin Way

London WC1X 9HD

www.profilebooks.com

First published in Great Britain in 1984 by Collins

Copyright Bookviews Inc. 1984

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

eISBN: 978 1 84765 677 3

To my mother, Grace Wolfe McCormack, who instilled in me, always with a twinkle in her eye, an awareness that money was indeed worth being concerned about, and to my father, Ned Hume McCormack, who, more than anyone I have known, demonstrated to me the importance of being highly sensitive to peoples feelings no matter how difficult the circumstances.

Preface

What They Cant Teach You At Harvard Business School

When I was at Yale Law School I was told that as a business education, a law degree was every bit as valuable as an MBA (Master of Business Administration). Years later, having lectured at Harvard and a number of other business schools, I became convinced that it was though both have definite limitations when applied to the real world. As an introduction to business, an MBA or an LLB is a worthwhile endeavour. But as an education, as part of an ongoing learning process, it is at best a foundation and at worst a naive form of arrogance.

The best lesson anyone can learn from business school is an awareness of what it cant teach you all the ins and outs of everyday business life. Those ins and outs are largely a self-learning process, though the experience of someone like myself might make the learning shorter, easier, and a lot less painful.

In the early 1960s I founded a company with less than $500 in capital and thereby gave birth to an industry the sports management and sports marketing industry. Today, that company has grown into the International Management Group (IMG), with offices around the world and several hundred million dollars in annual revenues.

I am probably better known as the guy who made Arnold Palmer all those millions than I am by my own name. In truth, Arnold Palmer made Arnold Palmer all those millions, though I think Arnold would agree that I helped.

While the management of celebrity sports figures will always be very important to us with Jean-Claude Killy, Jackie Stewart, Bjrn Borg, Herschel Walker, Martina Navratilova, Chris Evert and dozens of others among our list of more than 500 clients it is only one aspect of what I do, personally, and what we do as an organization.

Our television division produces hundreds of hours of original network programming throughout the world and sells thousands more hours for such clients as Wimbledon, the National Football League, the US Tennis and Golf Associations, the World Ski Federation, the National Collegiate Athletics Association and the Royal and Ancient Golf Club. Our marketing consulting division is retained all over the world by more than fifty blue chip corporations. We do the personal financial planning and management for several hundred high-level corporate executives. We own three fashion agencies and we represent, or have represented, entities as diverse as the Nobel Foundation, the Vatican and the English Catholic Church, and we are television consultants for the Organizing Committees for the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics and the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, Korea.

In more than twenty years, I suspect I have encountered every type of business situation and every type of business personality imaginable. I have had to cipher the complex egos of superstar athletes and of their spouses, parents, lovers, neighbours and camp followers. I have dealt with heads of state and heads of corporations, with international bankers and small-town advisers, with bureaucratic governing sports bodies and autocratic empire builders. I have come in contact with every phase and facet of the entertainment, communication and leisure-time industries. And at one time or another I have done business with practically every nationality on the face of the earth.

What I havent experienced myself I have observed. Because of our affiliations with major companies throughout the world I have been in countless executive suites and board-rooms where I have witnessed a lot of companies in action and have realized why a lot of them are incapable in action. I have seen every conceivable corporate style, culture, theory and philosophy put to work and noted why a lot of them never do. From my experiences and observations I have drawn the advice in this book covering selling, negotiating, starting, building and running a business, managing people and personalities, getting ahead and getting things done.

But in a way this categoric breakdown is misleading, because what this book is really about is street smarts the ability to make active, positive use of your instincts, insights and perceptions. To use them to get where you want to go, preferably by the shortest route, even if this means jumping some fences or going through a few back alleys.

Can you really learn to apply gut reactions to business? Perhaps not totally, but what you can learn are the results of street-smart thinking. Much of what I say and do in business, from a self-effacing comment to an intentionally provocative one, is designed to give myself a slight psychological edge over others, or to help me get the most out of others. That is what street smarts really is an applied people sense.

Whether it is a matter of closing a deal or asking for a raise, of motivating a salesforce of 5000 or negotiating one-to-one, of buying a new company or turning around an old one, business situations almost always come down to people situations. And it is those executives with a finely tuned people sense, and an awareness of how to apply it, who invariably take the edge.

In fairness to Harvard Business School, what they dont teach you is what they cant teach you, which is how to read people and how to use that knowledge to get what you want.