Xerox U.

TRAINING As a hard-driving boss who built a small shoemaking firm into an apparel and retailing combine with annual sales of $872 million, Genesco Chairman W. Maxey Jarman can fairly claim to be a business expert. Yet Jarman is going back to school. He recently struggled to jot down answers to questions on a long series of statements, spoken in everything from pure Bronx to a Southern drawl, on a tape recording prepared by the Xerox Corp. "I thought I was a pretty good listener," Jarman said after sampling the 21-hour session. "Then I took that test and found out I wasn't." Jarman has company. Staffers from some 600 firms have been taking lessons from an improbable corporate schoolmaster. Since it set up its industrial-education program in 1965, the Xerox Corp. of Rochester has cranked up sales of crisp courses in business skills to 20,000 a month. Currently boasting three short (up to three days) courses that include drills on sales and problem-solving techniques as well as "effective listening," the program has drawn more than 500,000 students from such companies as Pfizer, General Electric, Burlington Industries and Eastern Airlines. Just Like Golf. Eying the $6 billion to $8 billion a year that companies now spend on training programs, Xerox got a foot in the classroom door when it bought a Cambridge, Mass, outfit called Basic Systems Inc. three years ago for $5,600,000. Founded by a group of behavioral psychologists at work on applying modern teaching theory to classroom usage, Basic Systems has quadrupled its revenues to some $4 million a year under Xerox.

Biggest seller by far is the listening course, which a plant or office can buy from Xerox for a basic $1,200 fee plus a small charge ($1.80 to $3.50) for each enrollee. Xerox sells its customers on the fact that managers spend 45% of their time listening to others; yet let most of what they hear go in one ear and out the other. The half-day drill brings marked improvement: "retention" rates in one group of salesmen (notoriously poor listeners) rose from 20% to 84% after the course. Jarman was so enthusiastic about the program that he ordered the sessions for 800 other Genesco staffers. "The listening course sharpens a latent skill," says General Electric Personnel Consultant Dr. G. Roy Fugal. "It's like a game of golf. You have to practice."

The Big Hang-Up. The games get trickier in other courses. More than 55 companies have each paid a minimum $6,300 to send more than 10,000 salesmen through the 25-hour "professional selling skills" course. In small groups of six or so, the pitchmen analyze realistic, tape-recorded selling situations, then break off for "roleplay" sessions with "pretend" customers. The students soon overcome what Xerox's Ted Lee says is the salesmen's major hangup: "Most salesmen hate to ask for a final sales commitment because they are afraid of getting turned down."

Using a similar format, Xerox's course in "problem-solving discussion skills" does for bosses what the selling course does for salesmen. "Most managers," says a Xerox staffer, "are not able to face a subordinate, analyze a problem and reach a solution." To the problem-solving course have come 2,000 employees from Ford, 600 from Westinghouse and 300 from Procter & Gamble. Now offering its lessons mainly to production and manufacturing managers, Xerox is working on a variation for marketing types, will introduce something for general corporate executives late this year.

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