Street Smarts

Tips from a top dealmaker

When Mark McCormack, a well-known business manager of sports figures and a self-made millionaire, gave guest lectures at Harvard Business School in the late 1960s, he sensed in the students' questions an academic naivete about business. He thought they needed "street smarts." Now McCormack has helped out by writing What They Don't Teach You at Harvard Business School (Bantam; $15.95), a potpourri of tips for anyone who works for a company, runs one or wants to.

A lawyer who started out in 1960 as Arnold Palmer's manager, McCormack, 53, created the International Management Group, a worldwide complex of twelve companies that expects revenues of more than $200 million this year. IMG counsels

FORTUNE 500 companies on merchandising strategies and manages the business affairs of athletes and other celebrities. Some of McCormack's clients: Tennis Stars Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert Lloyd, Ski Champ Jean-Claude Killy, baseball's Jim Rice, and Hank Ketcham, the creator of Dennis the Menace. Officials of the Wimbledon and U.S. Open tennis tournaments rely on McCormack to negotiate for them with television networks, and his firm has already been hired as a television consultant by the organizing committees of the 1988 Calgary and Seoul Olympics. When Pope John Paul II visited Britain in 1982, IMG was enlisted to control the merchandising of souvenirs.

McCormack's book emphasizes that businessmen must be able to "read" people, to find out if they are secure or uptight, honest or treacherous. McCormack says that a person reveals a lot in the way he treats a waiter at a business lunch, decorates his office or even plays a round of golf. Look out for someone who thinks that any putt of 6 ft. or less is a "gimme."

The person may take that "gimme" attitude into a business relationship.

The book's strongest sections cover the arts of selling and negotiating. McCormack's skills in these areas are both revered and reviled: in siding circles he was once dubbed "the abominable snow-job man." A negotiator, says McCormack, should give in on minor points to soften up the opposition and ease the way for whining the important issues. Use silence as a stratagem, he urges. If a negotiator holds his tongue, the opposition may find the silence uncomfortable and volunteer information or make new concessions.

McCormack gives detailed advice on how executives can save time. He says that a manager should rarely accept a phone call. That would interrupt his work flow. Instead, he should return the call at a convenient time. McCormack considers most staff meetings unproductive. Says he: "If more than four or five people are in attendance, decision making is probably next to impossible."

The book is sprinkled with lively anecdotes drawn from McCormack's experiences, from playing tennis against Bjorn Borg to convincing Andre Heiniger, managing director of Rolex, that his company should be a Wimbledon sponsor. To illustrate the importance of research and learning from mistakes, McCormack writes of an episode in which he tried to sell John De Lorean, then head of General Motors' Pontiac division, on a new promotional campaign tied to the company's Indianhead logo. De Lorean's bemused response:

"Mark, you really researched the hell out of us. Pontiac's just spent $3 million getting rid of the Indianhead symbol and developing a new logo."