The best business advice I ever got.

• Author: Wiesner, Pat
• Position: Column

IT WASN'T A TIP TO HELP ME MAKE A million in the stock market or the secret to a big sale that made the company. The best business advice I ever got was a simple idea on how to treat people. It has always stuck with me.

Back in the early '60s when I first got into the publishing business, I was basically an engineer by training trying to learn how to sell advertising space in a technical magazine. To help put me on the right track, my sales manager sent me to the Dale Carnegie Sales Course. The classroom was in a building on Michigan Avenue in downtown Chicago.

I loved it!

It was all brand new to me. What made people buy? How do you make your product stand out in your prospect's mind? What is "closing" and how do you make sure you're doing it right all the time? Slowly it began to sink in that good selling wasn't so much telling people about your product as it was finding out about their problems and then trying to help them find solutions.

Eventually I took every kind of sales course available. It became sort of a way of life for me because it was helping me become successful. Along the way I ran into an instructor by the name of Bob James. He had a great influence on my life although I haven't seen him in 40 years. I'm sure he had a great influence on a great number of lives. Bob's personal formula for building people relationships was this:

Help people see themselves in light of a strength of which they are unsure or unaware, hopefully related to the person they dream of becoming.

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Since I was trying to make it in business and management, it is there that I applied these ideas. It turned out to be the best advice I ever got and, in my opinion, the best advice I can give to someone trying to make it as a manager.

The reason it is so powerful is that the manager must find...