ActionCOACH

was already on my team, just to prove whether franchising would work. At that time, white collar or intellectual property-based franchising almost didn’t exist, although today, it’s become quite pop- ular. Back in our day, franchising was either clean- ing or flipping burgers.” In addition, today, there are countless books, speeches, classes, and workshops devoted to motivating people to work more productively, but Sugars eschews the idea of merely motivating his clients, or asking them to change their attitude. “I’m an educator, not a motivator,” he states. “I hate motivational speaking because my theory is that if you motivate an idiot, they just do stupid things. You’ve got to make certain that you’re educating people. An educated person, who knows what to do, why to do it, and how to do it, becomes moti- vated. Attitude is definitely part of success, but the best attitude by someone who has no clue what they’re doing is still someone who has no clue what they’re doing. Now, does the attitude need to change in a lot of companies? Absolutely. It’s a start, but it’s only a part of success. Is it the key to it? Not really. Maybe it’s the key to it if having an attitude shift makes you want to keep learning new things about how to get better at your job. But overall, the business has to do things differ- ACTIONCOACH ently– it’s got to sell its product differently; it’s got to market its product differently; it’s got to do all these things, differently. If you don’t have great execution, if you don’t have simple systems in play, it doesn’t matter how amazing your culture is - you’re still not going to have a high perfor- mance business. Ultimately, if you want to change the success of a business, it’s about a hundred ideas that add one percent, not one idea that adds a hundred percent. The silver bullet theory– the one thing you need to do to fix your business, never has happened and never will. Management is about productivity and competency, and com- petency and productivity are definitely high on the list of success factors in business.” Sugars reports that his company’s systems are based on a directive once expressed by thinker and inventor, Buckminster Fuller: “If you want to create, you have to create a model or an artifact.” “One of the good things about teaching,” he says, “is that it made me contemplate: How do I actu- ally do this? How do I get customers? How do I do customer service? What’s the model for that? Once you create models, teaching intellectual concepts is not that hard; moving that knowledge is easy. So, every time I tried to teach something in business, I tried to teach it with a model of some sort – six steps to this, or three ways of that, or a five-way multiplier formula for profitability in business. By teaching it that way, it became some- thing that people could understand and grasp and say, ‘This isn’t as hard as I thought it was.’” Sugars also believes that, ultimately, coaching works for three main reasons. “Number one is just-in-time knowledge,” he avers. “It’s not like you’ve got to read 400 books to find out where to get the knowledge to do this. You’re working with a coach who has a system that is knowl-