WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR., WHAT HE MEANS TO ME

WILLIAM FRANK BUCKLEY, JR., WHAT HE MEANS TO ME

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 28, 2008

“Charlie Rose: Would you like to be twenty again? William F. Buckley, Jr.: “Absolutely not." CR: Would you like to be twenty-five years younger? WFBJ: “Not at all." CR: Why? WFBJ: Because I'm tired. I’m tired of life. I’m ready to go.”

Charlie Rose on PBS television, December 8, 2007

I

William F. Buckley, Jr. died yesterday, February 27, 2008, at his desk working on a biography of his most cherished friend and the acolyte of his conscience, Ronald Reagan. Buckley was the sixth of ten children of a patrician Connecticut family in which his father was worth $10 million at his death.

William, Jr., named after his father, didn’t abuse his father’s wealth, or remove himself from the family’s deep devotion to the Roman Catholic Faith, or the conservative politics of his father’s Republicanism.

He went to Yale, wrote a book about “God and Yale,” and fifty-four other books of which a handful were spy novels. He had been an operative in United States Intelligence Service during World War II.

My first acquaintance with Buckley was reading op-ed columns written by him in newspapers in Indianapolis when I joined Nalco Chemical Company as a chemical sales engineer. It was September1958.

II

With a son, two, and a daughter of seven months, I entered a strange and foreboding world. My safe haven since college had been the chemical laboratory for which I had been trained. I took the job with Nalco under false pretenses, as I was to continue my education in theoretical chemistry at a major eastern university on a fellowship that was due to start the following fall. I had to make and save more money quickly in order to handle the expenses of such an adventure, as the academic stipend was not enough to pay for a family of four.

Theoretical chemistry appealed to me after the success of James Watson and his “double helix” fame of discovering the structure of DNA. It was also because I am something of a control freak and like to know exactly where I am, what I am about, with no surprises.

It never occurred to me that technical sales would be strung out into a three-year training program and that I would not be able to make commissions until after this period. I felt trapped in a situation of my own creation.

What also never occurred to me was that selling, especially technical sales, was constructed on the premise of complexity and superiority in which the seller was to play God as the omniscient one to the customer’s total ignorance. Given this premise, it was deemed necessary that three years were required for the seller to gain the encyclopedic knowledge of the customers business and the proper application of Nalco’s products.

Nor did it occur to me that this attribution of omniscience would find the people with whom I worked condescending to customers as if lucky to have them solving their problems.

Characteristically, when asked what I thought of this approach, I answered candidly. I told my management I wasn’t comfortable playing God, and that I noticed people I traveled with never sold anything to anybody, suggesting it wasn’t working.

So, here I was with two small children and a wife, making less than I had made in the laboratory, and in foreign territory away from the safety of the lab, told in a huddle between the district and area manager, that I wasn’t cut out for this work, and should look for another job. I had been with Nalco two months, one of which was in a company training program in which “how to sell” was never a subject.

As an expression of the company’s compassion, the district manager told me, I to be accounts to service as a chemical engineer with the added option of upgrading them and calling on competitive accounts in the area if I like. Both managers smirked with deep grins, as I was given these instructions. I was also given the drop dead date of my final paycheck: “You will be off the payroll in two months, so in your spare time you had better look for another job.”

I am an emotional guy, a big guy, and a guy that can get quite angry, but not a malicious guy or vengeful guy. It was scary when I went out on my own not knowing the products and having no idea how to sell them if I did know. It was “system selling,” not products, per se, and I was supposed to be an expert of all these systems.

For starters, I was handicapped. I am not a mechanical person in the least, but a guy that could manage chemical symbols pretty well. It was already apparent in my lab work that I was not good at setting up experiments, or improvising instrumentation that was not already available. I was a book chemist, not a lab chemist.

The symbols up to that point had been all chemical symbols, which I could move about with alacrity and panache. I was so good at it that I set the curve in practically every test I took in every course in my curriculum. Where I had trouble was in the laboratory, where I was asked to make things, as you do in such a major.

III

It was in this precarious state that I wandered unto an op-ed column by William F. Buckley, Jr.

Buckley is an Irish name as is Fisher. Both names are first taken to be English, but we share a common heritage. I liked that. I read him and was moved by his vocabulary. I had read the dictionary as if it were a novel before I was a teenager. There was one word he used, which I cannot recall at the moment that explained the entire article. One word! The word was most appropriate but a word with which I was not familiar. I loved it.

Buckley also wrote with such unabridged confidence that I found him exhilarating, plus he was not afraid of ideas that were outside the mainstream at the time. I came out of the university full of country bumpkin idealism as a Roman Catholic from an agricultural state in a Protestant dominated community, and Irish descendents who were more often complainers than contributors.

Here was a man from my heritage that was urbane, witty, affluent, positive, cocky, cerebral, intellectual, and with writing aplomb I had seldom encountered. He did it all without apology. He was from the Eastern establishment but not of it, a Renaissance man in a time of a non-intellectual bias with an anti-intellectual president, Dwight David Eisenhower in office.

I watched his “Firing Line” on television at a time when I seldom ever watched television at all, and collected the summaries of those programs, which I still have, and referred to in my most recent book (A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD AuthorHouse 2007).

It was watching those “Firing Line” programs that I came up with the idea of how to conduct myself in my limited time with Nalco. I would do it in a similar fashion to the way Buckley interviewed and treated his guests.

Buckley would probe them with a question, then sit back with that pencil between his middle finger and smile and let them seemingly take over when he was always in control. It had never occurred to me before that listening was such a powerful instrument in the human language. But here I saw it demonstrated. Buckley took his pompous all-knowing guests down to comprehensive level by this simple process. I said to myself, why can’t I use it? What have I got to lose? I’m going to be fired anyway.

So, I would enter these accounts with little knowledge or understanding of what Nalco did for them, and ask them to explain how Nalco’s products worked or failed to work. If they were not working as well as expected, what would they like to see Nalco do? The approach melted away antagonism and suspicion, and opened the way for conversation.

It was amazing. They would look at me to see if I was sincere. One of my most engaging qualities has always been my sincerity. Noting this, they would explain their systems, how they worked, what role Nalco’s products played in each case, and how satisfied or dissatisfied they were. They went out of their way to be obliging, to be the knowledgeable ones while I played student to them as teacher.

In almost every instance, they wanted to improve their systems. I would go back to my motel, being by nature a reader, I would peruse the comprehensive manuals Nalco had produced in succinct language, and find products that would better meet their needs. As a consequence, almost without effort, I would upgrade the value of the account by their initiative, and not mine.

Returning the next day, I would often sell the customer more expensive products, but products that would be more cost effective. For this attention, I upgraded all these accounts I was given by 100 percent or more. In addition, I started to call on competitor accounts in the area with this new knowledge of Nalco’s successes and failures, deducing that this must equally apply to competitor accounts as well.

In the process of doing this, I called on a plant that was making home appliances, a factory covering seven acres, and so enormous that it gave me trepidations to show my card at the receptions desk. The account had been in Nalco’s competitor’s hand for many years, so long that Nalco no longer called on the account.

Using the same Buckley strategy that had been successful before, I sold the account in my first visit. It so happened that I came at a time when the plant was totally frustrated with our competitor, and was willing to try anyone or anything.

The problem for me was that I took a blanket order, meaning I was given a purchase order for a three month trial of Nalco chemicals in their system, when I didn’t know the systems, or the hundreds of Nalco products to choose from to apply to these systems.

My selling approach had been theoretical not application intensive. Nor did I have sufficient knowledge of Nalco’s mechanical systems (i.e. pumps, etc.) to choose much less install automatic feeding equipment in the optimum places. I had to call my district manager with my problem. He didn’t believe I had made the sale. He called the account to confirm and learned I had received a blanket order, which was rare in those days.

Having it confirmed, he had the area manager travel with me to set up the trial. The incredulity was palpable from Indianapolis to Nalco’s Chicago headquarters. How did he do it?

It didn’t end there, as two other sister plants in the city were automatically turned into Nalco accounts. I had sold more on that one visit than six other veteran sales engineers had sold in the entire year. No one understood my success, not even me, so it was hard for me to explain it to others. That said I started to get that opportunity.

Regional managers asked for me to be loaned to them to share my success during their regional meetings. I had to read selling books to come up with the vocabulary, knowing no one would believe the “William F. Buckley, Jr. story.” Such exposure made me a person of interest to senior management. This was in the days before human resources came up with the gimmick of “high talent.”

Soon I was made a manager, and then after only two more years in the field, promoted to the executive vice president’s staff, and from there made a vice president to facilitate the formation of a new company in South Africa. After completing that assignment, only thirty-five, and after only ten years with Nalco, I retired. The reason for retiring so young is another story. I plan to tell it in a novel I am now writing titled, GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA.

IV

In Buckley’s last program on “Charlie Rose,” he was asked about leadership. Rose was interested in leadership in the mega sense or at the geopolitical level. Buckley replied that leadership is a function of the situation. Rose replied, but isn’t it more a case of a transformational experience? Going through the crucible of experience? Buckley replied it was that, but it was a case of both not one or the other.

Hearing that from Buckley with that winkled grin and those knowing eyes, I got tears in my own. I knew he was no longer with us. Little me, a nobody in the firmament “out there” in the, then, television land, and now cyberspace, I could say, “both apply to me.”

It was the experience of “being fired,” and then finding the Buckley formula of listening that placed me in a situation that gave me a prominence I didn’t anticipate, nor certainly not my superiors. Going through the crucible of South Africa apartheid would also change my life forever, and find me writing these words.

I had been a student at Buckley’s knee. He helped me overcome my adversity and realize some measure of success. He hardened my determinism to be my own man on my own basis as the complete individual. Obviously, others helped as well but he was a force that I studied and admired.

My success at Nalco, and the fact that my third child was on the way, made it impossible for me to punish the family by taking that fellowship for chemistry. I instead stayed with Nalco through South Africa, then took a two-year sabbatical, read a lot of books and wrote one, CONFIDENT SELLING (Prentice-Hall 1970). That book was an elaboration of what I spoke about during those regional meetings when asked to explain how I sold.

Buckley taught me that you could have a strong point of view and yet not be intimidated or intimidating. I have not kept the Catholic faith as he did all his life. I wonder if he would have been able to think the same way after experiencing South Africa as I did. We will never know. South Africa did not add up to a balanced equation for me, and I have been struggling with that reality ever since.

He made me aware of the nature of leadership, not as a mega force but as a mini activity of individuals. It is how I came to believe we are all leaders or no one is. I have attempted to convey my fragmented philosophy in all my writings.

His legacy? I would imagine it is the conservative magazine he created, NATIONAL REVIEW. When you imagine a man of fifty-five weighty books being reduced to a single thing, it is humbly indeed. May his soul forever rest in peace, and thank you, Mr. Buckley for being you.

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Dr. Fisher's essays are available on this blog for your free review and comment.