"The customer is the answer." - management of Forum Corp., employee training company

Nation's Business, Oct, 1993 by Michael Barrier

After he graduated from Harvard Business School in 1964, John W. Humphrey worked as a salesman in IBM's Hartford, Conn., office. He recalls that one of his colleagues "was a guy who had been one of the first six salespeople that [IBM founder] Tom Watson hired; he sold butcher scales."

At a meeting one day, the branch manager announced to the assembled sales force--a group of about 150, some standing and some seated--that this veteran was retiring. The salesman said a few words and then told everyone that he was going to exercise the retiree's privilege and go home early.

The retiree got up and walked out, leaving his seat empty, very briefly, Humphrey says, before "some well-scrubbed young toad came down the aisle and sat down." As the retiree "turned and walked out," Humphrey says, "before my eyes, the hole in the company disappeared. It was there for like 30 seconds. I decided at that moment to go someplace that when I left, the hole wouldn't be filled in 30 seconds."

For Humphrey, as for many people like him, that someplace was a company of his own. In 1971 he co-rounded the Boston-based Forum Corp., which he heads as chairman and CEO. Forum has about 300 full-time employees, and Humphrey puts last year's revenues at about $40 million.

"Forum is part of what we call the employer-sponsored training system, and we are in the customer-specific segment of that," Humphrey says. In other words, Forum tailors its training to a particular company, as opposed to offering courses that anyone can attend. That means, Humphrey says, that "we have to understand the customer's needs and meet them with some sort of education or training remedy."

Most of the companies that Forum works with have more than 200 salespeople or managers. Very small companies are not candidates for Forum's services, Humphrey says, because Forum would have to charge too much.

Forum's smallest client is Plymouth Rubber Co., a Canton, Mass., manufacturer of rubber and vinyl tapes for the automotive and electrical industries; it has 325 employees and annual sales of about $50 million. Forum provided training several years ago that paved the way for a Total Quality Management program at the company. Forum's trainers "were tremendously effective at consciousness-raising," says Maurice J. Hamilburg, Plymouth's president.

When it works with a company, Forum first gathers data on finances, employees, and customers and reviews the information with senior managers. Forum's people work with a company's leaders "until we have a vision of where they want to drive the organization that they can all buy into," Humphrey says. There is what he calls the problem of "alignment," when an organization says it wants to achieve certain objectives but its leaders' actions send a different message.

High-ranking executives "don't realize how much pain they cause," he says. "It's easy to be out of touch with your customers and your people. You don't have to be a very big company before you lose track of what's really happening."

Only when a company's leaders are "aligned" can they teach those in the lower ranks. Forum doesn't train everyone in a company itself; instead, it trains a core of executives in spreading their vision to all employees. "The quality process means that you train everybody," Humphrey says.

Such training can bear unexpected fruit. Humphrey tells how employees who performed a simple task--opening cardboard boxes--applied the problem-solving techniques that Forum had introduced. The employees were using a knife that their supervisors had told them to use, but the knife was cutting not only the boxes but also the product inside. The workers remodeled the knife so it would not cut the product. As a result, Humphrey says, that company is saving $600,000 a year.

As Humphrey's reference to quality suggests, Forum keeps track of the currently hot management theories, but, in addition, "we do a lot of research," he says. "We collect best-practice research from our customers so that when we put somebody in a training program, we've got confidence in it." The idea is to lock on to what really matters, without being distracted by what Humphrey calls "the sea of data that surrounds everybody."

The "huge change"at the heart of the quality movement, for example, is a heightened awareness of the customer, Humphrey says. "It won't go away," even if the labels applied to it--what he calls "the hood ornaments"--fall out of favor. "The customer is the answer to whatever question you ask," he says. "The trick is to get your company focused on the customer, and then to get your people and your processes aligned to serve that customer."

How can businesses persuade their people to approach their work in the right spirit? "Connect them to the real vision of the company, and give meaning to their work," Humphrey says. "That's what people want from their leaders." And the customer is key to providing that meaning, he says: "The people who don't feel good about their work are the people who are disconnected from customers."