Most recently, the candor of Scott's TEC group forced him to confront a painful (from his perspective, brutal) decision. It involved the replacement of one of his senior management people, an act he could not bring himself to execute. Two months in a row, says Scott, the roundtable laid out all the manager's pluses and minuses on a blackboard. They worked dispassionately: no axes to grind, no emotional ties to the situation. After the second session, he says, he went straight back to his office and did the deed.
Shifting metaphors, Scott likens the process to "trying out a play in Hartford before you take it to Broadway.TEC's my testing place, my audition. The guys in here, they're all green, you know? They're still growing. Maybe we've become 50-year-old multimillionaires, but we're still learning, still growing."
Organizationally, TEC retains an office in the Midwest, although most of its activities are now governed by an office in the San Diego area. Dues are not cheap (around $600 a month), but with them come extras like guest speakers and tapes of all roundtable sessions (so the participants don't have to take notes). Plus, they buy access to a network of networks. As TEC president Pat Hyndman describes it, "We don't have groups in all cities, but we like having several [roundtables] in each one we are in. It means they can plug into one another -- or, if appropriate, that we can move a member from one to another -- and it defrays the cost of some of our resource speakers."
Those speakers visit the monthly meetings and address issues of general group concern; afternoon sessions are then turned over to several CEOs to discuss particular problems at their companies. Sometime during the ensuing two to three weeks, a TEC chairman, or group leader, drops by the CEO's office to review implementation of the group's suggestions.
Jerry Sellers is the chairman for TEC's newest branch, the TEC 60 group in Houston. A behavioral psychologist by training, Sellers grew up in a small-business family and did extensive work in executive training and personnel development for several large Houston companies before moving over to TEC. Most of the companies he now works with fall within the $5-million-to-$50-million-a-year range. Membership (now at 15) could easily be higher, but, Sellers insists, "it's not just the numbers involved, it's the feel of the whole thing. We interview [potential members] rigorously. If they think they already know all the answers or don't show a willingness to share, we don't invite them. Put it this way: I've kissed a lot of frogs."
Willingness to share, surprisingly, seems to be a problem in Japan, where TEC has tried to establish itself with mixed success. There, says Hyndman, "CEOs are used to being treated like warlords, and brutal candor is not their style. They would no more challenge a guest speaker than fly to the moon." Within the first six months, he reports, one third of the charter members dropped out of the network's Japanese roundtable groups. TEC's measured response to this dilemma: a mandatory, yearlong training seminar for Japanese CEOs in alternative management style; then, and only then, will they be seated at a regular roundtable.
It's like having the major leagues and minor leagues," says Jerry Sellers. "Breakfast clubs are the minor leagues, TEC and the YPO the majors. Each has a different feeling. And, more importantly, a different kind of role to play."
Sellers is a man who wears both major-league and minor-league caps. The TEC chairman -- along with colleague Ron Harris, who serves as one of the chairmen of the Houston TEC group -- is also one of the players in the Houston Executive Club (HEC), a network that focuses not on running businesses, but on marketing them.
Houston businesspeople need HEC, as one earnest networker put it, because "if you weren't born here or aren't in the oil industry, you don't know how to do business in this city." Established seven years ago as a sort of swap-meet-for-success, the group meets over breakfast each Tuesday at 6:30 in the swank new Remington Hotel to trade leads, business cards, and shoptalk. Harris, a tall, effervescent, toothy type, is the ringmaster -- "the witch doctor," as Sellers puts it, who "keeps the tribe stirred up."
Among Harris's assembled tribe at a meeting in March were the heads of printing shops, marketing firms, telecommunications companies, even a photographer and a plastic surgeon. One by one, they stood up and introduced themselves, Lee Iacocca-like, pitching their companies to a closed-circuit audience of peers. "With our video services, you can have a whole new marketing dimension," said one with a conviction bordering on the evangelical.The good-time atmosphere grew even more infectious when Harris asked each person to list all the leads he or she had that week through network members. To wild applause, Tom Wright, president of Wright Marketing Communications Inc., got up and credited Gary Crouse, sales manager of Computervision Inc., with having supplied two leads over the course of the year that were good for $300,000 (of his $1-million total) in annual revenues. "It's like they're walking down the aisle at some revival meeting, professing their faith in the gospel," says Sellers. "The others get excited and want to join [the process], too, and that creates a culture that says, Hey, it's OK to sell."
