The importance of HIRED GUN® is that it addresses one of the most critical yet sensitive issues in western corporate culture today.  HIRED GUN is about the top echelon of salespeople, which means it is about money, corporate revenue, specifically who generates it, who earns it and who feels that they control it.  For those readers in a corporate environment who feel that this subject is not a critical issue, you are the underlying reason that it is.

The twenty-first century marketplace is and will be, driven entirely by communication skills.  It is these communication skills, that when properly integrated, create a matrix of communication systems that are essential to future corporate marketing survival.  American and western European business

schools (universities and otherwise) do not teach communication theory, models and skills.  Over the last fifty years, many such institutions have become little more than white collar trade schools.  Curriculum within business schools is structured, rote and mired in dogmatic application of procedure.  Conceptualizing, researching and communicating are not required, in pre-formulated procedure.

In many business schools, demonstrating an average ability to follow a checklist earns a piece of paper that construes a form of mystic certification that the recipient is familiar with and therefore proficient in the administration of

checklists of several procedures.  There is the underlying assumption on the part of all involved that these procedures are necessary and universal to all domestic and global commerce.

This assumption has been inaccurate within a number of industries for the larger part of the twentieth century.  The integration of every form of communication to establish and maintain a successful marketing thrust is critical to twenty-first century marketplace survival.  Traditional procedures,

particularly those that are commonly (often inaccurately) labeled by business schools as marketing, are, at best, archaic.  The models these procedures use as foundation are early twentieth century modifications of their nineteenth century antecedents.  Few if any of these models are applicable to a marketplace where communication technology allows end users of products and services to simply bypass dogmatically structured procedures.  The species, twentieth century corporate culture, is entering its own ice age.  Those of the species willing to recognize that this evolutionary

process is occurring, and who are willing to become anadromous can and will survive.  The purblind will go the way of the wooly mammoth.  The adaptive will survive and thrive by bolstering their human resource gene pool with communication expertise.

HIRED GUN is an honest wake up call to American and western European corporate culture.  The most basic communication model is dyadic.  One sender, once receiver, the salesperson.

Almost universally, salespeople are paid on commission.  Their income, as employees, is derived from just one source:  themselves!  Good salespeople spawned from the anadromous are an independent and rare breed.  Salespeople are industry’s most valuable commodity, because they generate all corporate revenue.  Salespeople function best and are the most productive when left alone and given the freedom to exercise

personal communication skills.  “Rainmakers work best

one on one.”(1) Many industries have spent years evolving a creative system of “loosely channeling” the best salespeople.  Therein likes the rub fro the prototypical BBA/MBA or engineer made a manager.  By training they are

processors as opposed to “excellers” (HIRED GUN, page 13).  Good salespeople are “excellers;” they make commerce happen.  It is trite, but true, nothing happens until somebody sells something.  The majority of professional salespeople are college graduates, many with graduate degrees educated, in intellectual disciplines rather than trained in generic trade

procedure.  The best salespeople do not function by procedures, but rather the thoughtful and skillful

application of communication.

Robert Workman addresses corporate culture situations in HIRED GUN that cause personnel managers to become catatonic, salespeople to walk out, and company revenues to plummet.  In light of relevant communication theory, HIRED GUN rips an ugly scab (pancake makeup and all) directly off the face of traditional western

corporate culture.

HIRED GUN is Robert Workman’s first book.  Workman is a “salesman” a title of which he is very proud.  At age twenty-five, Workman, a collegiate track and field national champion, honors graduate of the university of Texas with Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees, was driving a school bus.  Possessed of a passionate obsession to study that fine line between winners and losers, Workman saw sales as a unique

career avenue.

Through thoughtful application of communication skill, perseverance and hard work Workman achieved huge success.  Workman quickly became a top salesman in his company, and within the marketing industry.  The achievement of this goal brought Workman to the realization that remaining on top requires an entirely different skill set from getting there.  Once in this position successful salespeople become a threat to and therefore a target of a corporate culture, that seeks

self perpetuation by making procedure more important

than customer, product and revenue.

In chapter fifteen of HIRED GUN entitled "You’re Not Being A Team Player” Workman describes a scenario frequently visited on top salespeople.  A strategy often used in a corporate culture to control “excellers” is to reduce their income and freedom with the “illusion of promotion.”  The critical aspects of this ploy typically contain three basic elements.  A salary (capped income), a high visibility, high responsibility position with little or no real authority to accomplish and measurable results.  Many top salespeople will turn down this type of “opportunity.”  When an offer of this nature is declined, typical corporate culture reaction is: 

“You’re not being a team player!” 

In HIRED GUN Workman offers sagely worded observations as guidelines for top salespeople who become the target of intransigent corporate culture.  “Law of the Hired Gun” puts much of this wisdom into a concise quotation form.  For the “not a team player accusation,” Workman offers this Law of the Hired Gun:

“Whenever someone accuses you of not being a team player, they always want you to give something up but never offer anything of equal or greater value in return.”

HIRED GUN is not a sales training book.  HIRED GUN is a book for top salespeople, who are highly paid professionals.  It is, and should be, required text for executives, and middle managers, who are harnessed to the yoke of a dogmatic corporate culture.  There are illuminating object lessons for those people within organizations, whose entire existence is predicated on the fact that someone else can and does create and generate revenue.

HIRED GUN is well written in a brutally frank yet refreshing and enjoyable style.  HIRED GUN is not your average McKayesque, warm fuzzy, cheerleader, empowerment, yea team book.  HIRED GUN is a book about power, not empowerment, individual self-worth that is self-achieved, not contrived through thinly veiled “we’re-a-team” corporate rhetoric.

If your are a successful salesperson you will get much valuable insight from this book.  If you are a cubicled, fixed salary, middle manager, you will get even better and more valuable insight.  You will get the truth!  “Selling is not a team sport!”(2) It is a carefully designed application of

communication theory and concept.  It is the foundation of an integrated marketing continuum, necessary in a world where customers, not corporations, control markets through communication technology.  Selling is not a dogmatic procedure.  Attempts to make selling such for the purposes of control destroys positive marketing momentum.  An entrenched corporate culture can not endeavor to manage a multifaceted system for which it has a myopic perspective.

Selling is a dynamic, not a process.  Progressive managers would do both themselves and their companies a great service, by doing what they can and should do.  Reevaluate their roles in all internal functions in light of an integrated

communication strategy.  In HIRED GUN Workman delineates a clear rationale and starting point. 

The real message of Workman’s HIRED GUN is that it does not require a corporate epiphany to take the first step toward twenty-first century marketing survival.   What it does and will require is a fundamental recognition that true education and intellectual evaluation are more valuable as corporate

assets than training programs that presume to construe academic achievements, for learning trade school functions.

To survive in the twenty-first century marketplace an organizational philosophy that imbues education in communication theories, concepts and skills will be required.  This will mean fostering, using and rewarding those who seek true academic endeavor, rather than those who get their “ticket punched” at grandaddy’s school of business on the

$30,000.00 ninety day pretty paper certificate program.

1)      Falvey, Jack (1994, March 3rd) Selling is not a team sport. 

Wall Street Journal (B-1)

2)      Ibid

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Presently residing in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Mark Cortner is a highly successful, internationally known and published, twenty-five year sales and sales management veteran and a managing partner in an international consulting firm that specializes in the design and instruction of continuing education courses on Integrated Marketing Communications.  A contributing journalist to a number of trade publications, Cortner is presently completing an honors graduate program in International Mass Communication Media Management at Oklahoma State University.  Cortner is also an adjunct professor of Journalism, Broadcasting and Mass Communication, at several area colleges and universities.