Stop paddling & start rocking the boat Book

Four Decades of Hard-Won Wisdom from an "Old Soap Salesman" Lou Pritchett, former Vice President of Sales for Procter & Gamble and the architect of the historic partnering agreement between P&G and Wal-Mart, has accumulated nearly four decades of in-the-trenches business experience. He shares that wealth of knowledge in a lively and anecdotal new book, Stop Paddling & Start Rocking the Boat: Business Lessons from the School of Hard Knocks, that ranges from partnering and customer relations to sales, management, and cultivating common sense. Pritchett is best-known for his famous canoe trip with Wal-Mart Chairman Sam Walton, in which he proposed a radical new way for the two companies to do business. In a process called partnering, the two companies learned to trust one another and share vital information, both reducing costs and providing more efficient service to the consumer. For Pritchett, it was the natural extension of a career in sales, a career in which he always placed strong emphasis on customers and consumers. Pritchett's long and successful career at P&G is the source of a wealth of insights and hard-won lessons about sales, management, and leadership. Drawing on his own experiences-both his successes and his failures-Pritchett offers an engaging, accessible, and astute primer in sales and management, informed by common sense and spiced with wit. Pritchett's vivid anecdotes of his own experiences, especially his remarkable turn-around of P&G's floundering Philippine operation as that subsidiary's President during the Marcos era, offer inspiring and practical illustrations of his insights and ideas at work. Through his "school of hard knocks" lessons and his own remarkable capacity to absorb and apply the information around him, this self-described "old soap salesman" maintained a remarkable career at the world's leading consumer products company and gathered a wealth of knowledge about the state of business today. He generously shares this working wisdom in Stop Paddling & Start Rocking the Boat. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Lou Pritchett, after an exemplary career of 36 years at Procter & Gamble, is currently delighting corporate audiences worldwide as a top-rated motivational speaker. Before he pioneered the partnership between P&G and Wal-Mart, he blazed trails in the Philippines during the Marcos regime, as President and General Manager of P&G's subsidiary in Manila. A lifelong Boy Scout and President of Pritchett Enterprises, Lou currently resides with his wife, Barbara, in Hilton Head, South Carolina.