The Humm Handbook

About the Book . The Story behind the book . About the Humm-Wadsworth . About the Author
	The Humm Handbook website The Story behind The Humm Handbook: Lifting Your Level of Emotional Intelligence

How the The Humm Handbook came to be written The story about the Humm Handbook begins in 1972 when I was halfway through completing an MBA course at the London Business School. Charles Handy was my tutor. This was before Charles had written his first book and had established himself as a leading British manageament guru. Nevertheless Charles was already a quirky character and well-known even then for his lateral thinking. I had just been offered a position with McKinseys in New York. When I told Charles about the offer (certainly the dream job of every MBA student at that time) he advised me to reject it! Instead he suggested I start my post MBA career as a salesperson! His reasoning was as follows: Success in business occurs in the one-on-one meetings. MBAs teach you about analysis and decision making but not how to deal with people one-on-one. The best way learn how to deal with people one-on-one is to become a salesperson. If you don't become good at dealing with people, you don't eat so the incentive to learn is compelling. The move to Australia At this time England was suffering economically. In the beginning of 1972 the miners struck for nine weeks and in the summer there was a national dock strike. In particular I remember a debate at the London Business School on whether the LBS supports the miners. The vote in favour of the miners was 98-2. I should add that I was one of the two dissenting votes. At the time the English miner was working seams by hand that were lesss that 30cm thick. The Australian coal miner who was operating drag chutes that could fill a truck in about five minutes. I seem to remember that an Australian coal miner was 100 times more productive than a UK miner and the subsidy to keep the UK miner in his job was something like four to five times his average wage. Yet here at the home of capitalism in the UK the vote was 98-2. I gave up. If you had said to me then in 1973 that England 30 years later would be the economic engine of Europe I would have said it was impossible. Anyway the two of us who voted against the miners both decided to emigrate to Australia and I was one of the last of the ten pound Poms. International Computers Limited had offered me a job in Sydney and used the scheme to fly me to Australia in October 1973 about two weeks before the official opening of the Sydney Opera House. The moment of epiphany I manourvered my way into a job as a trainee salesperson and at ICL I was introduced for the first time to the Humm-Wadsworth personality model. It is fair to say that the training program was a moment of epiphany. Up till then I had believed that deep down all of us were the same. After the training program I realised how different we all are, particularly in how we react emotionally. Subsequently I used the model very successfully in selling and management. In 1981 I switched careers and became a merchant banker with Bankers Trust Australia. I started the Retail Funds Management division and launched the BT Cash Management and Split Trusts. I also raised the initial $10 million for BT Innovation Limited which was one of the first seven venture capital funds licensed by the Australian Government in 1984. I then became a venture capitalist and to raise my profile began writing articles and giving seminars. This activity resulted in Allen & Unwin asking me to write a book on Venture Capital. The book Enterprise and Venture Capital was first published in 1989 and now is its fourth edition. It has sold some 12,000 copies and is regarded as the handbook of the industry. It is used as a text for a number of Australian and Chinese university courses on entrepreneurship. Following the success of the venture capital book, Allen & Unwin asked me if I had a second book inside me. I replied that I had a draft of a book on selling that I written in the late 1970s which I had tentatively titled Psycho-selling. Allen & Unwin rejected the proposal on the basis “Books on selling don’t sell”. Jill Hickson to the rescue I then decided that I would try a different approach and in 1991 cold-called Jill Hickson, who at that time was probably Australia’s leading literary agent. She read the book and came back with the following comments. “The book needs a lot of work. We have to change the title. On the other hand the chapter on the Hustler is probably the only thing I have ever read that gets inside the head of my husband, Neville Wran (Her husband was the Premier of New South Wales). I could not stop laughing about how on the mark it was. We are going to publish this book.” Thus Empathy Selling was born. Jill convinced Lothian to publish the first edition in 1991 and subsequently Kogan Page (1992) in the UK and McGraw Hill (1995) in Australia brought out subsequent editions. There was also an Indonesian version published in 1993 by Penerbit PT Gramedia Pusaka Utama. In the early 1990s I was, as we say in the venture capital industry, between funds working as an entrepreneur. For example I was chairman of Neverfail SpringWater and Scitec Communciation Systems. After the publication of Empathy Selling I approached Chandler & Macleod with a proposal to set up a joint venture that would create and market training courses using the Humm Wadsworth technology. We agreed on terms and for two years 1992-94 I worked full time on the JV. We developed three training courses on selling, managing and negotiating and I became fully immersed in the Humm technology. We signed up a number of distributors both in Australia and in the UK to market the programs and I ran a number of programs myself both for distributors and for conference organisations such as IIR and Euromoney. I took the venture capital route I was then approached in 1995 by St. George Bank to manage a venture capital fund. We negotiated a first fund of $20 million and thus was born Nanyang Ventures. Venture capital, if you can raise the funds, is generally more lucrative than being an author (unless you are Dan Brown or J.K. Rowling). Over the next five years Nanyang raised a total of $140 million. As part of the management contract I had to work full time at Nanyang Ventures so I sold my interest in the JV back to Chandler & Macloed. In late 2006 I decided it was time to retire from venture capital. I was 62 and venture capital investors require that you are able to commit for 10 years to a fund. I was suffering from 'deal fatique' having looked at some 5,000 business plans since 1984. I decided it was time to devote my efforts to The Humm Handbook. The birth of The Humm Handbook Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goldman was first published in 1995. The book, which promoted the concept that emotional intelligence (EQ) was more important than natural intelligence (IQ) in determining success in life, sold 5 million copies in the first five years of publication. Goldman popularly defined EQ using the marshmallow experiment. In the 1960s a group of four-year olds were tested by being given a marshmallow and promised another, if they could wait 20 minutes before eating the first one. Some children could wait and others could not. The experimenters then followed the progress of each child into adulthood, and demonstrated that those with the ability to wait were more successful in life than those who couldn't. Delayed gratification is a key part of emotional intelligence. Unfortunately while Goldman was correct in his premise about the importance of EQ, he was unable to describe a theory of core emotions. Emotions are very important in life but Emotional Intelligence was silent when it came to describing what are the core emotions and how do you recognise them in yourself and other people. Goldman says he believed there are core emotions but admitted in the book that he did not know of an appropriate model. When I read Emotional Intelligence for the first time in 1996 I realised that I had the answer to Goldman's conundrum. I was familiar with the Humm-Wadsworth, which is a scientific model of people’s underlying emotions. At that moment I promised myself that I would write a book for managers that would lift their level of emotional intellingence. Of course promising you are going to do something and actually doing it are two different things. For the next ten years I was too involved in venture capital to look at writing the book. However about two years ago, my elder daughter, Louisa began her career a supervisor for Skandia. She asked me a good question, "What management books should she read?" After some thought, I realised there there was no practical handbook written to help new managers develop their people skills so I decided that I had to write one myself. Thus The Humm Handbook was born and published in 2007 by Wilkinson Publishing.