Sales Lessons from Bradbury and Post

Ray Bradbury One of the few magazines to which I actually subscribe is Training: The Source for Professional Development. 

The March/April 2014 issue had a great piece that ran in the "last word" column.  Written by Peter Post, the director of the Emily Post Institute and co-author of The Etiquette Advantage in Business, this particular entry discussed the Bulletin Board Rule.  Post states the rule as If you can't put it on a bulletin board for anyone to read, don't e-mail it, text it, Instant Message it, leave it on a voicemail, tweet it, or blog it. 

The Bulletin Board Rule strongly reminds me of Lesson 23 of Rugg's Handbook of Sales and Science Fiction.  The lesson, drawn from Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, states If you put it in writing (on paper or digitally), you had better plan on it being around forever.  If you write it, you will need to own it.

You can read Post's column about the Bulletin Board Rule in its entirety (as well as anything else from past issues of Training... they've got a killer archive resource!) on the internet at www.TrainingMag.com.  Just click on "past issues" and select the title you want to read.  You can also learn more about Peter Post at www.emilypost.com/seminars. 

And here is the full text of Lesson 23 from the Handbook.


The Sci-Fi:  Fahrenheit 451.  Novel by Ray Bradbury


The Sci-Fi Sitch:  This classic novel of book banning is set in the near future, when books of all sorts have been outlawed, and firemen are not here to help humanity by putting out house fires – all of the homes are fireproof-- but instead, exist to track down and incinerate those tools of the subversives:  books.  And if the subversives end up charbroiled in the process, well then, they brought that on themselves, now didn’t they?  The novel takes its name from the temperature at which paper ignites, and the storyline follows one of the firemen, Montag, through his transformation from a good, order-following public servant, to a confused soul, intrigued by the forbidden books, and finally to a fugitive from society, living outside of civilization in the country, along with the other rebels who dare to read and preserve literature.  But these refugees don’t carry the actual books around with them- each person has memorized a book, and they keep the world’s greatest works intact by passing the written word along in an oral tradition.


The Sales Sitch:  This novel has become the standard-bearer in the fight against censorship and book-banning.  But the lesson for the sales rep is not quite so lofty.  Instead, it is a reminder of the persistence of the written word, be it on paper or in a digital file.  In Fahrenheit 451, several noted works of literature survive and thrive, through even a societal purge that seeks to eliminate books.  So too will your memos and e-mails survive even your most stringent efforts to delete them.  In other words, don’t write it down if you don’t want it to exist in that form throughout eternity.  When you write a bid proposal or make a service guarantee, you had better be prepared to stand by it, because if you don’t, it will turn up when you least expect it and bite you in the behind.


The Sales and Sci-Fi Lesson:  If you put it in writing (on paper or digitally), you had better plan on it being around forever.  If you write it, you will need to own it.


The Sci-Fi Skinny:  Fahrenheit 451, published in 1953, was perhaps the most well-known work of Ray Bradbury (American writer, 1920 - 2012), along with his Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man.  As mentioned, Fahrenheit 451 is annually trotted out by the anti-censorship movement, almost as a manifesto of the cause.  So it's worth noting what the author himself had to say about it.  Journalist Amy E. Boyle Johnston interviewed Bradbury shortly after he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2007.  She reported that he was fairly emphatic that F451 was not a story about government censorship, but instead, an indictment of television’s soul-suckingness and its role in the death of literature.

Bradbury is also famous, or perhaps infamous, for refusing to allow ebook or digital versions of his works.  Shortly before his death in 2012, though, he made the news again for a publication contract renewal that included an ebook provision.  It seems that he was forced into allowing for digital publication as a condition of renewal, but at the same time, made the digital publication contingent upon the publisher, Simon & Schuster, making the Fahrenheit 451 ebook available for public lending libraries (which had been against Simon & Schuster's policies at that point.)