To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others

by Daniel H. Pink

Theater, for instance, has always relied on scripts. Actors have discretion to interpret material their own way, but the play tells them what to say and, in many cases, how and where to say it. America’s sales pioneers sought to replicate theater’s staged approach. One of the titans, John H. Patterson, who founded the National Cash Register Company in the late 1800s, required all of NCR’s salesmen to memorize scripts. Over time, as Harvard University business historian Walter Friedman has written, these scripts grew more detailed—morphing from a short primer called “How I Sell National Cash Registers” into a sales manual that ran nearly two hundred pages.1 The ever more detailed instructions, Friedman says, focused “not only on what salesmen should say, but also on what they were to do while saying it,” complete with NCR’s version of stage directions. Sprinkled into the company-crafted monologues were asterisks “that indicated that the salesman was supposed to point to the item he was referring to”—as in Now, sir, this register* makes the entries. The indication* of the transaction shows through this glass.*2 Patterson and his crew even produced a Book of Arguments so that if customers raised questions or concerns, its salesmen could respond with well-rehearsed lines.