Early on, Lyons, a professional entrepreneurial coach and the founder of Lyons Consulting Group, writes about studying at the University of Michigan and earning an MBA at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. At the time, he was concentrating on a numbers-driven approach to business that had made his family’s Anheuser-Busch beer distributorship the largest in Michigan. Lyons gave no thought to entering the field of sales and also had no initial interest in what he calls the “touchy-feely” aspect of interpersonal business relationships. His opinion would change at the Wright Foundation, where Lyons met his collaborator on this book, executive coach Bob Wright. In the early 1990s, Lyons took Wright’s “Men’s Basic Training” workshop, which focused on a new, more sensitive “model of manhood,” which was emerging alongside the older, more traditional “tough and stoic” one. Lyons began to use the Wright Developmental Model as a “map for self-awareness.” This, he says, changed the way that he looked at both his personal and his professional lives, guiding him through the ups and downs of his expanding consulting business before it was eventually acquired by Capgemini, a French multinational consultancy. Readers curious to learn more about the deeper lessons that Lyons learned from his experiences may be frustrated at times by the amount of space his book devotes to the specific workings of Lyons Consulting and its sale to another company. However, his insights about sales professionalism, when they appear, are effectively passionate, as when he reminds readers that “sales is about service,” even if it means sending clients elsewhere: “Figure out a way to solve your customers’ needs, even if it is not something you can provide,” he writes. “Use your network.” His personal story in the earlier sections of the book gives extra heft to his later advice.
