Free Do You Sincerely Want To Be Rich? by Charles Raw, Bruce Page, Godfrey Hodgson Page B

Bazaar. How a sales force was mustered, a technique was refined, and young men learnt to 'put their egos in their pockets'. Also, some observations on Swiss banks.
        One evening in 1958 the doorbell rang in an apartment on one of the drab housing areas attached to the big us Air Force base at Orleans, fifty miles south of Paris. The sergeant who lived there opened the door, to be confronted by a slim, pleasant young American who proceeded to do a very odd thing.
        'Good evening,' he said. 'My name is Allen Cantor, and I would like to introduce you' - he made an assured gesture -'to my colleague Mr W. Thad Lovett.'
        The odd thing about Cantor's introduction was that he was at that moment quite alone outside the door. The reason for this was that Mr W. Thad Lovett, who was by no means a figment of Cantor's imagination, was down below in the car again, shivering with sheer horror at the idea of ringing the doorbells of perfect strangers and intruding upon them for the purpose of selling mutual fund shares.
        Thad Lovett was neither designed by nature, nor prepared by upbringing, for door-to-door selling, least of all to enlisted men in the US Air Force. He is a shy, plumpish man with exquisite manners and a dry sense of humour, who loves music and fives with nine living cats and innumerable china ones. Having inherited what he calls 'an Income' he had knocked about Europe until the age of 45 without having needed to earn a living. Then the Income came dramatically to an end, in the way
        Incomes sometimes do, and there was nothing for it, short of
        going back to America and working in an office, but selling mutual funds for Bernie Cornfeld.
        Allen Cantor's background was very different. His family ran a store in Brooklyn, and after a successful academic career, Allen travelled to Europe and put in a spell as a rare-book dealer.
        While outwardly very different, they were both representative of the superficially unlikely material from which Bernie Cornfeld recruited the IOS Old,Guard.
        Within weeks of arriving in Paris, Cornfeld had made an interesting discovery. He had found that there were at least two types of Americans in Europe. There were the servicemen, who had reasonable quantities of money in their pockets, but who more and more frequently were accompanied by wives and children - which made them increasingly disinclined to blow all their pay on living it up.
        And then there were the exiles. Today, large herds of gentle, conformist rebels against American culture graze anywhere in Europe they can find grass. In 1955, in Paris, Cornfeld was among the vanguard of the invasion. The exiles he met were on the whole highly educated. Many of them had come to Europe as students, on the GI Bill or on Fulbright grants. Theirs was a tolerant society: a mildly bohemian life-style was expected, and some vague stirrings of political radicalism were almost demanded. It was a world of frustrated intellectuals, mild neurotics, political nonconformists and cultural misfits, with the occasional drunk or homosexual. Most American businessmen would have written them off as being hopelessly deficient in acquisitive instincts.
        It was the inspiration of Bernie Cornfeld, the psychologist and social worker, to see that these exiles could be remotivated and put to work selling mutual funds to the servicemen. His success in doing so was so enormous that the originality of his perception has been forgotten. It is hard to imagine any ordinary mutual fund sales boss perceiving commercial talent in Thad Lovett, as Mr Lovett himself admits.
        The fact that his recruits were people who had found that their careers were stumbling, or that they had overestimated their talents, did not dismay him, as it might have dismayed some ibm-trained personnel manager. Indeed, it may well have served some deep need of his own: for it carried the promise that his recruits would