My Tutelage

John was a teacher.

By the time I met John Jack, he was already a legend at BI WORLDWIDE and the incentive industry. In many ways, I was late to the game. John was in his ‘60’s and he had a long line of devotees. But it didn’t matter to either of us – there was work to do.

In early 2001 when I joined the department, John and I would both arrive at the office around 7:00am and do our own thing until about 7:45 or 8:00am. Then we would convene to his office and discuss presentations scheduled for the week, calls from sales reps that had come in and what were the sales reps' issues or how we could speed up the development of the next release for one of the products…

That discussion would last until lunchtime – somewhere between 11:30am and Noon – and we’d get into his 5-series BMW wagon and head to Bunny’s. We never waited for a seat because the service and the food were incredibly mediocre. And he loved it. “See, it’s Friday and we can sit down to a table without waiting and order the same crappy food we had yesterday!”

Our conversation would continue through lunch and back to the office. Half the time, we went on to other meetings, but the other half we blew through a few more hours in John’s office working through ideas for presentations and products, researching academic findings, or just looking through magazines for great examples of great advertisements. 

And as much as I was cognitively aware that I was just another person in a long line of acolytes, my nose was rubbed into it when my colleagues would pull me aside and ask, “So you’re working with John. What’s he up to? What’s next?”

My colleagues never even considered that I might have contributed to something that John was working on – and that was fair. I was the apprentice, not a peer. Yet in that, he never made me feel subordinate. He always propped up my stature with questions like, “What do you think would be a good way to supercharge the AwardperQs engine?”

Later

A few years after John retired, a colleague from BIW came to me with a large book in his hands. “John let me borrow this a dozen years ago so I could brush up on motivation.” It was McClelland’s 692-page tome[1] on motivation. “I was moving my desk and realized I still had it. Can you get it back to him for me?”

I found inside hundreds of notes in John's handwriting and highlighted insights from the 1973 masterwork on motivation that informed John of some of the best ideas for products anyone could imagine. John had read the vast majority of the book and integrated it into his business like no one else I’d ever known.

[1] Human Motivation, David C. McClelland, Cambridge University Press, 1972. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/human-motivation/FE109A014F97354399BAF0E3602D593D