Malia Obama, born on the third of July

Malia Obama had a birthday yesterday.

White House kids seem to have it all. Every toy and gadget comes over the transom. The most famous people of their day are on hand. But the one thing that is often missing are the parents.

When Tad Lincoln celebrated his 12th birthday on April 4, 1865, his father Abraham Lincoln was visiting Richmond, Virginia, the conquered capital of the Confederacy. Fascinated newsmen covered Lincoln as he sat down at the very desk of his former nemesis, Jefferson Davis, in the so called Southern White House. It was a moment filled with such human interest and irony that the birthday of Tad mattered little to the nation. Ten days later, on April 14, Abraham Lincoln was dead at the hands of an assassin. Tad didn’t have his dad for long.

John F. Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963. Mrs. Kennedy remained in the White House for weeks after but the West Wing was immediately taken by Lyndon Johnson, the new president. On November 27, only five days after the death of her father, young Caroline Kennedy celebrated her birthday. The nation hardly cared. The new president Lyndon Johnson gave an address to a joint session of congress. And Mrs. Kennedy was in the news for visiting with the new president in the Oval Office. Big events overshadowed a little girl’s sixth birthday. But Caroline surely remembers it.

Doug Dwight “Ikky” Eisenhower was born on September 24, 1917 but died three years later in his father’s arms. Rather than wallow in grief, the Eisenhower’s determined to forever celebrate the birth of this child and the time they had shared together. They ever after celebrated his birthday, sending little cards and gifts to each other. But in 1955 President Eisenhower suffered his first heart attack on that date. The newspapers never even mentioned the coincidence. And Mamie would have her first serious stroke years later on the eve of this September 24 anniversary. No one even remembered the birthday of Ikky. But the Eisenhowers obviously did.

History towers above these little children of the White House and the lives of their parents often bury them in insignificance. If the children seem for awhile to be spoiled by the drippings from the table of power they are all too often overlooked and deprived of the ordinary parental love that many of the rest of us take for granted.

And so, there is something touching about seeing Michelle Obama, a first lady who is showing herself to be something much more, a real life mother, often putting her children first. On the trip to Europe, when daughter Sasha turned eight, she didn’t just pack her and her sister off to the movie set for the latest Harry Potter installment. They would have been okay, surrounded by handlers and feted by actors and actresses. The First Lady could have met with other movers and shakers in London, or burnished her image and cause by meeting with volunteers, doing her own Princess Diana photo op. The world would have loved it. But instead, she went with Sasha and Malia to meet Mr. Harry Potter together. They were inseparable throughout the trip, mother and daughters.

We have seen a number of dysfunctional families and marriages in the White House. The Roosevelts, the Kennedys, the Reagans, the Clintons. And if the Bushes were not dysfunctional, they were certainly old school, children were to be seen and not heard and when it wasn’t your turn, you weren’t even to be seen. So there is something kind of nice about watching a mother and father who openly love their daughters and dote on them.

Power does strange things to families, especially the children. Catherine de Medici plotted against her own sons. Two Russian monarchs, Ivan the terrible and Peter the Great, executed their own sons. It’s Biblical, David and Absalom. Power is an intoxicating poison and it ruins families and turns brother against brother.

However divided we may now be about the changing role of government and this administration’s decisions on the economy and foreign policy, we can all celebrate the fact that little Malia Obama will be eleven years old tomorrow. And we can all celebrate the fact that her parents see that as important.

Is Ron Paul too old to be President?

Ron Paul Shall Rise Again

Yesterday on Meet the Press they reviewed the declining prospects for the Republican Party.  And the yawning conclusion was that no one can really challenge Barack Obama in 2012 and no one can revive the G.O.P.  They assessed the prospects of all the possible candidates but there was one glaring omission.  Guess who?

Mitt Romney and Lindsey Graham were the Republican guest commentators.  Romney has already made it clear that only an Obama owned recession will allow him back in.  And if Obama can’t get a temporary bump in the stock market, after trebling the money supply, well, we might as all start selling apples right now.  And one by one, on the Russertless Meet the Press, they ticked off all of the reasons why Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee won’t be returning after all.

Of course, the weekly news dominated and they bemoaned the loss of yet another possible G.O.P. standard bearer for 2012.  Mark Sanford, the governor of South Carolina, is now out.  His dalliance in Argentina means he is damaged goods.  Can’t you just see the governor sitting at a side walk café in Buenos Aires, with this nagging worry in the back of his head, “What if they are looking for me right now?  What if I am on CNN? Naaa.”  Indeed, the Sanford episode brings back all the painful narrative surrounding the infidelities of Newt Gingrich and Rudolph Giuliani. Is there no one left to lead the G.O.P.?

Meet the Press cannot be blamed for omitting the one man who is still on everyone’s lips, as in “you know, I think he may have been right, after all.”  The one man who predicted the economic collapse, who suggested that the Federal Reserve needed an audit itself, who warned that electing a Democrat or Republican was pretty much the same thing; there would still be a war where we don’t need one.  The lobbyists would still rule.  The government would still intrude.

On May 18, 2009 Time magazine ran a cover story on the Republican Party, entitled “Endangered Species.”  They had a Michael Grunwald article on “How the Republicans Lost Their Way.”  And an article by Joe Scarborough on “How They Can Come Back.”  Not once did the magazine even mention the name of the man who raised $32 million with a single call.  The man who was first to recognize and announce that Republicans had lost their way, their heart, their soul.

What made the Mark Sanford loss so regrettable to many in the press was the fact that he was emerging as a bit of a populist figure.  He had been able to articulate some of the views and the ideas of the one man whom Meet the Press and Time Magazine and the rest of the establishment so studiously ignore.  And Sanford had been able to pick up the mantle without all the odious, dangerous extra baggage that makes the people at the television networks recoil in horror.  Like actually auditing the Federal Reserve.

The fact is that Mark Sanford was never really a true clone to that man, who like Lord Voldemort, cannot be named.  The man who would shake Wall Street and Capitol Hill to their foundations.  I am speaking, of course, of Congressman Ron Paul of Texas

No, he is not dead, much as Meet the Press and Time would have you believe.  Tim Russert is dead. Michael Jackson is dead.  Farrah Fawcett is dead.  And now even, Billy May is dead.

Ron Paul lives.

And as long as Ron Paul lives, the heart of the Republican Party beats strong and an alternative to the new Socialist Republic of America still exists.

Make sure you read…. Is Ron Paul too old?

And see Reagan and the age issue.

Mark Sanford: It was a woman

It was a woman.

GOP, South Carolina, Governor Mark Sanford was on the brink of greatness.  As one of the nation’s emerging political stars he was so principled that he turned down federal money for his state, saying it was wrong.  Some said he was in the process of inheriting Ron Paul’s massive insurgent army and taking it all the way.  And then?

He disappeared last Thursday.  When someone asked his wife she answered, “I have no idea where he is.”  Some staffers covered for him saying he was alone, writing.  A former press aide says he often disappears.  Others in his office said he was hiking in the wild.  By June 24, Wednesday afternoon, the governor was spotted disembarking from a plane in Atlanta.  It had flown in from Buenos Aires.

I disappeared once.  I was on staff as special assistant to the president at the White House and decided that the pace was driving me crazy. Without telling a soul I walked out of the White House and slipped into a cinema in downtown Washington.  I was gone from the office for exactly two hours.  And you would have thought that all hell had broken loose.  The world can change in two hours, especially at that level.

So what has the governor been up to?  Was he only looking for a moment on Walden’s Pond?  Don’t count on it.  Was he stealing money?  Settling his offshore accounts?  No, not the man who turned down billions from the government.  We all know what it is, or think we do.  We have all known what it had to be all along… a woman.

He must have recoiled in horror as the John and Elizabeth Edwards saga unfolded, with Elizabeth painfully  parading her feelings on the national stage while the rest of us squirmed uncomfortably on our couches.  He must have thought he could steal away a few minutes of peace.

And the women?  Likely a staffer.  Why?  Because some in his office were covering for him and obviously others not.

So, we are now only minutes away… we will see.

Postscript:  Yes, it was a woman.  But not a staffer.  And, in fact, an e-mail partner from Argentina.  And it appears he is still in love because he could not stop himself from talking about her.  Those last days and hours in Argentina must have been bittersweet.

Russian scientists close in on Fountain of Youth

Now, this is interesting.  An international group of scientists have embarked on the ultimate quest.   To find the fountain of youth.  Not since Ponce de Leon has the world been this hopeful. This time we should all expect a little more due diligence. The goal of the project is “to extend the period of human youth.”  And – get this – a biochemical laboratory of Russia’s Southern Federal University has joined the project.  This is getting serious.  And they are testing the affects of various stimuli on the DNA of lab animals. Vladimir Chistyakov is the senior scientist at the lab.  Apparently, in the 1970s, an academician named Skulachev “dissipated the energy of a living organism on the molecular level.”  This according to Pravda. Human cells produce a toxic by product which speeds up the aging process and Skulachev developed nano-constructions to neutralize the toxins.  Sound likes XanGo’s new secret product x51. Anyway, Skulachev’s experiments worked on rats, (which means it should be immediately effective for most politicians.)  The rats remained vigorous throughout their lives but it did not extend their average life spans.   It translates into a life of longer youth but not of longer years. Meanwhile, a group of English doctors have compiled a list of everyday, ordinary things that have already proven to extend life.  And what is the one, single, biggest thing that most people don’t do that has been proven to extend life? Floss. Now, when the Russians figure out how to extend a youthful life without flossing we will be getting someplace.

Related Presidents?

Which presidents were related?

John Quincy Adams was the first son born to an American president and he became president himself.  He was number six, while his father, John Adams, was our second president.

James Madison, our fourth president, and Zachary Taylor, our twelfth president, were second cousins.

William Henry Harrison was our ninth president, while his grandson Benjamin Harrison became our twenty-third president.  Benjamin so resented the public interest in the relationship that he declared to his campaign staff “From now on I am the grandson of no one.”

Theodore Roosevelt, our twenty-sixth president, was a fifth cousin to Franklin Delano Roosevelt who became our thirty-second president.

But it can be much more complicated than that.  For example, if distant cousins count, genealogists can connect most of the American presidents to each other.  And some only need second or third cousins to make multiple connections.  It is accepted that Franklin Roosevelt had some close relationship with eleven American presidents, five from his own family and six from his wife, Eleanor.

FDR and his wife can trace a close connection to George Washington, John Adams, James Madison, John Quincy Adams, Martin Van Buren, William Henry Harrison, Ulysses S. Grant, Zachary Taylor, Benjamin Harrison, Theodore Roosevelt and William Taft.

George W. Bush, our forty third president, is the son of George Herbert Walker Bush our forty first president.  Barbara Bush, the wife of the forty first president was formerly Barbara Pierce and a direct descendent of president Franklin Pierce.

But again, the trail gets complicated. According to genealogist, Gary Boyd Roberts, (See The Bushes by Peter and Rochelle Schweizer) the family is related to an amazing fifteen American presidents.  George Washington, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield, Grove Cleveland, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.

In fact, like or not – and the Bushes clearly don’t like it – if ever there was such a thing as a “royal American family” it would be the Bushes, not the Kennedy’s who are only a few generations away from poverty in Ireland.  George W. and Jeb Bush are the only sons of presidents to be elected governors of states.  And the Bushes, like a number of other American presidents, can trace their lineage back to King Edward I of England.

While the Bushes, much like the Adams in their day, have become unpopular for the time being, the saga is not over.  Public opinion is fickle and there are talented Bush family members ready to pick up the reins.  During the Civil War, an Adams from yet another generation took on the problematical job as Ambassador to the Court of St. James and kept the British out of the war.  Contemporary historians called him the most valuable general in the Union Army.

You Tube: Comparing the Adams and Bushes

Cheney for president?

Well, we now know that Dick Cheney is positioning himself for a presidential run. His challenge to Barack Obama on Gitmo will cast him as a “conservative” alternative and his position in favor of gay marriage will cast him as a “moderate” on social issues. If there is a major terrorist act on American soil between now and November, 2012, Dick Cheney will sound prescient and he will definetly be in the mix for the presidency.

Of course, the American public is getting good at reading mediaspeak. They know, for example, that Cheney’s position on Gitmo doesn’t really make him a conservative at all. A true conservative, having proven himself a loyal vice president, would now officially break with the policies of George W. Bush, whose off the books Iraq War bankrupted the country. Nor would a “conservative” engage in massive bailouts and the printing of trillions of dollars in new paper money, resulting in the largest transfer of wealth in the history of the Republic. No, Bush did not raise taxes, he just dilluted the value of the dollars in our pockets giving billions of his new money to Wall Street bankers. At least Obama will give some of his new monopo;y play money to the lower middle classes through armies of laborers rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure.

Nor is Dick Cheney a moderate on social issues. Cheney made it clear that he will challenge the Evangelical Christian hold on the party and on any and all social issues he will be liberal.

What does all of this mean to the other players in the GOP? For example, will Karl Rove finally have a horse to ride? Insiders say no but Cheney could overrule his own staffers who are telling reporters that Rove is radioactive, with high negatives. Cheney would be exactly Rove’s kind of man, the latter privately insisting to some GOP leaders that the party must shed its relationship with Evangelical Christians. Meanwhile, Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee will presumambly split that vote giving Cheney an opening. At least, that is the scenario painted by Cheney advocates. Where Mitt Romney fits is not stated.

What is impressive is how dramatically Vice President Cheney reemerged in public this past week. He challenged the untouchable, ultra popular President Obama on the very subject that had been his first success. In his first act as president, Barack Obama had signaled his end to the culture of torture by closing Gitmo. Obama received international applause for the decision and the Republicans totally caved on the issue. Yet Dick Cheney, with one well written and well argued speech, won respect and wide coverage for his views. It was the logic and the power of his arguments that thrust him back into the spotlight. It is something seldom seen in modern politics.

 

Why I Chose XanGo

“Arriving at one goal is the starting point of another.”

- Fyodor Dostoevsky

For twenty-one years I have been a student and writer of American history.  It is how I have made my living.  It is what has consumed my time.  But in between this Spartan business of researching and writing about people who are long dead and events that are mostly forgotten, I have had to do other things to make a living.

Since 1974 I have also written and studied network marketing.  For four years, I actually built my own Amway business, reaching the diamond level.  And for many years thereafter I have traveled the world, learning from networking leaders and sharing that knowledge with audiences at their great conventions.

By 1979 my philanthropic work, starting the charity awards, and my political work for the Reagans and Bushes, began dominating my calendar.  But I had never forgotten the idea of a residual, ongoing income for retirement and how it might possibly fund my dreams of even more reading and writing of history.

Recently, when it became known that I had formally retired from Amway, I was contacted by eight other networking companies.  The owners of five of the enterprises called or met with me personally, extolling the virtues of their companies.  One owner-distributor offered me a million dollars to join him.

But I chose my steps carefully.

I was looking for a business that would be the easiest, for the average person, to make the most money with the least amount of time.   I had learned well the lesson, that if an opportunity doesn’t work for the average person, like myself, it will eventually stop working for the exceptional person.

The first thing was a fair plan.  A binary was out.  They were devastating to the average person.  I struggled with that.  One of my best friends was in a binary.  But I did not want in a business that hurt masses of people and left them feeling guilty about their failure, even when it was the expectation, indeed – even a necessity for the company’s survival – that they fail.

But I was also warned not to get into a business that front loaded the payout.  One very chastised and humble networking leader told me that his company was failing because they had moved the bonuses all to the front.  His people could easily make $500 a month, he said sadly, but they could only double that with great difficulty.  As one of my friends commented last night, a networking business needs a vast middle class, like the United States, with many who quickly earn enough to justify doing it fulltime, a strong base from which to launch higher. Again and again I was told of the one company that had the perfect plan.  And twice this information came to me from the mouths of the very owners of the other companies, men and women who were trying to get me to join their enterprise.  Twice I was told that they had copied this plan.

And secondly, the company had to have a product with a compelling reason for people to buy.  There are several companies with good products that make it easy to build a network.  Distributors who get into those companies are astonished at the amount of money they can make in a short period of time without breaking a sweat.  “Yes, but how much do you make off the product?”  Someone will invariably ask.  “This IS off of the product,” comes back the answer.

Well, it so happens that my wife, Myriam, used the product of this particular company, insisting that it was making a difference for our youngest daughter.

“It’s a placebo,” I said, chuckling at her naiveté.  No one wants their wife looking the fool.

“Well, so what?” she would glower back, “It works.”

And then one night after an hour on the internet I told her that she could get the same benefits from buying pomegranate juice at the grocery store and save us some inconvenience and money to boot.

Well, my wife did just that.  We bought juices at the grocery store.  But within weeks all the symptoms came back.

“Look,” she said. “Our daughter has been to doctors in Arizona, Texas, Virginia and Maryland.  We have driven her to holistic clinics in Pennsylvania, arriving home exhausted at midnight.  She has had MRI’s and CAT scans and more blood tests than we can count.  She has taken endless bottles of medicines or vitamins and mineral combinations or nothing at all.  In ten years this is the first thing that has given her any relief.”

“Okay,” I pouted, “Back on the placebo.”

When you combine a fair marketing plan with a compelling product narrative it does not take long to build a network.  And you can stand in front of people and look them in the eyes and know that you are sharing an idea that can be replicated.

The process of networking has long left a distasteful feeling in my mouth.  I am too private a person. And there can be no recruitment without rejection.  A part of me would rather live with less money, on a college campus, reading and writing than taking an emotional risk.  I have a low threshold of pain.

But this company soared to $500 million, even without an educational, tool based system.  They did it on three things, a fair marketing plan, an easy to sell product, and credible branding.  (There is a nice story in a recent issue of Nutrition Business, featuring the style of their bottle, of all things.) For me, this company takes the embarrassment out of networking.

And finally, the future of this company’s founders is directly related to the success of the field.  They are young and their success in life depends on the success of their distributors. This is not a cow that they milk.  They aren’t manipulating the numbers or starving markets of product in order to keep down costs and control growth.  They want and need their company to grow and that bodes well for those of us who are taking this adventurous ride with them.  If they have succeeded without systems it is not because they are afraid of them.  Indeed, they have openly embraced systems that will help the field, saying to professional networkers, “come on, do your thing.”  They are not afraid of the prosperity of their distributors.  They are counting on it.

And so I chose the Lamborghini of network marketing.  Other enterprises have risen and fallen around them.  Many others will do the same in the years ahead.  This one proved to me that it is the easiest for the average person to make the most money with the least amount of time.  It has a sure and steady trajectory. I chose XanGo.

MLM Hall of Fame

Having traveled the world for many years now and spoken at networking conventions and met and known many of its leaders, here is my own subjective list for a networker’s hall of fame.

I have not included many of the legendary founders, like Rich Devos, Jay Van Andal, David McConnell, Mary Kay Ash, Mark Hughes, Aaron Garrity, Gary Hollister, Kent Wood, Bryan Davis, nor did I include the popular speakers, Jim Rohn, Zig Ziglar, Billy Zeoli and Robert Kiyosaki.  Maybe someday I will do those lists.  But each one of the following men and women actually built their own significant, personal networks into the hundreds of thousands.

Many on this list have made mistakes but so to have most of the rest of us.  And some have done extraordinary things for their countries and the world. They work with different companies and each have their different ideas and personalities.  What they have in common is uncommon results.

Nowadays, there are many phony “trade lists” of income earners floated on the internet by shill websites.  Some of them list names of leaders who have been paid out huge sign up bonuses.  Some have never sponsored a single person themselves. But I have met most of the people on my list and spoken to their groups in coliseums or soccer stadiums and been in their homes and I can say that their accomplishments are real.

Doug Wead’s Networking Hall of Fame

Robert Ankasa: This former vice president of the Bank of America in Jakarta has built the largest network in Indonesia and has filled soccer stadiums and auditoriums across the fourth largest nation in the world.

Jeff Boyle: Founder of Jus, he is included in this mix because he actually built his company’s own networks. Young. brilliant, with a big heart.  No one knows the science of networking any better.  He is the Alvin Toffler of the industry.

BK Boreyko: He hailed from a family that built one of the largest organizations in the Matal Company and when a corporate crisis occurred he stared his own company, New Vision, which reached the $100 million sales mark in record time.

Bill Britt: At one time his organization may have represented half of all Amway volume.  He transformed the networking systems by being the first to build his own cassette manufacturing company.

Craig Bryson: He is Nu Skin’s biggest lifetime earner and one of the industry’s greatest storytellers.

Bill Childers: He built the largest, single, cohesive group in networking history.  His secret?  He insisted on always appearing as the second man to his upline, even when his own group was at times much larger.

Jim Dornan: The founder of Network 21 has the largest and most efficient system business in the world. His organization has donated $100 million to World Vision..

Tim Foley: He defied the accepted wisdom of all the other North America networking leaders and proved that system networks could be profitable outside the United States building giant groups in Brazil and Spain.

Attila Gidofalvi: This Hungarian businessman is the father of networking in the former Soviet Union, Attila built 120 Amway diamonds in two years and held meetings at Olympic Stadium in Moscow.

John Godzich: He built a network in France and then a company that reached $200 million in sales in two years and annually filled Bercy, the largest auditorium in Paris, four weekends in a row.  80% of the money was made from retail sales, allowing new people to make money too.  It is still an industry record.

Hal and Susan Gooch: They hosted some of the largest networking events in the United States, filling the 90,000 seat Indiana Hoosier Dome on multiple occasions.  While most wives of American networkers were limited to roles as “speakers,” Susan played an integral part in the organization of the business.

Bob Goshen: “Mr. Enthusiasm,” he was the first system’s person in Sunrider and drove its success.

Brig Hart: Already very successful in networking, he felt cheated by his experience and joined a new company.  Brig proved wrong the old networking adage that successful networkers are too soft to build it twice and took his new company, MonaVie, into the stratosphere, making himself a legend in the process.

Randy Haugen: He had a great run in the west.

Don Held: In his heyday he filled coliseums in Ohio and Canada, and launched an educational system, showing that a network can do more than just make money.

Dave Johnson: He is the giant of Nikken. Supposedly 99% of the company is in his downline.

Gordon Morton: He is the father of the so called “Cadillac of compensation plans” and built his own networks in several different companies before venting his frustration by co-founding one of his own.  XanGo reached $500 million in its first five years.  Its compensation plan, which puts money in the pockets of its distributors quickly, is copied by almost all new startups.  It is called the perfect plan.

Joe Morton: Gordon’s brother and ally in XanGo, Joe showed how to build a network on products that people “had to have.”  It spawned a whole new category in networking.  Now all new companies copy the model.

Ken Pontious:  He was top earner with Enrich, was once taking home a monthly income which was twice the annual salary of the president of the United States.

Vladimir Pozdnyakov: He is nicknamed “The Poz” by his American colleagues, he is one of the new Russian millionaires, who developed a network out of trust, in a difficult environment.  His groups fill auditoriums.

Ron Puryear: He built one of the largest networks in the Britt system and for awhile, ruled in the northwest USA, filling the largest coliseums in Portland and Seattle to capacity..

Kaoru Nakajimi: He has more than 700,000 in his downline.  He built Amway in Japan.

Nathan Ricks: The charismatic legend who helped build Nu Skin.

Mitch Sala: He is the great Australian networker who solved the problem of isolation downunder by exporting his business worldwide. Sala has one of the most geographically diverse groups in the world.

Rick Setzer: He was once the third leg in the Yager-Britt stool.  Great systems knowledge.

Sherman Unkefer: A legend in XanGo, with an estimated $350,000 a month income off his XanGo business, Sherman’s simple prospecting package called “The Magic Wand,” helped him build a resilient networking business in only a few short explosive months.  No one has reached the top quicker.

Don Wilson: He succeeded by hard work.  Yager didn’t like flying on airplanes so Wilson soon owned the Yager system in the west.

Dexter Yager: The father of the so called “system,” he may be the greatest networker of all time, he has not only built one of the biggest organizations, he has maintained it big for the longest time.  His secret?  He keeps starting new groups and for years he has outworked everybody else.

Mark Yarnell: Formerly of Nu Skin, he is networking’s thinking man and its most prolific chronicler.

Natasha Yena: A wise and resourceful strategic thinker, Natasha is the mother of all Russian speaking networkers, Her events fill auditoriums across Russia and Ukraine and have spawned dozens of other networking women leaders with enormous businesses of their own, clearly disproving the misogynist declarations of some American networkers who insist that women can’t build the business by themselves.  Indeed, in Russia, it is mostly the women who do.

James Vagyi: He is a Hungarian whose business exploits put him on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.  He successfully launched networking in Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Ukraine, Russia, Moldavia, Belarus, Romania, Slovenia and Croatia, making him “the networking father of many nations.”  And while others have appeared and died in some of those markets, Vagyi’s groups continue.

Jody Victor: He proved that networking can survive and even thrive into a second generation. Victor has seen the dozens of seismic changes in networking and landed on his feet each time.

Orrin Woodward: He took the so called “systems building” to its ultimate extreme.

Amway Diamonds and their “tools”

After all these months I am still responding to the points that Tex has been making. This is my last post on this subject, before moving on. I haven’t been arguing with Tex, although he may think that, I am just offering explanations about how it happened. Actually, I agree with most of what he says, especially with what it has become.

I recently sat with one of the most famous diamonds and he was rationalizing his life of selling tapes by saying that what he tells the people is that “these tapes are good for you, they will build your life,” which is true.  He just doesn’t talk about how they relate to the business because while they will indeed build the business, the business may not offer as much money as the tapes. He knew that the tapes had bought his mansion, not his networking business.  So I think his conscience was bothered by that.

Now, in fairness, some network companies need CD’s badly and should be promoting them much, much more.  Their people are suffering for ways to build their businesses and a good system would solve it. And the difference is that if they build their businesses they will make money off of them because they have products that have a compelling narrative.  In Amway, we had a diversity of products, and that was our narrative and what we tried to sell.  I think if we had linked the tape bonuses to qualification in the business it would have solved a lot of problems.

Today we are experiencing a strong reaction to these types of extremes.  And Amway is cleaning it all up.

So here we go… my last answers to Tex’s comments, there is much, much more that he raises, I am just ready to move onto other things.

Tex: You don’t address whether ANY IBO’s below [Platinum level] were making a net profit with all of these tapes, books, functions, etc. THAT is my main point. It involves tool PRICES and system PRACTICES (unnecessary long distance travel in particular).

Well, in our group, I think we started giving a break at “Silver.”  We considered a break for everyone but it was so small at the lower levels that it wasn’t an incentive to anyone and diluted the power for a person who had made it to “Silver” or “Direct.”

As to distant groups?  Five of my six diamond legs came from groups that were more than 1000 miles from home.  In fact, they stretched from Seattle to Orlando.  I found out-of-town groups much more expensive but easier to grow and less high maintenance.  Even while I am retired from Amway and no longer an IBO, some of these groups are still going.

There is a whole science to starting out-of-town groups and they are expensive to get going but within a year or two they can be very low maintenance, self sufficient groups.  But I could never conceive of a way to build them without CD’s or tapes.

Tex: [ You talk of losing money.] How was money lost? Wouldn’t they sell them for at least the cost of producing the tapes?

Well, you had to buy and maintain the machinery.  It was always breaking down and so you were always buying new slaves or new machines.  There was no four year service plans from Best Buy back then.  You had to hire someone by the hour to do it and you usually had to do it yourself or have your kids because it was only hourly work and you were on the road sometimes.  You had to print and affix your own labels, which was a chore.

And even when tape duplicating companies started appearing you had the bookkeeping for all the different accounts and some never paid, which means you lost all of your profit and sometimes went in the hole.  What can you do?  You can’t kick them out. If you complain to the company they say, “That’s your problem, not ours.”  So sure, sometimes you lost money.

My White House experience

Let me give you an example.  I served on senior staff at the White House and my business was put in a blind management trust.  I couldn’t even contact my downline.  While I worked at the White House lawyers divided my group between Dexter Yager in the east, Bill Britt in the midwest and Jim Dornan in the west.  When I finally left the White House my Yager groups were very small, my Britt groups had transferred out, picked clean by the Diamond who had been assigned to “protect” them for me.  But my west coast groups had survived.

Now, Dexter was mad at me during this time.  I had gotten into “stacking,” it was something like the methods of today’s MonaVie and Dex had warned that it would not last and it would eventually destroy my group, that the newest people would be hurt. But I didn’t listen to him and I needed something to help my leaders survive and “stacking” creates excitement, you get a big group fast, even if the money only goes to the top.  No one in my group was making any money.  My business was collapsing.  In fairness to Amway, no one was retailing.  And frankly that was not so easy.  So stacking, or turning my Amway business into a hybrid binary caused some enthusiasm, at least for awhile.

But all of that is a different story. When I came out of the White House, with Dex upset at me, and my groups under Jim Dornan in the west surviving, I plugged into him.  Well, one of my Emeralds started to quickly run up a debt.  He was buying the tapes from me and selling downline to his group but he wasn’t paying me.  You don’t know what to do.  You love the people you are working for in your downline and they need the tapes to survive and build their groups.  And you care for the Emerald, who may be broke and making house payments.  And he thinks you are rich, that you don’t need the money, and he keeps promising that he finally has the money.  If you cut off the tapes you lose the whole group.  Well the debt climbed to almost $40,000. You ask how someone can lose money on the tapes?

Eventually, I could have gotten some of that back.  He would have had to pay something.  My new leader, Jim Dornan would have held his feet to the fire. We could have by-passed the Emerald and he would have lost his leadership.  But the Emerald went to Jim and cried on his shoulder.  This is a classic story, this happens all the time.  And the Emerald said, “Doug was in the White House, and now he is thinking about congress and he is too busy to help me.  We need to be transferred to another diamond.”  So a very big group was transferred, my tape money from the groups was cut in half.  And the debt of the Emerald was forgotten.  I was left holding the bag.

Tex: I think the “rules” in those days were based on favoritism; specifically, how hard the IBO pushed the tool system.

Sounds to me like you were in a very bad group with leadership that was greedy and not really smart. But again, I would want to hear it from their perspective too.  I never had any pressure at all.  Dex never pushed tapes on me.  In fact for a long time he gave them to me free but he started charging me for them, saying that it was bad for me to get them free.  And he was right.  I didn’t even listen to them until I had to pay for them.  You should never just give something away without a plan.  You can’t just go to Calcutta and throw money off of a rooftop.  You have to have follow up and responsibility or it is all a waste and can even do harm and make people dependent.

Tex: The question isn’t whether the tapes (or other parts of the tool system mentioned above) worked, it was whether the tail was wagging the dog, and whether the pre-Platinum IBO’s made a net profit.

Well, sadly, they did not.  And you are right that the tail was wagging the dog.  But again, did the fault lie with the selling of tapes?  Or the plan and the type of products and the price of those products?  At least the tapes kept people trying.

Tex: [You say you told everybody, everything up front.] What exactly did you tell them?

I told them that the suggested plan called for retailing the products.  I had learned from Jody Victor to do this and not immediately assume that they would not retail.  Of course, very few did retail. Like almost zero. And there was a danger in promoting it because when they tried and saw how hard it was you lost all credibility.  That’s why many would “dis” retailing from the beginning, not because they didn’t want it to happen but because they knew that no one really would do it and they had more credibility to say so up front.

Then, I would say that there was income from tapes and educational products at silver and above.   So they knew that it would be a lot of work.  And many still stayed with it, believing that they could get to the higher levels.  And I was one of those who did, and I am very, very grateful for what I experienced and grateful to the company and for my friends.

To start at the begining of this series read Doug Wead Amway Adventure