Last week, Ben Settle sent out an email in which he quoted a reader who said the following about negotiation coach Jim Camp:
“… his whole system for the most part comes from Dave Sandler and he never gives him credit, ever that I’ve heard. Now I realize he has done many things to make him an expert but he has never anywhere I’ve heard even mentioned Sandler.”
Ben is a big Jim Camp fan, and has infected many of his readers, me among them, with Jim Camp’s authority.
Ben shrugged off his reader’s comment, and said he had never heard of Sandler.
Neither had I. But I looked Sandler up. He was a sales trainer and he died in 1995.
I found a book of 49 of Sandler’s “Timeless Selling Principles.” Most of the rules line up very well with Camp’s system. And some line up exactly.
Take a quick look over the specific language in the chapter headings and summaries below, and you’ll see that Jim Camp was in fact taking a lot from Sandler. From the book:
* “Don’t spill your candy in the lobby” [Camp swapped in “beans” for “candy”]
* “The best sales presentation you’ll ever give, the prospect will never see” [taken word-for-word]
* “The bottom line of professional selling is going to the bank” [Camp said “bottom line of negotiation…”]
* “You must be comfortable telling your prospect that it’s OK to say ‘No.’ You must also be comfortable hearing and accepting ‘No.'” [Camp used this pretty much word-for-word, and summed it up with the title of his book, Start With No.]
In that Ben Settle email, Ben wrote, “If you learn something that’s not common knowledge from a particular source it’s good to give credit.”
I’ve read and listened to Camp a lot, but I’ve never read or heard Camp credit Dave Sandler. I’ve heard him mention Peter Drucker, Ralph Waldo Emerson, even Gloria Steinam, but never Sandler. (I checked just now, and Sandler is credited once, among 20 other mentors, at the end of Start With No.)
So now what? Is Jim Camp really a plagiarist? Or did he at least snub an influential mentor by not crediting him enough?
It might be interesting for the gossip, but on a practical level, I couldn’t care less.
As I wrote a long time ago in this newsletter, I’m less interested in attribution than in ideas that work.
Jim Camp’s system works. I know because I’ve used it and seen it work.
But is it really Camp’s system? Or Sandler’s system? Or somebody else’s who came before Sandler? Or some amalgam?
Instead of agonizing over those tough questions, I would like to give you a better, easier question to ponder:
Do you remember any of Sandler’s points above?
The real value in this email is those five points, not a dogpile on the topic of whether Camp gave due credit or not.
And yet, I doubt one person in a hundred will remember any of Sandler’s ideas above from this email… while many will remember that I wrote an email with the subject line, “Jim Camp, plagiarist.”
No judgment there. Such is the human brain — wired for human action and drama. You can gripe about it and fight it without effect, or you can simply accept it and work with it.
As I wrote once before, it’s your choice whether you want to be subtle or savage in how you work with it.
What is not your choice is how people’s brains work, and what kinds of messages they respond to.
And the most condensed and powerful type of message that people respond to… well, you can read more about that here: