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Shaw’s Showbiz
Stories
Show Success Secrets
By Tim Boxer
 OU
can learn a lot by watching performers on stage. Ron Shaw, who in an
earlier life was a standup comedian, learned timing, how to connect
with an audience, how to project, how to work a crowd, and most
important, how to pay attention to detail.
He never forgot the time he
opened for Dean Martin at the Fontainebleau in Miami Beach. He was
struck by the attention Martin paid to every detail of his
performance. Martin was extremely serious and thorough about every
aspect of his performance.
“Every beat in his act,
down to where he would sip his drink and slur his words, was
practiced,” Ron writes in his wonderfully absorbing autobiography,
Pilot
Your Life.
The most important thing he
learned from Martin, he writes, was that “successful professionals
stay at the peaks of their fields not due to luck, but simply
because they are more obsessed than anyone else with growing and
perpetually improving what they do.”
In his eleven-year career
as a comedian, Ron absorbed so much technique and secrets of success
from the stars he worked with that he was able to apply his acquired
wisdom in the next stage of his life – selling pens.
From show business, Ron
learned how to dress, walk and make an entrance – which he adapted
in his business situations.
He noticed that when a
performer is introduced, often he would wait three beats before
coming out onstage. He would always look behind him as he walked
out, as if talking to someone “thus creating a certain mystique
and theatricality.”
Ron says he learned more
“about how to walk into a meeting or work a roomful of people from
great stage performers than from any classroom or other experience
in my life.”
Pilot
Your Life is
chockfull of interesting showbiz anecdotes from which valuable
lessons are gleaned that can help propel you up the ladder in the
business world. It certainly rocketed Ron all the way to the top.
(See www.pilotyourlife.com.)
In fact, Ron became so
stupendously successful that today he is president and CEO of Pilot
Pen Corporation of America. Headquartered in Trumbull, Conn., the
company, which produces more than a hundred different pens and
markers, has over 270 employees with $200 million in sales last
year.
Ron’s autobiography,
while chronicling his exciting career in show business and corporate
life, is an engrossing textbook on how to succeed. Some of his
salient points:
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When
speaking, always open with your strongest material.
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Develop
the ability to sell yourself.
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Don’t
always go with consensus thinking. Sometimes you have to
challenge conventional wisdom.
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It’s
often necessary to bend the rules and take risks to move
forward.
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It’s
important to define goals for yourself and for the people in
your company. |
One significant lesson –
on perceived value – is derived from a story Ron relates
concerning Picasso.
The maestro was sitting at
an outdoor café when an older woman recognized him and, all
excited, asked him to draw something on a piece of paper.
Picasso made a sketch. The
woman asked if she could have it.
“Of course, Madam. That
will be five thousand dollars.”
“Five thousand dollars!
Why, that drawing only took you a few seconds!”
“No, Madam. That drawing
took fifty-two years.”
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