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An interview with James Connor, author,

Geshe Michael Roach praised The Perfection Of Marketing by James Connor, published by Diamond Cutter Press in January 2009, with the following:
    “James Connor had the courage to go and seek the ancient wisdom of Asia, the determination to master it with many years of study, and the vision to apply it to his hot New York ad agency. The proof is in the pudding; listen to him and succeed.”    

Scott Vacek of Diamond Cutter Discussion Groups recently interviewed James Connor, a brand marketing expert and the CEO of The James Group, an advertising agency that specializes in businesses under 500 employees, to learn more about his new book The Perfection of Marketing.

Q:    James, how important was reading The Diamond Cutter to your career?

There has been one book that changed the course of my life: The Diamond Cutter. Reading it, I felt I was hearing the truth for the first time. In Geshe Michael, I felt I had finally found someone who knew the truth about how things really worked. Naturally, I wanted to know more.

I started to study the original sources for the wisdom contained in The Diamond Cutter through the 18 courses of the Asian Classics Institute, then continued study out at Diamond Mountain Buddhist Retreat Center for the advanced courses.

I really spark to the disciplined, rigorous academic approach. As a business person, I need to understand the details of how something works before I feel confident committing to it. In that sense, I always do my due diligence.

After reading The Diamond Cutter and further study, I started treating my business as a laboratory for observing karmic correlations. Then with confidence in seeing results, I started to reformulate our marketing processes around those principles in a skillful way so business clients and even employees wouldn’t realize we were using ancient Buddhist principals to make people successful.

Q:    What kind of success have you had with your business, The James Group?

Lots of successes for clients and ourselves. We’ve made more money for 95% of clients over the past 13-years including creating national category-leading brands like GarageTek, Thinkfun, The Water Quality Insurance Syndicate (WQIS) and Transparent Value.

I got to employ lots of people with six-figure salaries. I lived and worked each day without compromising my world-view and made steady improvement in my ability to keep my vows. As a result, we’ve also been profitable 12 of 13 years.

Q:  James, what did you set out to accomplish with this book and do you feel you’ve done it?

I wanted to do two things. 1. Take something as mysterious and unpredictable as marketing and clarify it into simple repeatable steps that every company should follow to create predictable marketing results. 2. After testing and perfecting the process over 12 years, I wanted to pass the process on to others to help their businesses grow more effectively. Everyone will benefit when companies can tell their story more effectively and companies can stop wasting marketing dollars.

Q: Tell us about the book?

I wanted to create a marketing book that was a page-turner. The book is written in narrative style using story and plot to make it easy to read. The characters are composites of the over 200 CEOs, VP’s of Marketing, and CFOs I’ve advised over 12 years. There isn’t a single word said in the book that someone didn’t say to me many times. So people will find the concerns and marketing advice ring true.

Q:  The reviews have been extremely positive. What can you say about that?

I’ve been very fortunate. Several reviews have called it “Marketing book of the Year.” I’m also getting emails and picking up twitter feeds from business people around the world saying “it’s the clearest marketing book they have ever read.” It’s nice to hear. However, I always remember where the wisdom came from. Build anything on the principals of Geshe Michael, Lama Christie, and Master Shantideva and your work will be irresistible.

Q:  How are you going about marketing the book?

Karmically, of course. I actually finished the book a year earlier and put it aside because I didn’t feel I had accumulated enough merit yet to see it succeed. During that year, I had the opportunity to work on Lama Christie McNally’s new book The Tibetan Book of Meditation as an editor. That book is amazing. When it comes out in May 2009, it will change the face of Buddhism by rightfully elevating women Lamas and establishing Lama Christie as one of the leading teachers of meditation in the world.

When her incredible book was complete, I submitted my book for publishing and started to give away lots of content. At the www.perfectionofmarketing.com you can download the first four chapters for free. Those chapters were written when I was studying in India the art of interpreting what the Buddha really meant, so I feel they were written from a very sincere, clear place. If you search Perfection of Marketing on iTunes, you’ll find free video podcasts that walk business people through the marketing principals discussed in the book. People seem to like those a great deal, judging from the reviews.

Q:  What’s next for you?

I sold The James Group to our Creative Director Paul Blakely and a European advertising agency on the same week The Perfection of Marketing was released. The sale is allowing me freedom to build a meditation retreat cabin and go into the upcoming 3-year silent meditation retreat led by Geshe Michael and Lama Christie starting 10/10/10.

In many ways, this book is my goodbye to business in a similar way The Diamond Cutter was for Geshe Michael before he went on his first three-year retreat. I’ve given away everything I know about brand marketing and advertising which feels wonderful. I hope it will continue to make others successful each day that I am in retreat and beyond.

I feel that I’ve gone spiritually as far as I can go while still owning a business. I’ve learned how to take full responsibility for employees, vendors, clients and their employees by putting their needs first.

In retreat, I want to concentrate on the larger problems in the world like how to create peace. At 39-years old, I haven’t lived a single day on this planet where some country isn’t in a shooting war with another. I want to change that.