What’s the next big thing that will affect your business? Tom Miller and Jim Ericson make it their business to find out who knows—and to persuade them to share their information with Twin Cities companies.
Miller and Ericson own and run The Masters Forum, a Minneapolis-based firm that brings cutting-edge, business-oriented speakers to the Twin Cities. Eight times a year at the Thrivent Auditorium in Minneapolis, attendees pay $375 ($2,600 for season tickets) to hear new ideas in areas such as innovation, leadership, ethics, communication, and geopolitics. The Masters Forum has projected revenue of just over $500,000 for 2007, and an average of 250 attendees per lecture. (Miller and Ericson also help Twin Cities businesses find speakers for in-house seminars.)
They met at Pillsbury in 1972. Miller later hired Ericson to provide sales training to employees of Silent Knight, a Maple Grove-based manufacturer of electronic components used in burglar and fire-alarm systems, where Miller was vice president of sales and marketing. Eventually, the duo hatched an idea for a business. “We decided to become the equivalent of manufacturer’s representatives for two or three training companies,” Miller says.
One was the Covey Leadership Center, which offered training in time management and related topics. (It later became part of Franklin Covey, the Salt Lake City-based maker of day-planner books.) Miller and Ericson organized a lecture series for Covey called The Masters of Executive Excellence. “They used the pull of the other lecturers to pull the audience in so Stephen [Covey, the company founder] could present his material,” Miller says. Covey eventually abandoned the strategy, so Miller and Ericson bought the series in 1989, renaming it The Masters Forum and paying Covey a year’s worth of royalty payments.
“Our inclination is to find speakers and topics not yet really on most people’s radar screens,” Miller says. That said, many of the Masters Forum’s speakers later became better known. The list includes James C. Collins, who presented material from his second book, Good to Great, a year before it was published; and Malcolm Gladwell, who spoke at the Forum a year before publishing his bestseller Blink. Other speakers have included futurist Alvin Toffler, Pursuit of Excellence author Tom Peters, and Meg Wheatley, author of Leadership and the New Science.
Attendees have gotten many different things from the forum. Harvard professor Robert Kaplan’s talk in 1999 on “the balanced scorecard” inspired Jon Thompson, president and CEO of Minnetonka-based Opportunity Partners, which provides employment, residential, and educational programs for the disabled. “We needed a balance between the financial result and other key parts of the mission,” Thompson recalls. CEO Brad Anderson of Richfield-based Best Buy hired corporate intelligence specialist George Friedman as a consultant after hearing him speak in 2006.
Richard Murphy, president of the Minneapolis-based Murphy Warehouse Company, holds several Masters Forum season tickets. “I like to get my managers out of the office, give them some decompression time and a place to go and listen to some good ideas that force them out of the box in some of their thinking,” Murphy says.
