Looking for change out of pounds 70: What happens when a management guru takes the stage? William Raynor drops in to a Lou Tice seminar

CROPPING up in speeches and over coffee, the buzzwords - focus, holistic, impact, cascade, envision - were packaged into aphorisms for generating empowerment and, as this was the theme of the seminar, 'making change an adventure'.

'Be sceptical, be analytical' - a small, dapper American named Lou Tice admonished his audience, his cadence and laconic delivery reminiscent of W C Fields. 'Why should you listen to me? To help other people to be empowered, to grow, we need to ask the same question of ourselves. We need to address the question of credibility.'

All this and more for pounds 70 a head. This was serious stuff; the 200 people in the audience - or more likely their employers - were paying for the chance of discovering how to control change, to survive and even prosper, rather than be tossed like a cork on recession's turbulent sea.

Their hosts were Kent County Council - a pounds 1.25bn business with 50,000 employees, its chief executive pointed out - and the Cambridge-based Careers Research & Advisory Centre. Among the delegates were senior policemen, educationalists and management executives from companies as varied as Burger King, British Telecom, Girobank, Kyoei Fire & Marine, British Gas, and London Underground.

During a whirlwind trip from his headquarters in Seattle, Mr Tice had just dispensed his nostrums in Stoke-on-Trent, and was about to repeat the exercise in Cardiff. His time, it was made clear, was precious. His purpose, 'to explain the process of growth and change every individual uses or doesn't use, so that instead of taking five years, it can maybe focus down to five months'.

As for his own credibility, Mr Tice has addressed that by changing himself from a local high-school teacher and baseball coach to an international management and training guru, an evangelist of change apparently enjoying the status in certain quarters of a secular Billy Graham.

As chairman of the Pacific Institute, co-founded by him and his wife 20 years ago and still wholly owned by them, he has also changed himself into a rich man.

How rich is hard to tell. The institute operates discreetly, relying on word of mouth instead of advertising - one reason why it is still comparatively unknown on this side of the Atlantic - and remains a private, profit-making enterprise. Its figures are not disclosed.

'What we can't sell, we shouldn't be teaching,' he says. 'If it's not perceived as being needed, we'll be out of business anyway.' What he sees himself as, above all, is a translator, translating the findings of work at the cutting edge of research psychology into a programme of education.

The programmes, 12,000-15,000 of which he estimates to be currently in use, are then licensed to companies and institutions. The institute, with a worldwide and varied staff of 150, then trains their personnel to implement the curriculum and sells them the necessary literature and videos.

The programmes can involve several days of tuition and several weeks of homework, and, with the overriding aim of inculcating TQM - the Total Quality Management which, to quote the institute's own literature, 'impacts upon everybody, everywhere in the organisation' - come under three main headings:

'Strategic Thinking for Strategic Planning', for 'senior management to build their strategic vision';

'Investment in Excellence', to teach 'people to think in a way that helps them . . . change habits or attitudes that are no longer personally or organisationally relevant'; and

'Pathways to Excellence', for 'young people who are starting their working life'.

According to Jeremy Glyn, one of the institute's London project directors and a distributor of its information through his own Centre for Change, in Fulham, the programmes have been adopted in the UK not only by councils such as Kent, which has had more than 150 of its head teachers using them with 'excellent results', but by computer and construction companies, by banks and divisions of multinationals.

They have been applied to school leavers, blue-collar employees and board members, and the gains in terms of clarity of thought or increased productivity have been such that 'cost has never been an issue'.

In North America, the programmes have been accepted by AT&T, General Motors, Nasa, the military, prisons and agencies helping the unemployed.

With up to 1.5 million people taking part each year, Mr Tice has come a long way. 'When I left high-school teaching, the thought of being here in Kent would have scared me to death. But as I grow older, I continually expand what I see as possible.'

After barely three hours, the horizon seemed to be expanding for most of his audience too. 'All meaningful and lasting change starts on the inside, in the imagination, and works its way out,' he told them.

'It's essential not to get bogged down in . . . the junk that's going on around you. Recognise that it's happening, but think beyond it, and like a racing driver, hold the picture of recovery until you come out of the spin.'

(Photograph omitted)