"Pretend that every single person you meet has a sign around his or her neck that says 'Make Me Feel Important.' Not only will you succeed in business, you will succeed in life."
"We praise women to success. When one of our girls has had a good week — even if it is something pretty small — we pat her on the back, put a ribbon on her, sing her a little song, anything to move her on to the next level."
Every July in Dallas, for two weeks, some thirty-five thousand women would gather for an event called Seminar — a colossal pageant of crownings, sashes, diamonds, tears, and pink Cadillacs rolled onto the stage, at the center of which stood a petite, immaculately groomed Texas matriarch handing out the honors personally. It is tempting to read the spectacle as one great warm celebration, and warmth was certainly its surface. But you don't have to be an Ambrose Bierce or Jonathan Swift-style professional cynic to recognize that the thing is a social status ladder. Tiered prizes ascending from pins to diamonds to minks to the car, crowns awarded on a stage before an arena... Mary Kay Ash (1918-2001) didn't exactly build an engine of Alpha-Fe cozy collective good cheer. She built an MLM court with a queen at the top. She was an SEE: the type that craves visible victory and rank, and that binds people to itself in webs of individual loyalty, expressed here in a distinctly feminine, and somewhat uncharacteristically disciplined, key that gave her an accent on the rational Gamma LIE/ESI dyad. Granted, the desire for recognition and status is often the only thing that can impose discipline on an SEE...
As a struggling young saleswoman, Ash borrowed twelve dollars to attend the company convention and watched the year's sales champion crowned queen and handed an alligator handbag. Tellingly, she resolved on the spot to be next year's winner, publicly announced this to the president of the company, memorized her pitch, and took the next year's title. It is the burning, competitive, central-ethical-extravert craving for the crown on the stage. (The company, comically, gave her a fisherman's flounder light instead of the coveted purse, and the slight rankled her for decades — a grudge over denied honors that is itself in character). The pink Cadillac is the perfect emblem: a two-year lease tied to continued performance — a rolling trophy, rank made visible on the road and revocable at the next reckoning. When shareholders grumbled about "those frivolous pink cars," she refused to touch them.
The engine of her company was the illusion of a one-to-one bond. Ash's famous "Make Me Feel Important" maxim is similar to Dale Carnegie's approach, and it's no accident that both share Fi-creative traits. Ash deployed it to build an empire of personal loyalty (a telling IEE-vs-SEE difference). In this she is closer to another SEE we have typed — Huey Long, who conquered Louisiana one handshake at a time. Ash had the same "specially for you" gift of making each woman in a sales force of hundreds of thousands feel that Mary Kay noticed her particularly. Only the openly domineering register that a Huey Long could revel in was simply not socially available to a woman of Ash's generation, and female SEE's, I noticed, generally run softer in presentation for exactly that reason. She was also able to understand that many women of her time wanted an independent source of income without it being tied to a "second-wave feminist" aesthetics, and provided them a presentation more suitable to an average American housewife.
Ash was considerably more disciplined than the type usually runs. Her memorized pitch and the "five o'clock club" of pre-dawn work testify to it. This is a work-ethic coloring borrowed from the sober ESI/LIE rational dyad next door, although her chief drive remained status, victory, and personal dominion. It is the deviation from the type's average that explains why she, "the conqueror in pink," and not some equally charming rival, built the two-billion-dollar court. Still, the management functions of her company — finance and administration — were mostly handed by her plausibly-Gamma NT son Richard (even if she was able to understand his reasoning and steer the overall direction), because her own specialty was selling and motivating. On the contrary, she needed no external advisor to do marketing and be involved in the sensory effect of cosmetics. This is what separates her from an LIE businesswoman.
Unlike some other MLM schemes, her company at least did sell an actual product, and from what I was able to gather from the Internet, the actual cosmetics aren't half bad — the bad part is the MLM scheme itself, especially today, when the market is over-saturated, even sympathetic websites admit that the company revenue itself is decreasing as it continues to exploit its followers by making unlikely promises of them earning five-figure sums. Still, Mary Kay spent the rest of her life at the top of it doing the thing her type, in its feminine key, does best: making every single woman who climbed toward her feel that the queen knew her name — and meant it.
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