Synergy

Synergy is that awesome, magical force that is somehow created when two people get together for a joint endeavor. I first encountered it when I met G. Herbert True, Ph.D. He was speaking for a group of supervisors and managers at a meeting for Grand Trunk Railroad in Michigan. I was not invited but I asked the Superintendent if I could attend and he welcomed me.  Herb taught a psychology class for students at Notre Dame and somehow he managed to do about 150 programs a year as a professional speaker. This was before Power Point or computers and he had a team backing him up, including graphic artists,who created Idea slides. Sometimes he wore a uniform such as a Referee or maybe a Prisoner. He was great with humor and his ideas would just fly past you at an exciting pace. Being about twenty five years behind in management and leaderslip concepts the audience was not very responsive and so at the break I approached Dr. True and remarked that it was a tough audience. I then offered Herb about half a dozen railroad jokes and he was like a sponge. In the next half hour he had worked in every joke I gave him and with other adjustments had made the crowd perk up a bit. They applauded and when they left he came right up to me and said “I want you to work on my team as a writer of humor.”  When he asked how much money I wanted I told him I just wanted him to teach me.  It was a fantastic arrangement. Within a year I was booking my own speechs and getting paid to speak. 

In my lifetime I have been blessed by working with others along the way who brought out the very best in me.  Terry Pochert from WXYZ-TV shot my first video tape and for years we worked together on tapes for clients. Terry still surprises me now and then by putting on YouTube a segment of something we did perhaps in the eighties or nineties. They can be found on YouTube.com/artfettig.  Then there was Greg Brayton at his recording studio in Coldwater, Michigan.  We hit it off from the start and my records show that we recorded sixty-two songs together. An artist named Bill Tatroe did many of the graphics for my books and booklets. And a fellow named Joe Carpenter illustrated many of my children’s books.  I remember when I first gave Joe a book I had written and asked him to just do a few sketches to demonstrate how he might  draw my Three  Robots, Pos, Semi-Pos and Neg. He returned two weeks later and he had done the entire book. 

I learned that if I could team up with the right talent that we could each perform way over our norm and when the magic of synergism kicked in and we’d come up with something great that on a chart of one to ten might just go right off the chart.  Roger Thurgaland was voice on the early audio-visual presentations I wrote and produced. I can recall handing Roger a script I’d written that I felt was a real bummer and Roger would lend his fantastic voice to the script, work his magic charm, and the final results of the production were far beyond my expectations. He had so much integrity in the way he spoke that we produced great results with our presentations.