The Twenty-First Century Agent

Charles I. Wilson is a Toronto-based business consultant.

According to Dan Sullivan, 90 percent of today’s insurance agents will
no longer be needed by the turn of the century, and insurance companies
“will have no choice except to become much smaller, more efficient
organizations” as technology replaces people.

This book provides “a 25-year framework, both conceptual and
strategic, for surviving and thriving as a life-insurance agent at the
outset of the 21st century.” The framework is based on the Strategic
Coach Program, a three-year focusing school developed for experienced
and successful entrepreneurs.

Sullivan identifies the trends in our evolving global society that are
changing the insurance industry: the collapse of insurance
bureaucracies, unlimited entrepreneurial expansion, expanding computer
networks, new software developments, and the employee’s ability to
adapt—to break through the “Ceiling of Complexity.” He then
describes 20 strategies designed to enable an agent “to escape from
the complexities caused by his or her own organizational history and
activities” on the one hand and to “keep the agent free from the
bureaucratic entanglements and obstacles caused by head office
structures, processes, and turmoil” on the other.

Agents in the insurance business would do well to read this
well-written, insightful book.