'Guru maker' unlocks the short pathway to success

By SELWYN PARKER

Doris Carmen Cordova, or D.C. as she prefers to be called, is in the business of creating entrepreneurs in three and a half days at $2,500 a time.

Even adding a video, six weeks further training, membership of her organisation and other back-up, this seems like quite a feat. But there must be something in it because around 40,000 people in 30 countries are said to have gone through D.C.'s San Diego-based Excellerated Business Schools for Entrepreneurs.

And her New Zealand associate, S.C.I. Enterprises, is signing up candidates right now for her Money and You course. The publicity says the course has produced such "renowned overseas graduates" as Paul Mitchell of hair products fame whom I regret to say I've never heard of, Anthony Robbins who wrote the best-selling The Giant Within, and Spenser Johnson M.D. whose trite book about coping with change, Who Moved My Cheese?, has become a best-seller.

To be candid, graduates such as these are not the advertisements I'd want for an entrepreneur-creating programme because they are hucksters rather than entrepreneurs. And in such brief courses, graduates is hardly the correct word, but never mind.

D.C. is a well-groomed woman with a liking for heavy gold jewellery and the talent for self-advertisement that is the stock-in-trade of the self-improvement business - "they call me the guru-maker," she says.

The Chilean-born Cordova is a former translator and court reporter (stenographer) who got into self-improvement some 25 years ago and never looked back. She gives an impression of dynamism, sincerity and self-belief, and I'm sure she's a very worthy lady.

However, D.C. needs to spend a bit more time studying the evolution of education in the last century or so. In claiming that the "learning modality" behind Money and You and other programmes she's developed are superior to anything the established education system can produce, she is making massive assumptions about the alleged shortcomings of modern education.

"Write this down. Education has hardly changed in 150 years. The school system around the world is totally antiquated," she insists, and blames many of society's ills from criminality to drug abuse on it.

D.C. suggests that we don't need formal education ("school is no longer a prerequisite to being successful") and that indeed it might even be a hindrance ("a lot of educated people are not making it in life").

These are wild claims.

How do we define success? "We're talking about total success - financially, emotionally, physically, spiritually", D.C. answers.

"Please write this down. I want to open you up to a whole new way of learning." The entrepreneurial secrets of Money and You are contained in a fat, blue-bound book and you've got to pay $2,500 to get at them. But success, as D.C. sees it, starts with courage. Few would argue with that, and some of the 40,000 who have been through her courses find out the entrepreneurial life with its anxieties and challenges isn't their cup of tea.

Her course also teaches practical skills like accounting, teamwork, the power of leverage and so on. All good commonsense, basic stuff. But for D.C. it all starts with education: "You have to write this down," she says. "Education is the highest form of leverage." Few would argue about the value of education either, but D.C. probably means her own particular form of education.

Like all successful entrepreneurs, Cordova is an opportunist. On the way out, she suggested I might like to buy a book.