Ocean Palmer is the pen name of American author, speaker, and internationally known sales leadership coach Ted Simendinger. A subject matter expert on the topic of Worry, he has taught, coached, and lectured in businesses and universities all around the world. A frequent talk show guest , he has been featured on all major TV networks plus countless radio stations around the world.
The nom de plume, he says, was born of necessity: “When your legal name is Theodore John Simendinger III, it takes a long time just to read a title page. Twenty or so years ago my agent was shopping The Rise and Fall of Piggy Church as a potential movie project and suggested I use a pen name. ‘Ocean Palmer’ came to mind instantly — it was catchy and easy to remember — so now I use it for most of what I write.”
Born in Philadelphia and raised in Severna Park, Maryland, Ocean Palmer left home at 17 to attend a small private college (Jacksonville University) in northeast Florida. A business major with a triple minor — psychology, economics, and marketing — he worked his way through school as a full-time meat-cutter for southern grocery chain Winn-Dixie.
“That job saved my college diploma,” he said. “Our freshman biology final consisted of finding blood vessels and organs in the split open corpse of a fetal pig. I had no clue where that stuff was — but I did know how to dismember a pig. I cut up that tiny little fetal pig just like you’d see him in the grocery store: teenie-weenie pork chops, tiny spare ribs, miniature hams — you name it.
“When the bell rang I was a bit scared to turn it in, but knew my choice was to hang back and sell it or flunk. I was last to go forward and proudly presented the tray and dissected piglet to my professor. I didn’t lie about why I cut him up, either.
“’I don’t know where that stuff is you were asking for,’” I said, “‘but I do know how a pig is put together.’
“Lucky for me, he loved it. We cut a deal: He would give me a “C” if I promised never to take science again. We shook on it, I fled gleefully, and kept my word. Never again set foot on that part of campus.”
Ocean graduated on time with a general business degree and triple minor and returned home to Annapolis to work for The Capital, the city’s daily newspaper. Virtually nothing he had studied transferred to the job.
“Great fun, no money,” he said. “Poverty is the newspaperman’s shadow. Took a pay cut from being a butcher — a tradesman — in order to be almost famous. Fed the ego, not the tummy. Monetarily, it was a textbook C student move.”
The son of a salesman, Ocean quickly tired of being unable to eat a byline and decided to pursue a corporate career. He returned to Florida and joined Xerox Corporation.
“I wanted to work for someone who was the best in the world at what they did; and I was lucky enough to get two offers at the same time, Xerox and Johnson & Johnson. J & J warned they’d relocate me often — which didn’t appeal to me since I was trying to mend an unfixable relationship with a former girlfriend.
“I went with Xerox. The company taught me the profession of selling but forgot to mention the relocation thing … and moved me six weeks after I started, from Jacksonville down to Ocala in central Florida. The move didn’t bother me because I planned on working with them for only a year or two, squirreling away enough to return to writing.
“But one year turned into twenty, and one corporate relo turned into five. I had fun, learned a ton, and earned a wonderful living. My career path was a marvelous learning lab — I am an inquisitive man who loves and respects the profession of high-performance selling. I was innately curious how talent evolved. I especially enjoyed working with and learning from some extraordinary talents.”
Ocean had an outstanding Xerox career, including a year as Xerox’s #1 salesman. He was also selected to be a senior sales instructor at the company’s prestigious international training center in Leesburg, Virginia. Three times he was sent overseas, first to Hong Kong and twice to New Zealand.
“That job (teaching) was priceless. Like any smart instructor I learned more from my students than the curriculum shared. I also learned how the company built its escalator of great sales talent. I was and remain relentlessly curious about high performers in all walks of life, especially corporate leaders and salespeople, and maximized every opportunity to learn how Xerox, IBM, and other top companies transformed raw potential into role model professionals and top producers.
“Two years after accepting that training center job, I returned to the field a far stronger professional.”
Ocean orchestrated many of the corporation’s largest outsourcing contracts, deals worth hundreds of millions. He remained tied to teaching — he was a key member of the training organization’s advisory faculty — and re-wrote much of the sales school curriculum.
“I always seek a better way,” he said. “The market moves and what works moves, so companies have a choice: They can proactively adapt and stay one step ahead, or maintain the status quo and fall behind. Selling is not a static, stationary profession. What it takes to win morphs. High performance selling rewards strategic progress in objective, measurable ways. This is tenfold-true today. It is the movement of the marketplace — the positioning, repositioning, and evolution of behavioral change and influence — that inspires everything I do.”
Ocean left Xerox in 2000 to go out on his own.
“Two things hastened my exit,” he said. “One was that the corporation’s C-level execs got caught cooking the books for personal gain. Their greed-over-ethics behaviors were distasteful, to put it mildly. Not long after I was in Hawaii when a co-worker shot and killed seven of nine at a team meeting. It was a human tragedy of the greatest degree, and one that affected me a lot more than I thought at the time.
“Because of that horrible day — and what I learned about the shooter’s life in the months that followed — I realized it was time for me to go. I walked away at the height of my career because I saw a big gap that I felt passionate about filling. Corporations trained workers to perform work-related tasks, but seemed negligent developing the whole person. I left Xerox and went out on my own, determined to gap-close the chasm.
“Leaving the protectionist umbrella of a guaranteed check and big money is not for everyone but I didn’t see it as a choice, simply the next challenge of life. I invested three years researching and preparing the necessary intellectual property to fill the life skills behavioral gap I was driven to pursue. From that day to this, all of my research, ideas, innovation, and concept development efforts use life skills as a bridge to better business and living.
“Life skills melded to leadership and pro selling are at the heart, soul, and uniqueness of my work. The support of this approach is why companies choose to hire me.”
Ocean has coached, taught, and lectured on five continents and spent four years working throughout Europe, the Middle East, Africa and much of Asia, in addition to the USA and Australia.
“Sales depends on influencing behavior. But in order to teach someone how to influence behavior, he or she must know what causes it in the first place. In order to assure global relevance, I distilled key learning concepts into universal behavioral truths common to all of us.
“The reason for writing and teaching this way is vital: I seek the highest possible “stick rate” in everything I teach; the ‘stick rate’ being the maximization of retention and application. Irrelevant things go in one ear and out the other, never pausing to stop. I want these vital life skills going through the eyes and ears, turning north to the mind and south to the heart. When those two things — head and heart — are aligned, life gets easier. And when life gets easier, life gets better.
“To maximize the stick rate I emphasize the “why.” I explain why some things work and other things won’t. When key learning principles are taught a life skills context, and information is relevant, people embrace it. And when a person does something in his or her “real life,” he or she brings it to work. What I suspected when I designed this approach has proven to be true: This is a smarter, better way to help people improve their lives and careers.
“When you teach concepts that help people grow — and that growth lifts organizations and careers — there is no more fulfilling profession. The energy around positive change is exhilarating. Help someone improve and he or she stays better forever. Positive, self-motivated motors power careers and help sustain high quality results.”
In his spare time Ocean enjoys fishing, reads and writes, plays an occasional round of golf, and invests a significant amount of time in charity work. In 1991 he founded the No Bats Baseball Club, which has raised and donated over $2.3+ million to a wide variety of needy charities.
“Helping others makes me feel good,” he says. “So does writing. I write every day in some form or another. My business interests support behavioral concepts that relate to positive living and career development. Creatively, my stories, novels, and screenplays tend to be multicultural ensemble stories with happy endings, because that’s how I want the world to be.
“Words are important to me,” he added, “as are possibilities. The more I write, the better I am at selecting and sequencing words to express ideas. Reading and writing are equally important to high-performers. Command of the language provides multiple options when it comes time to expressing a clever or differentiated idea.”
Three of Ocean’s 14 books have been optioned for movie development, as has an original romantic comedy screenplay set in London. In 2005 he was selected his college’s Alumnus of the Year and 2010 he was honored as one of Jacksonville University’s “75 Distinguished Dolphins” in conjunction with the school’s 75th anniversary. He lectures from time to time in the college of English as well as Business.
“I am a relentlessly positive guy who enjoys making people laugh,” he said. “It was an honor to be recognized by my college for a career built around doing what I love. The company they put me is a great bunch, to say the least. Who knew a fetal pig would springboard me to such lofty heights?”
In 2015, the university announced Ted’s induction onto the business college’s Wall of Fame, a move he hopes will encourage the next generation to seek and follow the true north of their lives.
“I live a happy life,” he added. “All of it — coaching, teaching, consulting, or crafting a good speech — inspires personal growth. I am fortunate to have seen the world while earning a living chasing things I am passionate about; and generating global friendships with talented people I admire tremendously.
“Pro selling is great and honorable because it is fair. It is color blind, gender blind, and age-blind. All selling cares about is whether or not you can do it. Selling rewards those who invest in themselves and their profession. It is a wonderfully honorable way to earn a living.”
Ocean Palmer’s life skills guide “Managing the Worry Circle (How to Improve Your Life by Worrying Less)” has maintained tremendous popularity ever since its release.
The follow book to Worry Circle, titled “The Impact of Technology on Behavior & Happiness,” was released in late summer, 2016, after lecturing at M. I. T. in Boston. He has continued research in this field, especially as it relates to coaching, and co-authored a widely respected scientific whitepaper on the topic. Later he wrote a coaching guide to help people contemplating a job switch or career move.
“I wrote those books to help people,” he said, “and I am gratified knowing they have. And since technology has reshaped behaviors — and political opinion — so remarkably, the insight I reveal in “The Impact” provides clarity through explanation that is vital to know and share.
“The work has helped others around the world so much, it inspires me to keep pushing.”