How Steve Jobs Revolutionized the Massage Industry

by | Nov 9, 2011 | Chair Massage, History

Steve Jobs portraitThe first time we nervously walked into Apple Computer’s Macintosh division in 1984 to provide seated massage with our matching grey slacks, white polo shirts and blue blazers, we felt overdressed. At a time when the largest computer company in the world, IBM, was still requiring dark suits, white shirts and ties on all of its workers, while Apple employees were all about jeans and T-shirts. We immediately breathed a sigh of relief and settled in for a year that would change the massage industry forever.

Apple Computer was already a high-flying, high-tech legend helmed by 29 year old Steve Jobs who was revolutionizing the nascent personal computer industry. But equally significant, Jobs was also redefining the relationship between a company and its employees. With the casual dress code and the pirate flag that flew over the Macintosh building, Jobs was heralding and prototyping the shift away from the 20th Century paternalistic, conformist corporate culture that treated employees as replaceable parts working for a paycheck.

Instead, he was inventing a 21st Century ethic based on the belief that fundamentally work should be an outlet for creativity and that the most productive workers are those who are challenged to perform to their highest potential and whose work makes a difference in the world. At Apple, employees were judged not by their resume, education, clothes or experience but by their intelligence, passion, creativity and performance.

Jobs nurtured an employee-centric environment. He rejected the idea of a personnel department and instituted a human resources staff charged with creating a workplace that was inviting, exciting and supportive. Apple employees were expected to work 60 hours a week or more, but Jobs wanted them well taken care of.

One of the departments working long hours was in charge of writing the user manuals for the new hardware and software products and, at that particular moment, they were under deadline. The head of the department, Chris Espinosa, was trying to figure out how to spend his monthly budget allocated for employee amenities. They already had the beer busts on Fridays and the occasional private, first-run movie screening, but he was looking for something special. By chance, a friend handed him a flyer advertising a service that would bring massage right into the employee cubicles. Definitely a crazy idea, but that was exactly the kind innovative service that fit the Apple culture.

When I got the call from Chris, I was ecstatic. Up to that point seated massage was an experiment. We tried every way we could think of to market this new approach to professional massage. I knew we needed a high profile company to put its imprimatur on our work before we would ever be taken seriously. Apple was a perfect match for chair massage and ultimately turned out to be our ticket to success. But not in quite the way I had imagined.

After our first visit to Chris’s department, we were invited back the following week. That’s when the folks in accounting, a few cubicles over, said they would like to get in on some of that massage action. Each week we kept adding more departments and doing more massages.

At the peak of our work with Apple, seven practitioners were offering up to 350 chair massages a week with the company footing the entire bill. I had visions of megabucks dancing in my head. I thought that our little service would turn into a tsunami that would soon sweep across corporate America. I was wrong.

The honeymoon at Apple ended in 1985 when the first downturn hit the personal computer industry and Apple was forced to lay off 800 employees. The company could no longer justify paying for first class airline tickets, fresh orange juice, or massage. We withdrew our services from Apple for two months, until the dust of reorganization settled. When we returned, it was the employees who were now paying for seated massage. Our client base plummeted to about 60 massages a week.

There was going to be no tidal wave, at least not in the corporate world. What actually had occurred was that a company ahead of its time, Apple, found a service, seated massage, that was also ahead of its time. The bulk of the business world ignored us. Massages at work? Who were we kidding?

However, by taking a chance on chair massage Steve Jobs did revolutionize the massage industry. He helped us prove that, given the right conditions, chair massage was a viable service for the workplace. We were also able to leverage our experience at Apple into dozens of national and local stories in the press, television, and radio. It turned out that the media loved chair massage. It was an ideal “Cinderella” story. Out of the ashes of disrepute (read: massage parlors) and into the corporate boardroom came chair massage.

That publicity, in turn, laid the foundation for my revised long-range plan to bring professional touch to the masses. In 1986, I sold my portion of the business to a partner and began the task of creating a chair massage profession by training chair massage professionals. In May of that year, when the first massage chair came to market to coincide with the creation of the first training organization, On-Site Enterprises (now TouchPro) to teach table massage practitioners how to perform and market chair massage.

Then, finally, the tsunami did in fact hit. When I showed off the massage chair to 34 school directors at a meeting of the American Massage Therapy Association that August, the response was immediate and overwhelming. During the next 12-months, I taught 20 chair massage seminars at schools throughout the United States, Canada, Sweden, and Norway.

For the massage profession chair massage was truly an idea whose time had come. Within four years, by 1990, virtually every massage school in the United States was teaching their students about chair massage.

The revolution Steve Jobs inspired was not just a technological one, but a cultural one as well. It extended far beyond computers, phones, and media distribution systems and deep into our perception of work and the work environment. While a chair massage industry was probably inevitable, the innovative laboratory that was Apple Computer provided chair massage with the credibility it needed to move forward at a critical moment.

Today, thousands of companies around the world embrace chair massage as an essential part of the workplace and tens of thousands of practitioners make their living providing affordable chair massage services to hundreds of thousands of customers each year. Thanks, Steve. You changed the world in more ways than you will ever know.

Question: Do you have any stories to share about pre-1986 seated massage?

584 People Receive Seated Massage on Thai Beach

by | Aug 21, 2011 | Chair Massage, In the News

Last week Phuket, Thailand, featured two of its most famous tourist attractions–beaches and massage–as the Ministry of Health hosted one of five preliminary events leading up to an official attempt in November to break the Guinness World Record for most simultaneous massages (currently at 232 held by Tourism Victoria Australia).

In a connection that could only be made in Thailand, the number of bodies and pairs of professional hands in Phuket, 584, reflected the numerology of King Bhumibol Adulyadej’s birthday. On December 5th we will be 84.

The event was not only held on popular Kata Beach, but all of the massage practitioners were performing the same massage (a “Kata“) at the same time. If they break the official Guinness record, that should give additional credibility to their effort as well as make it more difficult for other do-your-own-thing massage nations to challange.

Halfway through this video is the official start of the event and some English description.

Quality Control Through Katas

by | Aug 1, 2011 | Bodywork, Business, Chair Massage, Education

When I first began developing chair massage sequences in 1982, one of my students was also a student of Haruyoshi Ito, who had introduced a Japanese movement form called Shintaido to the United States and Europe during the mid 1970s.

One day this practitioner came to me to say that he had given his teacher one of our chair massages and Mr. Ito’s response was to say, “That’s a good Kata.”

“A good what?” I asked. “What is a Kata?”

Thus began my introduction to a concept that is fundamental to Japanese society.

While there is no exact translation of the word, the basic concept of Kata has to do with the form or correct way by which something is accomplished. In the West the word is most often encountered in a martial arts context. Students practice Katas, or sequences of defensive and offensive movements, over and over again until they become automatic.

Katas are studied in all of the Japanese arts­—brush painting, theater, flower arranging, the tea ceremony, as well as the martial arts. But the word has a much broader meaning in Japanese culture, which places a great emphasis on the correct way to do anything, from how low to bow in greeting to brushing your teeth.

To begin thinking of teaching and learning massage as a Kata prompted a major shift in my understanding of our work.

For one thing, it was a way of honoring the vast history of Japanese massage that had come before us. The path we travel is well worn; only the scenery has changed over the years.

Practicing a Kata also relieves us of the burden of having to know everything about what we are doing. We now understand that the master of massage is not the practitioner, but the Kata itself. We adopt the point of view that the only way you can truly learn about massage is by doing massage. The Kata gives us the opportunity to practice (in the learning sense of the word) with confidence. We teach a Kata and it is the Kata that teaches us massage.

The Kata is like a very wise elder who has the wisdom of the centuries behind her. The Kata has a long lineage that extends from teacher to teacher and is based on a theoretical foundation and philosophical world view that transcends our individual understanding.

If you trust the Kata and develop an honest relationship with it, you will be rewarded with unlimited insights about the nature of touch, massage, service, relationships, yourself, and your place in the grand scheme of the universe.

Another advantage of practicing a Kata is that it becomes a discipline in the spiritual sense of the word. One of the hallmarks of every spiritual discipline is the practice of repetitive rituals that become automatic and allow for openings into higher states of consciousness. Praying the Catholic rosary, Buddhist meditation, yogic breathing, and Sufi dancing­ all fall into this category.

When you practice a ­­­massage Kata it eventually becomes something like a beautiful dance or a piece of classical music. Highly structured and cho­­­­­­reographed, it is the same each time it is performed and yet, each time, it is also different.

On a practical level, performing massage as a Kata allows for quality control to enter into the massage business equation. When you have a private practice doing table massage, you can basically do whatever you want. Your clients will either like it, or not. However, when you are doing 15-minute chair massages for someone else’s business in a convention hall alongside nine other practitioners, exactly what you are doing becomes crucial to providing a high quality, consistent service.

Finally, the Kata is eminently researchable. One of the reasons broad-based research has been so hard to do in our field is because everyone does something different. It’s nearly impossible to control for the differences in practitioners. The Kata solves a great many of these problems because it provides the consistency needed for good data collection.

In touch,
David

Why I Do Chair Massage – Part Two

by | Jul 27, 2011 | Chair Massage, Touch

When I was a kid, my Mom and I used to lie at opposite ends of the couch with our legs entwined. When I was a kid my Dad used to kiss me goodnight.

Then, somewhere around ten or eleven, I became too big or perhaps too much of a “boy” to get a leg cuddle or a Dad kiss. I don’t really know why. I just noticed that the good feelings, the physical affirmations of security and love were gone.

I also learned from my culture and my Catholic religion other things about kinds of touch and times when touch was inappropriate between myself and others and even with myself. Pre-adolescence was the beginning of the numbing of my body as I began to override the natural instinct to touch with the cortical control that resulted from social inhibitions.

I became increasingly awkward, cautious, self-conscious and stiff throughout my teenage years. By the time I was twenty, I had developed chronic torticollis and woke up with a painful stiff neck every morning. Some mornings it was too painful to even get out of bed.

A few years later, I decided that I had had enough of the pain and began altering my lifestyle. Daily stretching (this was before yoga), a Tai Chi class and, most importantly, ten sessions of Rolfing eliminated the torticollis and changed my life forever.

Rolfing was the first kind of structured touch I had ever experienced. It was an awakening and a remembering of how good it was possible to feel in my body and in the world. I never forgot the lesson and it is no accident that in 1980 I ended up attending massage school, becoming a massage professional and eventually owning my own school.

For me, and for many bodyworkers, touch has been pivotal to our personal development and well-being. But it is essential and no less dramatic for most people. While it is true that recent generations have been raised to be more comfortable with their bodies on an individual level, our cultural relationship to touch is more pathological than ever.

We can’t touch our neighbors’ kids, teachers can’t touch their students, pastors can’t hug their parishioners, and colleagues can’t offer a supportive touch in the workplace. Touch is the physical manifestation of relationship and, when we touch, it signals a deep intimacy, a deep connection and bond of trust between two human beings. Unfortunately, contemporary media tends to emphasize that touch means sex.

Thus, the fear of touch and a discomfort with intimacy, along with an impossibly high price point for table massage, are the biggest barriers our profession has to overcome if more than four percent of the population is going to get massage on a regular basis (see How Sticky is Massage?).

That is the second reason why I do chair massage. Of all forms of bodywork, it is the least threatening and requires the least vulnerability on the part of the customer. We let you keep your clothes on, there are no messy oils involved, you can sit down rather than lie down and it takes a fraction of the time required in table massage.

Chair massage is kindergarten touch. It doesn’t require a high investment of either money or trust and it doesn’t require you to have something wrong with you. It is the gift of touch for its own sake. The many varieties of table massage all require a secondary, college level or post-graduate level understanding of, or comfort level with touch.

A close friend of mine, Rika, tells the story of the ten-year old boy who wanted to get a chair massage from her at the hotel where she worked for many years. After receiving permission from his father, the boy jumped in the chair and proceeded to receive his chair massage like a pro. When he was paying for the massage, the father said, “You don’t remember us, but a year ago we were here and you gave us both a chair massage. Every night since then, my son asks for a back rub as part of his bedtime ritual. It has been one of the best parts of both of our days.”

And I’ll bet that is one kid who will never lose touch with his “sensational” body.

I Believe in Touch

by | Jul 27, 2011 | Touch

In 2004, National Public Radio (NPR) began airing readings of brief essays entitled This I Believe written by youth and adults from all walks of life about the core values that guide their daily lives. It was based on a 1950s radio program of the same name, hosted by acclaimed journalist Edward R. Murrow.

I looked forward to hearing each week’s selection, which felt like a breath of fresh air in a glass-is-half-empty world.  During Thanksgiving week of 2005, after hearing a particularly moving piece, I went to the website and searched for any essays about “touch.” There were none.

Here is the essay I submitted on November 24, 2005 . You can also view it at the This I Believe website along with the now dozens of other contributions on the topic of touch. About a year later, I was one of a number of Bay Area residents selected to participate in a conversation about the This I Believe organization on the KQED radio program Forum. A portion of my essay was read and discussed.

I believe in the power of touch.

I have experienced the power of touch to calm an infant, to comfort the dying, and to mend a relationship.

I believe in offering a hand or a hug to say hello or goodbye.

I believe in putting my arm around a good friend while we sit and talk on the sofa.

I believe in saying “Thank you,” when someone accidentally bumps up against me on a crowded sidewalk.

I believe that touch makes me whole.

I believe that the touch of another person connects me to my personal history, to their personal history, and to the history of all humanity.

I have seen touch in times of crisis bring relief to emergency workers, firefighters and police after a natural disaster and heal soldiers and civilians in time of war.

I have seen that a simple handshake between political opponents can spark years of hope between warring peoples and sometimes actually signal the end of years of conflict.

I believe that touch can reconnect the innate wisdom of my body to the rational calculations of my brain.

I have watched touch reawaken sensations in me that I thought were gone forever.

I am aware that as touch heals me, it also heals my relationships, heals the institutions of work, religion and politics that I participate in, and I believe that ultimately it helps to heal the world.

I believe that, if everyone got as much positive touch as they wanted for free, the need for wars, racism, drug abuse, child abuse, spousal abuse, anti-depressants, and the need to blame others for the conditions of our lives would mostly disappear.

I believe that touch reminds me that human beings are supposed to feel good, not bad.

I believe that touch is the orphan sense in our world because of our fear of intimacy.

I believe that touch has the power to turn “you” and “me” into “us.”

I believe that unless we learn how to touch and be touched, we will never learn how to love ourselves and each other.

I believe in touch.

In touch,
David