He’s constantly looking for new ideas, and when he finds one he likes, he grabs on to it with ferocious intensity and will not let go.

He speaks English ever-so-slightly accented with Portuguese (his native language, one of several that he speaks fluently), and when he gets excited, his thoughts seem to race ahead of his ability to get the words out. I got to thinking about Berlitz from a strategy point of view when I met Marcos Justus, at the time Berlitz’s head of operations in Brazil. In transient-advantage terms, Berlitz was well on its way to a long, slow, deadly period of erosion of its competitive advantages. Rosetta Stone was gearing up for an IPO Berlitz was treading water. Its performance showed when contrasted with hip, upbeat competitors such as Rosetta Stone, with its ubiquitous ads about glamorous Italian supermodels being wooed by American farm boys, Berlitz looked downright dowdy. Our experiences were typical-Berlitz was very hard to do business with. Whether it was asking Charlie to teach us grammar (“I’ll do it,” he said, “but don’t tell them that, because it isn’t the Berlitz method!”) or trying to figure out a schedule that worked for us, or figuring out whether I could find a way to continue the lessons once Anne went back to school, the company was one big, inflexible, grumpy old organization. Although we loved Charlie Townsend, our teacher, we seemed to be struggling with Berlitz policy all along the way. Well, given my travel schedule, that pushed things back by three weeks! When we finally did get in, we were presented with a fixed menu of options, and very expensive options at that. When I first called to set up the series, I was told that I would have to make an appointment and come in to the office in person, just to schedule the course. We signed up for intensive German lessons-as often as three times a week for three hours each-at an on-site studio run by Berlitz in Princeton, New Jersey.īerlitz sure didn’t make it easy. I wanted to improve what our teacher resignedly calls my “kitchen German,” and Anne was interested in adding another European language to her repertoire. It all started with a decision by my daughter, Anne, to take German lessons-together.

Berlitz english course price