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He had been strongly recommended. And so,
when I got on the
phone with him, I was expecting a sharp,
take-charge guy.
Instead, I got this:
"I've been involved in strategically important roles with
communications companies for 25 years.
Throughout,
I've focused on my core competencies,
building brand recognition
and interfaces with key
personnel."
To which, I responded: "Huh?" He went on ... "It's been a personal paradigm of mine that quality control and
dynamic
leadership are essentials in today's globalized
business
environment, and that's what I feel I can
bring to any company
that I work for."
"So," I said, "what exactly have you been doing all these years?" There was a pause during which I could almost hear
his
disappointment. He must have been thinking,
"What kind of dummy am I dealing
with?"
For my part, I had already come to an initial assessment of
him: The guy was a fraud.
Normally, I would have pretended to have been interrupted by
some sort of emergency and gotten off the
phone. But because
a colleague had spoke so well of him, I
suppressed my instinct
and kept
the conversation going. And here's what I got for my
troubles:
"Bringing in a bottom line and achieving optimal results are
goals that resonate with me."
"That's it," I thought. "I can't take any more." "I'm really sorry to do this, but I have to jump off the phone to
handle an emergency. I did enjoy talking to
you and I'll look at
your resume and get back to you if
something comes up that makes
sense for you."
And with that, I said goodbye to this man and his chances of ever
making money with me or any business I have
a say in.
In their book "Why Business People Speak Like Idiots", authors
Fugere, Hardaway, and Warshawsky say there
are three reasons
we hear this kind of nonsense from too many
people in the business
world:
They focus on themselves, rather than their
listeners. "When
obscurity pollutes someone's communications
it's often because
the ... goal is to impress and not to
inform."
They are afraid of concrete language. They
realize that saying
exactly what they mean makes it hard for
them to wiggle out of
commitments later on. "Liability
scares us, so we add endless
phrases to qualify our views on a topic,
acknowledging everything
from prevailing weather conditions to the
12 reasons we can't
make a decision now."
They like to romanticize what they do for a
living. They are afraid
that their daily routines, and indeed their
daily thoughts, are
common and thus vulgar.
Here's the bottom line on lies: It's a very poor success strategy.
It can work in the short run, and this is
why so many shallow-minded businesspeople use it. But in the long run, what
you do is what counts
You can get away with fooling people for a
while, but only a little while.
As
I've said many times, in business only two things really matter:
what you know (your skill set) and who you
are (your integrity).
Those qualities are demonstrated ultimately
by your actions, not by your words.
You are, as our grammar school teachers used to tell us, only fooling
yourself by lying and making up stories.
Eventually - usually much
more
quickly than you'd like to believe - people will find out who
you really are. At that point, no amount of
verbal hyperbole is going
to save you.
Having been found out as a con artist, you have also been marked
as an impostor. You don't have the skills
you've claimed and you've
lost
any hope of being thought of as a person with any integrity.
It's much better to be honest from the outset. And being honest
means being honest about who you are, how
much you know,
and the qualities of your character.
None of us is perfect. And the good news is that we don't have to be.
You can be outrageously successful
in business with just a handful
of
good qualities and a truckload of faults.
And anyway, nobody wants you to be perfect. What they want is
for you to be good. So the first rule of
successfully selling yourself
is
to begin with the basics:
You must be good at something - really
good.
That something must be useful to the
success of the business
you are attempting to work for.
You must prove that you are good.
And then you must deliver.
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By Mark Ford
COMON SENSE OF LIVING
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