That’s what you become when, with good eye contact, you compliment him or his company in voice strong sure just as you’re settling down to your up-talk deliberations.
The opening perception of the Intimidator as he meets the up-talker is something like, “I’m dominant. You’re submissive. You’re here to try to gain something I have power to accord or withhold. ’ ’ He doesn’t say any of that, of course. All he says is, “Why don’t you sit here.”
Your compliment lets him know right away, “Hey, this one’s different.”
“Nice place you got here” does nothing of the kind. But a sophisticated surface-to-air compliment that indicates your ranee and depth of concern simply overpowers his dominance and, in a profoundly human way, forces him to respect you.
“Businessmen in the Third World tend to abandon their regional rivalries when a superpower horns into a part of their market they’re perfectly capable of serving,” you continue. “You fellows had to overcome a lot of Asian pride to win that deal. ”
If you come out of your comer behind salvos like that, can you imagine him maintaining that ungiving pose and saying merely, “Uh, oh yes, the turbine deal. Thank you”—and then continuing with Ids “Why don’t you sit here” routine?
It’s much easier to imagine him relaxing and saying something like, “Interesting you should mention that. There were some hairy moments before we nailed that thing down, you know,” and then proceeding to regale you with all the trickle-down company legendary that reached him at morning coffee yesterday.
Sometimes the rapport you set roaring by the “highest honest compliment skillfully rendered” can be embarrassing. You almost want to say, “Enough, already,” and resume the submissive posture so he won’t later feel he overextended himself and suffer a backlash in his warmth and outreach.
Once you feel the power of the “password,” you’ll wonder where it’s been all your life. You may find it amazing that such a simple, obvious tool eluded you for so many years. It’s not amazing at all. Look how much water power went to waste before man learned how to harness it.
I discovered password power by accident—in fact, by accident while not even trying to score. I was just playing around. I was on the phone in New York trying to sell my radio show to stations across the country. I was talking to a program director of a station in Cheyenne, Wyoming, a place I’d never been. As we were small-talking, my eye happened to spot a map of the United States and gravitated, naturally enough, over to Cheyenne. I lazily noted the town of Torrington, Wyoming, a bit to the north of Cheyenne.
“Do you ever get up to Torrington for the weekend?” I asked.
I think he screamed. He was so impressed he actually screamed his amazement that someone like me with a southern accent calling him from New York City could deal so knowingly with someone in Cheyenne about his territory! I made it a rule to begin all long-distance sales calls in a similar way. It makes for a great feeling on both ends of the line, a great feeling precisely when that embryonic little relationship needs it most.
Where do you get “high, honest compliments?” Not maps, obviously, but books, magazines, newspapers, newscasts, gossip, asking people who know things about the company, employees of competitors who like you more than they hate them, and from the company itself. If you call just about any company in the world and tell them you’re interested in their activities, they’ll be happy to send you a packet of public relations material, books, brochures, pamphlets, and folios, all extolling the history and activities of the company. Ask them to include a few recent copies of the company newspaper. Most will do so without question if you ask, but might not think to if you didn’t ask, on grounds that no one would be interested in most company newspapers except company employees.
People who watch moviemakers at work marvel at how many hours and days it takes to make a few minutes, or even seconds, of usable film. If all this “espionage,” brochure procurement, question-asking, and homework result in nothing more than giving you a good, solid lift over that “Nice place you got here” period of floundering, it’s hours and days well invested.
That moment is more important than the next hundred to follow. A good opening minute with a person who can say yes or no to your ambitions is the equivalent of a smooth takeoff, a high-spiraling kickoff, a 350-yard drive off the first tee, or, to a man, the woman he’s flirting with giggling at his approach quip, telling him her name and asking his.
You have to be a personnel director, or someone who says yes or no importantly, to believe how suicidally most people proceed through that opening minute.
Some people actually believe that nothing eases pre-interview tensions like a good, rollicking, off-color joke.
Understand the terrain. The personnel director may like dirty jokes. He may have never heard the one you chose to lead off with. He may think it’s funny. He may think it’s the funniest dirty joke he’s ever heard. He may fairly itch to convene his buddies into special session later that very day just to hear him tell that joke. But it’s miserable ice-breaking policy, for an interesting reason.
Those two, the job seeker and the applicant screener, have never met before. The Intimidator will reason as follows: “I have nothing against jokes, no matter how dirty. But how does he know that? Here he comes looking for a job, and before I can even get around to asking him what he’s been doing in recent years, out of his comer he comes with a joke like that. Cops don’t like drivers who crash red lights, even when they don’t happen to hit anybody. The joke teller exceeds his license. That, not the dirty joke itself, is his infraction.”
Undoubtedly, jobs have been gotten and careers launched on dirty jokes told without a “license,” told before the teller had earned or been awarded the “right” to tell a dirty joke. Never mind. The fact that President Harry Truman was a high school dropout shouldn’t lead young people to conclude that their best strategy for advancement is to drop out of school, then wait for overtures from the major parties.
The “Let’s warm it up with smut” up-talker is the apprentice asked by the electrician on the ladder to touch one of the bare wires on the floor below.
“Do you feel anything?” asked the electrician.
“No,” said the apprentice. “Not a thing.”
“Well,” said the electrician, “don’t touch the other one. It’s got twenty thousand volts running through it!”
If you don’t have time to research, prepare, shape, and sharpen a good, high, honest compliment, at least ask the receptionist, after the Intimidator’s been told you’re waiting, what the company’s done lately that people are talking about, what they’re proud of.
The minute you enter the Intimidator’s turf for the opening handshake, you’re in a battle of wits.
That’s no time for you to be unilaterally disarmed!
The wisest thing said during World War Two may have been the comment by an unknown soldier standing at pierside among hugging and kissing couples making their farewells, duffel bags hoisted over shoulders, loudspeakers blaring, band playing, all uniforms sharp and snappy, as the troopship was about to embark to go to war.
The GI looked around and said, “You know, war would be the most fun in the world if only nobody ever got hurt.”
Some people suspect that those who use warlike analogies and metaphors harbor some dark lust for combat. (They’ve even banned war toys for children in Sweden.) Nonsense. Sometimes the war analogy helps your life along.
You want that job, or assignment, or contract, concession, allocation, grant, gig—whatever. That’s why you sought the opportunity to meet with the Intimidator in the first place. That’s why you’re sitting there nervous, feeling an almost physical need for some good conversation to break out quickly. Just as in war, you’ve chosen an objective. You’ve prepared. As you’re headed down the corridor to the Intimidator’s lair, your invasion force is on the high seas. When you enter, you’ve hit the beach. When you sit down at his invitation, you’ve secured a te
ntative, temporary beachhead.
The next few instants—less than a full minute—are crucial. Will you secure and expand that beachhead, or be driven by hostile forces out to sea?
At the time of the real invasion at Normandy, France— June 6, 1944—General Eisenhower waited in his London headquarters for word. He had drafted two public announcements: one in case the invasion was successful, the other in case of failure. Once word came that Allied forces were indeed moving inland from their initial beach positions and into the hedgerows and that succeeding waves of troops and materiel were being unloaded without impediment, Eisenhower released the victory message.
He wadded up the other one and tossed it like a basketball into his wastebasket. His secretary, with enough sense of history to think beyond the relief and joy of the moment, walked over and retrieved it.
Instead of merely sweating it out with “Gee, I hope that interview goes well tomorrow,” make it a “war” game!
Long before they started talking about psychological programming, they knew about training. You can train yourself for success in that all-important formative instant of the interview by once again marshaling your “material” (information about the company, high honest compliment, etc.), learning to cut physically through that Bermuda Triangle of unease that descends upon you, and belting out your rehearsed-but-not-obviously-rehearsed opening salvos with grace and confidence. Defensively, the mission is to resist the wicked, gremlin-inspired temptation to say something destructive and dumb! (Some otherwise worthy candidates have aborted their opportunities at the outset by actually confusing the name of the company they’re trying to work for with its competitors’!)
Some invasions were unopposed. American marines going ashore in Lebanon in 1958 were greeted by laughing and cheering bikini-clad bathers on the beaches of Beirut! Others are “standard”—Guadalcanal, Leyte Gulf, Sicily, Hollandia. Others are so difficult that their very names continue to chill us—Tarawa, Okinawa, Iwo Jima, Salerno, Anzio. Up to now our scenarios have dealt with relatively friendly conditions on the “beach”: The enemy—the Intimidator—has handed us some kind of topic, some kind of hook, along with a handshake and seat assignment. Up to now he’s given us some hint of what we might use to get a conversation started.
What if we’re facing that sheer, stone cliff at the water’s edge, the one where the foe sits entrenched at the top rolling boulders down upon us? What if you don’t even get a handshake? What if all you get is a curt invitation to sit down delivered through a frown that looks like he could pose for a gastritis ad without shifting a muscle?
Obviously, then, we need a different approach from the one where the bikini corps is shouting out welcomes.
Look around.
The Intimidator is in an office or workspace or meeting place of some kind. He’s not levitating in midair in empty space. Where there’s life, there’s hope; and where there are things, there are things to notice, things to talk about, things to start conversations with. (The desirability of flaking People Talk is nothing new. For centuries people have been calling restored oaken chums and other unusual items “conversation pieces”!)
Look around, then. Are those his children in those lovely pictures off to the left side of his desk? Did anybody else ever mention how much his son looks like John F. Kennedy at the age of eighteen and his daughter like Maria Montez? Is that diploma from the University of Maryland? He may be too young to remember, but did he ever hear the legends of how coach Jim Tatum came in and in one single season turned Maryland from a bad football joke into a national power? Do they still talk about that comeback season when the backfield of Turyn, Larue, Bonk, and Gambino took the Maryland Terrapins to a 20-20 tie with Georgia in the Gator Bowl? (Even if he’s not too young to remember, it’s a good idea to suggest he is!)
Does anything on or around his desk look like he might have won it—a trophy for Salesman of the Month before he
got shifted over to Personnel, a letter opener from Kiwanis, a plaque from the National Conference of Christians and Jews, a pennant from the Little League, a translucent paperweight for valorous service on behalf of the Junior Chamber of Commerce wastepaper drive?
If so, bear in mind that people don’t display artifacts they’re ashamed of or that bore them. If he’s got them there, he’s proud of them, he enjoys talking about them, and nobody, not even his son-in-law or his niece, has ever seemed the least bit impressed by them. Be glad they saved that for you! That’s your opportunity to act, not overly but somewhat, like you’re admiring Tito’s medals in the war museum at Avala outside Belgrade.
Is his desk neat? Congratulate him on taking a page from Bernard Baruch. Is it cluttered? Congratulate him on taking a page from Thomas Edison. Does his office bristle with bric-a-brac that says, “I want to be me”? Tell him it gives you a good feeling to meet someone who refuses to let himself get emulsified and homogenized by the corporate steamroller. Is his office straight and standard without a ripple of self-expression or distinctiveness? Tell him it gives you a good feeling to meet someone willing to let a good office go ahead and be a good office and not trash it up with tacky attempts to be an “individual.”
Hypocritical? Lying? Weaseling? you say?
Twaddle! Impoverished in spirit is the person unable to appreciate a variety of work styles.
Besides, a certain lassitude is allowed in wartime that would normally repel honest and worthy men. You’ve got to get that conversation going right away. However you deign to do it, short of an outright lie, you’re excused. Regardless of how you really feel about his workspace, be forthcoming, be impressed, be alive, be nice. The end justifies your not being mean.
One man’s coward is another man’s ‘ ‘hero with the strength
to show restraint.” One man’s “ring kisser” is another man’s diplomat. There are ways to perform the most abject—and effective—kinds of ring kissing without coming across as or being charged with being a ring kisser.
Let’s take the toughest-case scenario. Your Intimidator is male, so are you, and you think he might warm up a little if, you praised his physique. ^
You’re right if you’re thinking that “Hey, you’ve got a great build’ ’ is not the most magic, rapport-engendering line to use when you walk into a frigid, well-defended chamber and he offers you his hand as though he himself had no further use for it.
How about, “Forgive this detour, but I’ve finally decided to haul off and get myself into shape, and you, obviously, came to that decision quite some time ago. Tell me, how do you give your work and your body the attention they deserve?”
“This I beheld, or dreamed it in a dream,” begins Edward Rowland Sill’s famous poem “Opportunity.” “A craven hung along the battle’s edge and thought, ‘Had I a sword of keener steel, that blue-blade the king’s son bears. But this blunt thing!’ He snapped, and flung it from his hand.” Positive thinkers already know the rest. The king’s son got his blue-blade - knocked from his hand. In desperation, he spotted the sword the craven had thrown away, picked it up, sallied back into the ^fray, and won the battle!
It’s fascinating to hear the “cravens” return from the interview wars complaining about the reception they got. “Man,
I knew it was all over from that icy ‘Hello’ when I walked in.” Listen to them! “He wasn’t the least bit interested in my—” “He treated me like—” “He didn’t even read my—” “He did everything he could to make me feel uncomfortable.”
Comic Sam Levinson hated to waste anything as precious as a laugh on a line that was merely funny, and nothing else.
He,liked to load lessons into his laughs. He never quit repeating his penniless immigrant father’s advice, “If you want a helping hand, you’ll find one at the end of your arm.”
Old Mr. Levinson, had he known the possibilities of getting ahead through personality, not perspiration, might have added, “And if you need a helping tongue, you’ll find one J lying lazily on,the floor of your mouth.”<
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I have never once failed to seize immediately on something in the Intimidator’s environment I could use to get things going, even when the Intimidator chose not to be helpful. Among the available “specks” I’ve blown up into colored helium balloons are a desk picture of him standing beside his World War Two fighter plane (‘ ‘Those babies had the engines in front, where they belong”), a piece of fresh-looking Vietnamese currency (“Have you been there since the war?), a hand-pumped Victrola (“You don’t look old enough to remember the old straight 78-rpm breakable records”), an expensive rug (“I’ve always wondered how many people appreciate fine things—or even notice?”), a framed page one of a newspaper reporting Lindbergh’s successful solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean (“Take a look at the President’s comments about Prohibition in the news story just below”), a letter from Father Flanagan, who founded Boys Town (“I always wondered if he really looked like Spencer Tracy”), a 1929 menu (“I could have treated twelve people to filet mignon for what I just spent for lunch at the coffee shop downstairs”), a souvenir picture of his audience with the Pope (“Have you got a minute to tell me how those audiences work?”), and the view from his window (“Not many people realize it, but that part of Harlem you can see at the top of Central Park up there used to be a Finnish community. In fact, they still have a commercial sauna open on Madison Avenue just north of 124th Street”).
As Talleyrand counseled his young diplomats, “Above all,
not too much zeal.” It’s very easy in the early up-gush of success to go for overkill. It’s such a delight when your invasion succeeds and you can tell by his face you’ve got him rocking with you and enjoying your words that the temptation is to go ahead and increase the dosage of the medicine that’s obviously working.
The most unhappy victor in the Wake Island sea battle was the American pilot who was so thrilled to see the Japanese fleet sinking beneath his wings that he forgot his orders and spent so much time after he’d dropped all his bombs circling and looking that he ran short of gas and actually had to ditch his plane a few hundred yards from the aircraft carrier! He forgot his job.
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