Claw Your Way To The Top

by Dave Barry

Meat

  The appropriate wine here would cost at least $45 a bottle

  Fish

  With fish you want a bottle of wine costing a minimum of $45

  Poultry

  You should spend $45 or more for this bottle of wine.

  If you have trouble remembering all this information, don’t worry. Your wine steward will be more than happy to help you make your wine selection:

  YOU: How is this wine that costs $12 a bottle?

  WINE STEWARD: We use that primarily as a disinfectant.

  YOU: I see. Then we’ll have something much more expensive.

  WINE STEWARD: Excellent choice.

  When the steward brings you the wine, he’ll show you the label; you should examine it closely for spelling and punctuation errors (see The Basic Rules of Business Grammar). He will then pour a little into your glass. Taste it, and if necessary, have him add a couple of packets of Sweet ‘n’ Low.

  At the end of the meal, be sure to make a lighthearted remark about the size of the check, such as: “My God! This check is so large that unless I sign a big contract with a prospective client soon, I’ll never be able to afford the operation that will restore the precious gift of sight to my three-year-old daughter, Little Meg, ha ha!” This is your humorous signal to the prospective client that it’s time to “talk turkey.”

  “Ed,” you should say (if his name is Ed), “this meal has been a tremendously tax-deductible pleasure for me personally, but let’s get down to brass tacks. Looking at this thing objectively, I think it would be a big mistake for you not to sign this contract, especially if you want a ride home.” Now give him some time to think it over. Maybe even sprint for the door a couple of times, as if you’re running off without him. Better yet, offer to stay there until night falls and buy him dinner. He’ll come around.

  Entertaining At Home

  The first question, of course, is: whose home? I think we can rule out your home, since, let’s be honest here, nobody in your home has ever made a really sincere effort to clean the toilets, and it’s far too late to start now. A much better bet would be the client’s home. Call him up and explore this possibility with him:

  YOU: Ed, Denise and I are wondering if you and Trudy would be free to have dinner with us at your home Friday night.

  CLIENT: What?

  YOU: How are your toilets?

  CLIENT: What?

  YOU: Cleaner than ours, I bet!

  CLIENT: You want to have dinner at our home?

  YOU: Sounds good to me! Eight o’clock Friday it is!

  You should arrive a bit early, say fiveish, to rummage around and make sure there’s plenty of pre-dinner liquor on hand. When Ed and Trudy come out of their bedroom, your first responsibility is to make them feel at ease. I suggest you get a copy of the Complete Book of Games and Stunts published by Bonanza Books and authored by Darwin A. Hindman, Ph.D., professor of physical education at the University of Missouri. This is an actual book, available at garage sales everywhere. I especially recommend the “Funnel Trick” described in chapter 4 (“Snares”), wherein you have the victim lean his head back and place a penny on his forehead, then you tell him that the object of the trick is to tilt his head forward so the penny drops into a funnel stuck into his belt. However—get this—while he’s got his head tilted back, you pour a pitcher of water into the funnel and get his pants soaking wet! Ha ha! Be sure to follow this with a lighthearted remark (“You look like a cretin, Ed!”) and offer everybody a swig from the liquor bottle.

  Now that everybody is loosened up, drop a hint (“God I’m hungry! Any food around here?”) that it’s time to move to the dinner table. Your goal at dinner, of course, is to somehow cause the prospective client to get a wad of food caught in his throat and start choking, so you can leap up and dislodge the food by means of the “Heimlich maneuver,” thus causing the client to be indebted to you for the rest of his life. This means you have to startle him just as the food is going down his throat. The most reliable way to do this is to have a pistol hidden under the table, and fire it off just as he starts to swallow. You should of course use blanks, as bullets would be irresponsible.

  The Heimlich Maneuver

  Stand behind the victim and put your arms around him. Make a fist with one hand and grab it with the other, then yank your hands sharply into the victim’s abdomen, thus causing the wad of food to be expelled.

  Heimlich-Maneuver Hockey

  Have two opposing players, each holding a victim, stand about six feet apart. Each player tries to expel his victim’s food wad into the other victim’s mouth.

  What To Do If A Client Or Business Associate Dies

  Send a flower arrangement that does not have little pink or blue rattles in it. Wear black clothes to the funeral. If you don’t have black clothes, wear the darkest clothes you have. Tiptoe up to the next of kin during the service and explain this fact to them. “These are the darkest clothes I have,” you should say, taking care to whisper. Next you should tell them how awful you feel. “God!” you should say. “I feel terrible! Just horrible!”

  Next you should go up and examine the deceased, then go back and inform the next of kin how good he looks. “Ed looks great!” you should say. “You can hardly even tell he’s dead!” Unless Ed is in an urn.

  Chapter Seven. How To Dress Exactly Like Everybody Else

  Take a moment to consider the way the world’s truly successful people dress. They dress like mental patients. Your prime example is Prince Charles. Here is one of the world’s top princes, if not the top prince, yet he is constantly showing up in public wearing ludicrous Sergeant Pepper-style outfits featuring hats with enormous feathers. Or you’ll see a picture of him visiting some remote fungal nation and cheerfully wearing ritual native vegetation around his neck. There are plenty of other examples of highly successful people who dress absurdly: Mick Jagger, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Ronald McDonald, to name just three. And of course you can’t find a really successful world religious leader who doesn’t wear a comical outfit.

  So what does this tell you about how you should dress if you want to succeed in American business? Nothing. Because the way we dress in American business is not based on the way the world’s truly successful people dress. It is based on the way John T. Molloy says we should dress. Molloy is the author of the best-selling books Dress for Success, The Woman’s Dress for Success Book, Live for Success, and Success in the Afterlife. He openly admits to practicing a science called “wardrobe engineering.” He has done extensive wardrobe research, wherein he tested the reactions of thousands of groups of people to the way different individuals were dressed. What he found, after years and years of study, was that the groups always liked it best when the individuals were naked. So he pretty much gave up the research and decided instead to author best-selling books containing incredibly detailed instructions on how to dress and what accessories to carry, instructions that were so slavishly followed by the business community that they briefly resulted in a worldwide shortage of Cross pens.

  The bottom line is, if you truly want to present a business wardrobe image that makes the all-important fashion statement: “I look exactly like everybody else in American business,” you damn well better dress the way John T. Molloy says you should. So listen up.

  How Men Should Dress

  Basically, the American businessman should dress as though he recently lost his entire family in a tragic boat explosion. We are talking about a subdued look here. This doesn’t mean that you have no choice in what you wear. Au contraire. For example, you may wear two completely different colors of woolen suit: you may wear a dark gray woolen suit, or, if you want to get really crazy, you may wear a dark blue woolen suit.

  You may not wear a brown, green, or (God forbid) plaid polyester suit, because everybody will think you just tromped into town from rural Louisiana to attend the Live Bait Show. Men wearing these colors are very likely to be passed over for promotion, as is shown by this actual simulation of a sc
ene that for all we know probably occurs every day in major corporations:

  (We are in the office of the president, who is meeting with a vice-president to decide whom to promote to director of the Research Department.)

  VICE-PRESIDENT: Well, there’s Barkley, of course. He’s the one who came up with the way to turn discarded wads of Kleenex into gold using only common household ingredients.

  PRESIDENT: What color suit does he wear?

  VICE-PRESIDENT: Brown.

  PRESIDENT: Well forget him.

  Shirts

  Your shirt should be white, and it should not have the name “Earl” embroidered anywhere on it.

  Ties

  The purpose of your tie is to suggest that you attended an Ivy League university, so the key is to select the right pattern.

  How To Tie A Tie

  Face southwest, with the long end of the tie hanging down casually from your right hand (the audience’s left hand). Now bring the short end of the tie around the back of your neck and let it hang down your front, so that it just touches the scar you got ironing shirts naked. Now take the “wide” (or “long”) end of the tie and pass it three times around the “short” (or “long”) end, then up through the loop. (What do you mean, “What loop?” Check again!) Now pull everything snug, unless you have forgotten to put on a shirt, in which case you had best remove the tie, by force if necessary.

  Shoes

  These are a “must” in most business situations. If you use “Odor Eaters,” they should be beige or navy blue.

  Underwear

  No area of the male business wardrobe is as important as his underwear. Next time you’re in a room with a group of successful executives, take a few moments to examine their under-wear, and you’ll find they’re all wearing underwear with proven “power patterns” that have been shown in scientific tests to create a feeling of awe and respect in others.

  In situations where you really need to enhance your power image, you should wear your power underwear outside your pants. In extreme situations, such as you are arguing before the U.S. Supreme Court, you will want to wear them in an even more visible location, such as on your head.

  How Women Should Dress

  In deciding how to dress for business, women must understand certain basic facts, the foremost being that all men are scum. If a woman, no matter how competent, gives off the slightest hint that she has any feelings that could be remotely construed as sexual, this is all that the men in her corporation will ever think about. That’s not just my opinion: it is a scientific finding based on years of extensively hanging around with guys and talking.

  What does this mean, in terms of your business wardrobe? It means you want to adopt a fashion look that has become the standard for the woman on the corporate fast track, a look that can best be described as: Modified Nun. All we’ve really done to the basic nun look is remove the headpiece. This conveys to the men in your corporation that you are not a sex object, but an authority figure who must be taken seriously because at any moment you might strike them on the hands with a ruler.

  Hosiery

  This is mandatory. I realize you women hate to be constantly shelling out money for a product manufactured by an industry that pays its scientists huge bonuses if they can develop fibers even weaker than the ones they currently use. I realize you go around saying: “If we can land a man on the moon, why can’t we develop pantyhose that will last longer than a small vanilla cone on a hot day?” Well I’m sorry, but rules are rules. Also, we haven’t landed a man on the moon for a very long time now, and we probably never will again unless something urgent comes up, such as the Defense Department suspects there are Cuban troops up there.

  Makeup

  A good rule of thumb is: if you can stick a pin more than a quarter inch into your face and still not feel anything, you’re wearing too much makeup for the business environment. Or else you have a medical problem.

  Shoes

  The ideal shoe for the career woman is the basic pump with a “sensible” heel, by which I mean a heel that will just fit through the holes in a standard street grate.

  Chapter Eight. Sales

  What makes a good salesperson? In an effort to answer that question, I asked my research associates to interview the top 100 salespeople, based on dollar volume, in the nation. Naturally, my associates refused to do this. I wouldn’t have done it either. Life is hard enough without voluntarily subjecting yourself to top salespeople.

  What we can learn from this research is that if you want to become a top salesperson, you must develop drive, determination, and persistence such that people do not wish to be within thousands of yards of you. How can you become this kind of person? By BELIEVING IN YOURSELF. You must develop a FAITH IN YOUR OWN ABILITIES so strong that YOU DON’T FEEL THE LEAST BIT EMBARRASSED ABOUT ACTING LIKE A SCUZZBAG. You don’t get this kind of confidence from other people; it has to COME FROM WITHIN, from having a comprehensive, meaningful, and deep-rooted PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE based on TIMELESS TRUTHS, which you get from MOTIVATIONAL BOOKS THAT ARE ALSO AVAILABLE ON CASSETTE TAPES COSTING $49.95 PER SET.

  Without question, the number-one cassette thinker in the world today is Dr. Lance M. Canker, the man whose famous motivational tape “Dare to Be a jerk” is believed to be the single biggest factor in the historic decision by Coca-Cola executives to change the Coke formula so it tasted more like children’s cough syrup. Dr. Canker, who has had a lifelong interest in motivational thinking ever since 1963, when he had his name legally changed from “Lance Canker” to “Dr. Lance Canker,” has written a number of self-help books, including the hugely popular God, Are You Fat! But his greatest contribution to the business world is his classic how-to-sell book Buy This Book or You’ll Starve to Death, which is filled with true-life inspirational anecdotes such as these:

  Not long ago, I gave a dinner party attended by every major Western head of state and a young man I’ll call

  “Jon.” Although he is attractive, intelligent, and talented, “Jon” was a very unhappy person, and he was thinking of killing himself. So I took him aside.

  “‘Jon,’” I said. “Lighten up.” Today, he is the president of General Motors.

  Not long after that, I got a telephone call from a major world religious leader, whom I’ll call “the Pope.” Although he is attractive, intelligent, and talented, he was feeling tremendous anxiety about the fate of mankind.

  “Hey,” I advised him. “Forget it.” And today he, too, is the president of General Motors.

  Using proven techniques such as these, Dr. Canker shows in Buy This Book or You’ll Starve to Death how any member of the vertebrate family can develop powerful selling skills. In this chapter, we shall draw extensively on the information contained in Dr. Canker’s book, and by the time Dr. Canker finds out about this, we shall be long gone.

  Rule #1: Maintain Eye Contact With The Prospect At All Times No Matter What

  This is extremely important. If the prospect tries to glance out the window, you must race over and stand in front of the window. If you hand him a document and he attempts to read it, you must place your head between the document and his eyes. If he goes to the bathroom, you must maintain eye contact as best you can from the adjacent stall or urinal. This may make you uncomfortable, especially if you and the prospect happen to belong to differing sexes, but if you don’t do it, you’ll give the impression that you’re not being totally honest and you don’t truly believe in your product, whatever the hell it is.

  COMMON QUESTION #1: What if the prospect is blind? ANSWER: Then you must maintain knee contact.

  COMMON QUESTION #2: Well, what if the prospect is blind and has a wooden leg? ANSWER: Well, then you would ...

  COMMON QUESTION #3: Also he’s in a coma. ANSWER: Hey! These aren’t common questions!

  Rule #2: Call The Prospect By His First Name A Lot, Because He Might Forget You’re Talking To Him

  WRONG: “Bob, have you ever given any thought as to who would provide
for the financial security of your wife and children if, God forbid, you were to be killed by falling cement?”

  RIGHT: “Bob, have you, Bob, ever given any thought as to who would provide for the financial security of your, Bob’s, wife and children if you, Bob, were to be killed by falling cement, Bob? Huh? Bob?”

  Rule #3: Learn To Read The Prospect’s “Body Language”

  If you’ve ever driven on the Long Island Expressway, you know that people often communicate to each other “nonverbally,” which means rather than using words, they use fingers, arm gestures, facial expressions, teeth, knives, etc. As a smart salesperson, you must learn to “read” the prospect’s body language so you can take appropriate action, such as shielding your face.

  Rule #4: Get The Prospect Into A “Yes” Frame Of Mind

  The way you do this is by making a series of statements that the prospect cannot help but agree with. Let’s listen in to this actual transcript of a top salesperson applying this technique:

  SALESPERSON: Hi, Bob! Great to see you! Bob, I want to thank you for giving me an appointment. Bob.