Materials for week two (October 27, 2012)

For this week you will need two (2, zwei, dwa, dos) things.

The materials from the first meeting (see previous blog post with the link to them).

The materials here.

A copy of the materials is also found here below the jump (click where it says 'czytaj więcej').

See you Saturday!

HAND TO HAND   (part two)

adapted from Coercion by Douglas Rushdoff

Mort threw himself on the old woman's mercy, apologizing profusely. If she felt sorry enough for him, he'd still accomplish his original purpose of drawing her out.

"You couldn't have known," she reassured him. Mort surmised from the way she put her tongue to her upper teeth and looked down and to the right that she had more to say but that her rational left brain was holding her back.

She wanted a confidante, Mort thought to himself. People make friends by sharing confidences. They need to talk. He took a shot in the dark.

"How is your husband doing with it?" Mort asked. At the same time he motioned subtly with his eyes toward the old man, who was already channel surfing.

"He's holding on to the pain, if you know what I mean."

"I know exactly what you mean," Mort responded compassionately. He had found his sales hook.

His faux pas revealed a dynamic between the couple that he could exploit. The husband was holding on to his pain and the wife sought to relieve it.

The mechanical bed would make a perfect metaphor for her struggle. The old man's resistance to buying the bed could now be turned into a symptom of the husband's whole problem by a perceptive salesman. By convincing her husband to buy a more comfortable bed, the old woman could start him on the road to recovery. His decision to buy the bed, a symbolic act of healing himself, was more important than the bed itself.

"He's got to think of himself too," Mort began.

"I know," the old woman agreed, getting up and taking Mort to the bedroom. She spoke loud enough for the husband to hear over the television set. "He doesn't have a good back, and look at what he's sleeping on."

Mort pulled back the bedcover. He was shocked. Not only was it a mechanical bed manufactured by his own company's strongest competitor, but it was the best bed on the market.

They were, however, using a one-piece mattress, which was not correct for a mechanical bed with elevation controls. It would slip off the frame whenever one side of the other was raised. In theory, all the couple needed to do was buy a set of hinged mattresses and they'd have a better system than anything Mort could offer them.

"Who sold you this?!" he asked, horrified.

"The people who moved out upstairs," she said. "But it hasn't worked …"

"I know," Mort nodded. He invented reasons to get rid of it, all lies. "That company's beds are awful. The mattresses slip right off the frame. It's very dangerous. You shouldn't even plug it in. There've been reports of fires."

"Did you hear that?" she shouted to her husband. "Fires!"

"Tell him what Eddie said!" the old man shouted back. The couple's son-in-law had told them if they just bought the right mattress everything would be okay.

"If only that were true," Mort lied. "These companies make things so cheap these days that you can't replace individual parts. It's cheaper to get a whole new bed."

Then Mort used his new weapon.

"He shouldn't be sleeping on a piece of mechanical crap like this, anyway, if you'll excuse my language … How long has he been suffering?"

"Too long," she said, looking up and to the left.

"That's the sign I was looking for," Mort says. "Up and to the left means she's accessing her emotional memories, and very impressionable."

By the time all three were once again seated around the kitchen table, Mort had sold the wife on his company's best bed, but the husband was unsure. It was time for an old trick.

He told the old man that he had been down at the warehouse the day before and saw two mattresses that had been improperly labeled as plain. But he could see that they had had heating units installed – an $800 value.

He made a call to his "buddy at the warehouse" to find out whether those two mattresses were still available. Miraculously, only one had been sold. Arnie had claimed the other, but if Mort had a signed sale, then he could get it.

Mort put his hand over the mouthpiece and related the information to his prospects. Of course the whole call was fake. All the beds came with heating as a standard feature. But Mort told them that if they didn't grab this bed right now, they'd lose out to Arnie. Convinced he was getting something for nothing and anxious to beat Mort's competitor the old man quickly signed the sales receipt.

Mort had already taken the couple for $3800 but he wasn't done with them yet. If he could get them to agree to the installment plan, he would double his commission.

The old man was already writing a check, so Mort had to act fast.

"I'm supposed to take that and go," Mort confided "but I'd feel terrible if I let the company get away with it." This got their attention.

"We're only supposed to mention this in the richer neighborhoods, but you don't have to pay for the bed today, or even this year," he said.

"With an interest rate of only six percent, the loan on this bed earns you four percent on your money every year," he continued. "The math is simple."

Mort demonstrated through a long and confusing set of numbers that the couple could earn more interest by keeping their money in savings and paying for the bed on the installment plan.

Actually, between the loan fee and a balloon payment at the end of the five year loan, technically a lease on the bed, the couple would pay dearly for this plan. But Mort's numbers thoroughly baffled the old man. To preserve his dignity in front of his wife he agreed to a payment plan he did not really understand.

Now all the paperwork was signed and a team of expert "customer service representatives" was ready with a variety of strategies in case the couple changed their minds. But Mort had a simple method of insuring that the sale would be final. From his case he pulled out a large, plastic bag. Inside it was a $25 "cottony" quilted pad, which he presented to the couple as a token of his appreciation.

"I want to make sure you're happy before I leave," he said. "If you want to change your mind, you can rip this up right now."

"No, no," the old lady protested as she took the gift. "You've been a great help to both of us." With that exchange, Mort reduced the possibility of cancellation by 80 percent, according to one of his sales manuals.

On his way home, it wasn't fear of the couple's buyer's remorse that bothered him but rather his own seller's remorse. Normally, he would have been happy. He had converted a highly doubtful prospect into a $1500 commission.

But has he waited to pay at a toll he couldn't get the image of the couple's wheelchair-bound grandson out of his head. He imagined himself confronted in the afterlife by every customer he had deceived in his years of selling.

By the time he got home he was in the midst of an anxiety attack. As the snow began to fall he got out a shovel and tried to dig himself out. When his neighbors saw him standing in the snow holding his chest they made him take a cab to the hospital.

"The whole time the title of the Dale Carnegie book kept going through my head How to win friends and influence people. That's what I'd done I'd won friends by influencing them and then I fucked them over."

He hadn't suffered a heart attack. Instead the best regional salesman had had an attack of conscience.

Games of weakness (Korda)

(adapted from POWER! Michael Korda)

It has been written that nothing helps a person in their journey through life more than a knowledge of their characteristic weaknesses. One might think that this is so a person can hide them from others. But in the world of work, displaying one's weaknesses is, counter-intuitively, a very effective and versatile strategy.

The basic move is to simply deny that one has any power at all, thus avoiding the dangerous act of taking a stand on any issue.

This game can be seen at its clearest when people who have considerable power are asked to get their subordinates a raise.

People whose whole life and soul are wrapped up in the ability to make tough decisions, and for whom aggressive confrontations are a lifestyle can be reduced to whimpering helplessness by a secretary who wants a $500 a month raise. Suddenly they are brought low by the thought of taking action on behalf of someone else's needs, however small.

An executive who has just single-handedly closed a $2,000,000 deal might do anything short of physical violence at the board of directors' meeting to assure their own raise. But they will plead incapacity, weariness, overwork and above all powerlessness, to avoid "going to bat" for someone else's $500 a month. They raise their palms, slump their shoulders and tilt their heads in the Gallic gesture of resignation that indicates impotent sympathy.

This is because when it comes to raises, the smaller the amount involved the more difficult it is to put through. Raising an executive from $150,000 to $200,000 a year is easy and it may even be felt not giving him a large bonus at the end of the year would be either an insult or a warning of imminent dismissal.

Raising a secretary from $2000 to $2500 a month on the contrary is sure to involve a bitter struggle and require emotional appeals, blackmail and personal commitment.

Executive salaries, no matter how large, are seen as reflections on the corporation and are thus collective decisions, while smaller pay raises are by their very nature personal requests, requiring the executive to put their own prestige on the line.

Thus, the same executive might ask: "What do you think we ought to do about the vice president of sales? Don't you think we ought to give him 50?"

But in asking for a raise of much smaller dimensions, they would be obliged to say: "I'd like to give my secretary another 200 a month. It's deserved and it would make my life a lot easier, okay?"

The smaller the amount of money, the more personal the request will appear, and the more difficult it will be to achieve. This explains why most executives are reluctant to undertake such tasks, and why the best way to get a big raise is to already by making a lot of money.

This is why Games of Weakness are primarily used as a way of saying "No" without actually having to use that unpleasant word. Salaries are an excellent example of this.

On the level above you, after all, your performance is being judged, at least in part, on your ability to hold salary increases down. Meanwhile the loyalty of those below you is determined by your ability to get them what they want, which usually involves more money. In this position the best posture to adopt is one of uncompromising toughness with your superiors and pathetic weakness with your subordinates.

In other words, an executive campaigning for a personal raise can only do so by holding back everybody else. The more people who don't get raises, the more they will deserve one. The simple fact is that the structure of most businesses makes it fairly certain that the person one has to go to for a raise can only get more money for themselves by refusing to give it.

Denying power can be fruitful in many other ways as well. Any competent negotiator knows it is better to curse the management, flaunt their weakness, blame everything on the computer or the board of directors and by joining their opponent imply that they are both victims of the same rapacious organization. Then a lower price can be more easily negotiated.

There have been places and times where making tough decisions on one's own (or pretending to) has been in fashion. But generally over time the larger benefits of playing dead will drive out such temporary aberrations.

Thus instead of bargaining, which may or may not go a particular bargainer's way, it's easier to defer responsibility to unnamed, unknown, unknowable forces from above.

After all, true negotiation is more difficult and potentially dangerous as things might not go your way.

 It's so much simpler to say: "Well $100,000 sounds interesting, I'll have to talk to people here about it. It sounds okay to me, but I don't know what 'they' will think." When you call back an hour later you offer $50,000 together with many apologies for 'their' intransigence and general stinginess.

In fact, there's not that much difference except that bargaining depends on being willing to humiliate other people while the Game of Weakness requires one to humiliate oneself. The important thing to note is that the weakness game makes humiliating oneself into a productive and profitable system.

Self-debasement then is an effective weapon in the hands of a person who knows how to use it and doesn't suffer from the misplaced desire to show their power.

Method acting has become a business asset. Here, the basic trick is to counter any complain with one's own sufferings. Rather than reason with unwanted requests, the canny executive sympathizes which is much more effective as it's much harder to argue against. Samples of this give an idea of the basic technique:

"I'd love to talk about it, but not this week. If you could see my calendar, you wouldn't believe it …"

"I know, I know, I think you should get more money too! But hell, things are tough all over. I'm gonna be here till midnight going over these reports, I haven't had time to answer yesterdays phone calls yet and I haven't had a raise myself for two years."

"Look, this just isn't the time. I'm having troubles with the board and if I try to get more money now, it just won't work. We're just gonna have to be patient a little while longer, okay?"

Some even carry this tactic to the lengths of making it a form of preventive deterrent, complaining bitterly about their lot in order to shame others into not making embarrassing and difficult demands.

Those who play this game sigh a great deal, hold their heads in their hands and project a posture of extreme weariness and defeat in order to prevent others from adding to their burdens by bringing up their problems, like the fact that they haven't had a raise in three years.

One version is to ask any potential petitioner for headache tablets before they can say anything.

Active hypochondria is another form of protective armor. An effective player with an imaginary case of flu can clinch three deals, turn down four requests for raises and shame their staff into staying at work until seven in the evening.

Certain illnesses can't be faked and others do no good. Infectious diseases are definitely out since nobody wants to be quarantined from an important meeting. Similarly, a broken leg is troublesome to fake and is generally seen as an unfortunate side effect of good health and sporting enthusiasm. Therefore it evokes no sympathy. But flu, severe colds, back trouble and sinus headaches are always effective.

Shamelessness is the key to winning in Games of Weakness, which makes faking asthma very popular. After all, attacks are sudden and unpredictable. When negotiations take a bad turn, one rolls one's eyes and clutches one's throat in a theatrical manner. By the time someone's brought you a glass of water, found your bronchial spray and helped you swallow your medicine it will be difficult for them to go on explaining their exorbitant demands.

It is also possible to pass down despairing messages through secretaries. This has the advantage of avoiding face to face contact while holding onto the moral high ground of working while deathly ill:

"Well, he isn't feeling well today and isn't coming in. But I did speak to him just before the doctor arrived and he said that 50,000 isn't really enough and he'd really appreciate it if you could think about it some more."

There's no winning against this kind of self-abasement. Unless you're willing to counter every suggestion of ill health with something even more drastic and grave of your own, you are lost.