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Errantfischer
Senior Member
Username: Errantfischer
Post Number: 400
Registered: 06-2000
| | Posted on Saturday, April 15, 2006 - 08:46 pm: | 
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Hey, all, long time no vent! I thought of the bugboard when I read an article today on usatoday.com, which I'll quote in part:
Odland isn't the only CEO to have made this discovery. Rather, it seems to be one of those rare laws of the land that every CEO learns on the way up. It's hard to get a dozen CEOs to agree about anything, but all interviewed agree with the Waiter Rule.
They acknowledge that CEOs live in a Lake Wobegon world where every dinner or lunch partner is above average in their deference. How others treat the CEO says nothing, they say. But how others treat the waiter is like a magical window into the soul.
And beware of anyone who pulls out the power card to say something like, "I could buy this place and fire you," or "I know the owner and I could have you fired." Those who say such things have revealed more about their character than about their wealth and power.
Whoever came up with the waiter observation "is bang spot on," says BMW North America President Tom Purves, a native of Scotland, a citizen of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland, who lives in New York City with his Norwegian wife, Hilde, and works for a German company. That makes him qualified to speak on different cultures, and he says the waiter theory is true everywhere.
The CEO who came up with it, or at least first wrote it down, is Raytheon CEO Bill Swanson. He wrote a booklet of 33 short leadership observations called Swanson's Unwritten Rules of Management. Raytheon has given away 250,000 of the books.
Among those 33 rules is only one that Swanson says never fails: "A person who is nice to you but rude to the waiter, or to others, is not a nice person."
Now, when I read this, I said to myself, "Dang! Here's another person taking credit for something I said first! Note Swanson's Golden Rule, as quoted from this article: "A person who is nice to you but rude to the waiter, or to others, is not a nice person." Compare this insight (which CEO Swanson thinks is profound enough to base a whole book on) with this comment I posted on the bugboard six years ago:
Posted on Friday, July 14, 2000 - 06:44 am:
Moving onto Trumpetx's comments, basically it sounds like he is saying he is not a jerk, he just acts like one on the Internet. Well, okay, I suppose that statement is believable. He's like the guy who gets along fine with his co-workers but turns into a terror when he is behind the wheel of an automobile. The automobile offers this cloak of anonymity, you see. Nobody else on the road knows who you are, so you can act any way you want. The Internet offers this same cloak of anonymity.
However, I would submit that the truest test of who you are is how you act when you have this cloak of anonymity. If you get along fine with your classmates or co-workers but are rude to the waitress, you are not a nice person.
Uncanny, similarity, eh?
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Character (Unregistered Guest)
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Sunday, April 16, 2006 - 03:04 am: |
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People say Trumpetx is in reality the same in real life as he is on the internet. It is said that he tries to hide it irl whereas online he does not. *shrug* Never met him so I can't say one way or the other.
Having said that, I disagree with this article. How one treats strangers, family, and friends may give an indication as to personality under certain specific sets of circumstances, but it nowhere near paints an accurate and complete picture of an individual. People react differently in different conditions. While the cloak of anonyminity on the internet can reduce the inhibitions of some individuals (especially when under heightened emotional states -- e.g. anger, rage), it may not accurately reflect nor define a person's character.
A complete asshole on the internet who is completely out of control flaming people online may be the one willing to repeatedly risk his life to save children from a burning building; whereas an extremely well-mannered, polite, and on the surface seemingly kind individiual may be the one who decides to turn a blind eye and walk the other way.
Tell me, can one accurately tell a person's true character from his interaction with a waiter? Is the well mannered person the 'nice' person or is it the rude person with no social graces who risks his life to save others? |
nice man (Unregistered Guest)
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Monday, April 17, 2006 - 12:21 am: |
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Here is a fine example of a quiet, seemingly trustworthy man that would have most likely passed CEO Swanson's 'nice' man waiter test.
CNN
PURCELL, Oklahoma (AP) --
All he wanted in life, Kevin Ray Underwood wrote in his blog, was "to be able to live like a normal person."
People who knew Underwood described him Sunday as a quiet, "boring" and seemingly trustworthy young man. His mother, who lived across town, called him a "wonderful boy."
The 26-year-old grocery store stocker was arrested Friday. Investigators searched his apartment after he aroused their suspicions at a checkpoint, and found a large plastic tub in a bedroom closet.
According to a police affidavit, he confessed that he killed Jamie Rose Bolin, telling FBI agents: "Go ahead and arrest me. She is in there. I chopped her up."
Jamie's unclothed body was inside the tub, along with a towel used to soak up blood, officials said. Police said that, while there were deep saw marks on the girl's neck, she had not been dismembered.
"Regarding a potential motive," Purcell Police Chief David Tompkins said Saturday, "this appears to have been part of a plan to kidnap a person, rape them, torture them, kill them, cut off their head, drain the body of blood, rape the corpse, eat the corpse then dispose of the organs and bones."
Investigators found meat tenderizer and barbecue skewers that he planned to use on the body, McClain County District Attorney Tim Kuykendall said in this small community 40 miles south of Oklahoma City.
Underwood, who is to be formally charged with first-degree murder Monday, lived alone in an apartment downstairs from the one where Jamie lived with her father.
Authorities believe Underwood killed the girl Wednesday, when she disappeared after going to a library, by beating and smothering her.
Underwood's family was shocked.
"This is something that I don't know where it came from," Underwood's mother, Connie, said through tears in a brief telephone interview Sunday with The Associated Press. "He was always a wonderful boy.
"I would like to be able to tell her family how sorry we are. I just feel so terrible."
On his blog, an online diary that he had kept since September 2002, Underwood described himself as "single, bored, and lonely, but other than that, pretty happy."
He mentions cannibalism, asking "If you were a cannibal, what would you wear to dinner?" and responding: "The skin of last night's main course."
In an entry dated February 4, 2006, Underwood wrote that he struggled with depression and social interaction.
"Pretty much the only time I believe in God is when I blame him for something," he said. "Or, when I'm really depressed, to cry and beg him to make me better, to make whatever is wrong in my brain go away, so that I can live like a normal person.
"That's all I want in life, is to be able to live like a normal person."
He wrote that he rarely left his apartment for long stretches, except to go to work and to buy food. "I just sit here at the computer every minute of the day, when I'm not at work. A week or so ago, I spent my day off sitting here at the computer, barely moving from the chair, for 14 hours."
He said one of his main interests was the online role-playing game "Kingdom of Loathing," in which stick figures battle one another.
In September 2004, he wrote that his depression deepened after several months without taking the medication Lexapro, an antidepressant also used in the treatment of anxiety disorders.
"For example, my fantasies are just getting weirder and weirder. Dangerously weird," he wrote. "If people knew the kinds of things I think about anymore, I'd probably be locked away. No probably about it, I know I would be."
Underwood worked for nearly seven years at a Carl's Jr. restaurant, where shift leader Bill Verdan described him as a quiet person who kept to himself. "He did a good job," Verdan said Sunday.
However, he said Underwood, who quit about a year ago, was a "boring" man who rarely smiled.
"Just his tone of voice, he just sounded dull," Verdan said. "Trying to get a smile out of him took an act of Congress."
Verdan said he and his wife and young daughters never suspected anything unusual.
"He gave my wife rides home from work numerous times," Verdan said. "We never felt uncomfortable. I talked to my girls after this happened, and they said they felt comfortable around him."
His most recent job was as a stocker at a Griders Discount Foods grocery store in Oklahoma City, where he arrived early for his shift Friday, said a manager at the store, Jerry Castro.
"He was the same as always," Castro said. "He was quiet and kept to himself. He didn't interact with people. It just didn't dawn on you that this was something he'd do." |
Errantfischer
Senior Member
Username: Errantfischer
Post Number: 401
Registered: 06-2000
| | Posted on Monday, April 17, 2006 - 08:53 pm: |
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Underwood's story is so sad. Bughouse could have been the output for his psychotic impulses, as it has been for so many other players we know, but evidently the poor man was never introduced to the game. Such a tragedy...
Character, you have some thoughtful things to say. However, I think a person's treatment of waiters is a reflection of how the guy deals with subordinates in general. Rescuing people from a burning building is a completely different mindset. As for the waiter analogy, naturally the bughouse equivalent is how a player interacts with a lower-rated partner. We all know how jerky some players can be, sometimes even berating their partner for losses that were mainly their fault. |
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