Unmotivated

My boss and I went down to San Antonio today for a speaker/trainer showcase: a half-day sampler of motivational speakers broken down into easily digestible, ten-minute chunks.

I mean, the presentations were broken down into ten-minute chunks. The speakers themselves seemed to be more or less physically intact, and none of them looked particularly appetizing anyway.

One of the interesting things about this format is that, when you have to go through them every ten minutes, the gimmicks speakers use to engage and involve their audience really stand out. Or stand up, as the case may be. Stand up, hold out your arms, find out a random fact about someone else in the audience, make a circle with your thumb and forefinger and put it on your chin (as the speaker places his on his cheek and half the audience does what he does instead of what he says - hilarity and enlightenment ensue), close your eyes, take three deep breaths, point in different directions, now point in the same direction, turn around, sit down, stand up, sit down, fight! fight! fight!

Conflict resolution is a popular topic for corporate trainers. It's a great topic to train on, because you can deliver inspiring platitudes all day without ever actually solving any problems, and therefore rendering your further services unnecessary.

My favorite speaker today talked about negotiation. "There are four possible outcomes to a negotiation," he said. "One, you could get everything you want and the other person could get nothing. But how often does that happen? Two, the other person could get everything they want, and you get nothing. Three, you could compromise; but if you do, how do you feel? That's right. Compromised. Or four, you can go for the win-win."

One, win-win is a myth. There's always compromise; in a relationship, you may take turns getting your own way, or you may know and care about one another enough to give on the things that matter to the other person, and stand stronger on the things that matter to you. Personally, I think that's as close enough to win-win as makes no difference. I once took a negotiation-skills class where we divided into two groups fighting over an orange crop, each needing it desperately for our own particular purpose. Of course, once the exercise was over and the groups revealed their instructions to each other, it turned out one group only needed the fruit, while the other only needed the rind. So there really never had to be any conflict at all, and if the students had only been smart enough, we'd have worked together and each of us would have gotten everything we needed for half the price we had been prepared to pay if the other guy got shut out, you see? But come on - is life ever really like that?

Two, he was wrong. The four possible outcomes are win-lose (both of his first two options were examples of that one), compromise, win-win, or lose-lose. He forgot that last one completely, but sometimes I suspect that's what happens most of all: you can't reach an agreement, your pride gets in the way, you need appeasement, the other party feels equally hurt and angry, everything goes horribly wrong, and finally, talks break down completely, nobody gets anything they want (not even what they started out with), and hope is lost forever.

Another favorite gimmick of motivational speakers is the random, unsubstantiated statistic. Did you know that 68% of customers who don't return aren't staying away because of bad customer service - they stay away because of indifferent customer service? Maybe there's a study somewhere that backs this up, but the speaker didn't cite it. I've been leery of statistics like this ever since a trainer I had to listen to in 2001, to back up his assertion that we all needed to expunge the word "try" from our vocabularies ("Don't try... Do!"), claimed that ever since Avis adopted the motto "We Try Harder," their sales had dropped by 75%.

This is obviously rampant bullshit, because of course if there were any truth to that claim, Avis would have gone out and found them a new motto, toot sweet - something less offensive to the car-renting public, like maybe "Avis: We Kick Puppies."

Oh well. At least it got me out of the office all day.

Day Tripper

Sometimes you wake up in the morning and think to yourself, "You know what? I think I'll just get in my car and go to College Station and see Justin!"

Well, at least sometimes I do.

Justin gave me the grand tour of his neighborhood (historic South College Station, which he modestly demurred is not really all that historic) and the A&M campus, where they're much more progressive than I would have imagined, inasmuch as they are unusually willing to name major buildings after Quentin Tarantino movies. There weren't as many bonfires as I had expected, but we did encounter a knot of twenty or so people cheering, on the sidewalk, for no readily apparent reason besides the sheer joy of being Aggies. We were bemused. A passerby stopped and informed us that he was just down from Manhattan and they were frightening him.

"A heroic panel over the side entrance symbolizes petroleum exploration," reads part of a historic plaque on one of the engineering buildings. How often do you get to read a sentence like that? We felt that it bore repeating, so we went inside and wrote it on one of the chalkboards in an empty lecture arena.

In College Station, people have rhinos as lawn ornaments. That's just the kind of town it is.


Justin took me to dinner at Blue Baker, where they will actually give you free food if you paint yourself blue, reasoning, I suppose, that Blue Man Group lives in a whole nother state and hardly ever comes to College Station on tour. Then he made me put on my sunglasses so I could meet his friend "bigger lenses," who really ought to show up to break one day. Our day complete, I headed back home and he went to start on a paper that's due Monday, which I kept him away from working on by visiting, so wish him luck with it, will you? Something about conflict resolution. I'd help out, but it's probably my worst subject.

I'm ready to go back next weekend.