Integrity is a big part of work, there are many Game-theory reasons why Integrity is a big issue, but I’ll not cover all that here in this post. I want to focus on Trust and Respect.
There is a saying “Pera-Pera lang yan” in english “Its only Money” but things are more complex and as a young person, I see the common faults of my peers. One fault is that we really take Its Money to heart.
There was a deal that the scion and heir tried to brokered with us. We know the biz and they have a good reputation with my parents. Ours is also a good reputation to them. unfortunately the scion began treating our board with very little respect. So our families were in the good and now we will not entertain anything else except if we get it all in writing.
I keep note when my Captain asks me how much he should haggle by when it comes to friends. The same shrewd and emphatic consideration also goes with respectable biz partners. Low-Ball people and it appears you don’t respect them. This other scion made that mistake, which I am prone to as well. When you are young you are blind to many considerations experience educates us. the primary lesson being that if he did his homework he would know who he is talking to, and if he let his more experienced partner lead a whole mess could have been averted.
Often I’m in the position to represent my parents, and their interests. I also represent my company and the people who helped build it with my parents. I am shy and also inexperienced, but thankfully that has a humbling effect on me and I deffer to my betters and experience. I know I’ve got all this education regarding Biz sci and all such cognitive studies but Knowing when to apply them is a delicate art only honed by experience and to gamble with audacity is not what the Gamer in me would advise. (i’m surprised how shrewd my mom and dad are in terms of strategy if I put their actions in context)
But the more important lesson I see in what happened is the importance of Respect as the default approach. You may be doing a deal and you may have the upper hand, but everything in business is transient and Respect goes a long way.
I was talking to my father and about what had happened. He told me that this is a very very hard project, and if you cannot trust the person beside you to stick by you as the project goes through waves and waves of problems then you have lost before you even begun. Respect would have opened the door to Friendship, Partnership and Trust. Things that would give people more reason to stay when times are hard, and times will always be hard.
Don’t close doors, don’t lose respect. Even if someone abuses your friendship and respect, things have a way of getting out. Everyone has a basic intuition regarding Politics and Power, its easy for them to scan and tell who abused what. Like in my Organizational Studies would say, the Crowd will figure the truth (or what is as close to the truth) out in the end.
I guess my own motto would have come best at that situation: The smartest thing a young biz person to do is NOTHING, and let his more experienced companion lead. I must have found myself echoing that motto about 3-4 times just this month and last before making a big decision.
So this is basically a word of warning, and again echoes my mother’s motto, if we were a House like in Game of thrones it would be: “We don’t close doors”.
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