Top Ten Things Not to Say in a Sales Call

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Props to Brad Trnavsky, who posts Ten Things a Good Salesperson Should Never Say, and Why.  They are short, sweet, and on the money.  Click through to check it out.

Have you ever found yourself saying, "I was in the neighborhood, thought I’d drop by?"  My chimney sweep company does that.  It’s rarely true, and probably doesn’t fit your business. 

Of course, the grand-daddy of them all—trust me.  I won’t do that rant again just now—Trust Matters readers know that one.

The one that caught my eye and prompted this quickie blog, however, made me wince. "What would it take to have you get started today?" 

Ouch.  Only about a year ago, I got a call from a woulda-been perfect client—a business I know well, a speaking engagement right up my alley.  We had a great conversation.  I quoted my full regular rate.  The client said gee, I dunno, limited budget for this event, etc.  And I—with all good intent, really wanting to help him out, and willing in fact to take a hit on this one if I had to, said, "Look, what would it take…"

He, quite rightly, said, "Wait a minute.  Your book talks about the need to maintain transparent and consistent pricing, and never to offer discounts except in clear specific cases.  And here you are discounting.  You have just destroyed my trust in all you’ve said."

Damn.  That’s one between the eyes.  And I had to admit that my good intentions couldn’t save me here, he was exactly right.  I told him so, we parted, never heard from him again.  100% my fault.

That’s my read on one of  Brad’s points anyway. Good comments on his posting too.  Go check them all out, see if any make you wince.

Trusted Professions

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Consultants’ News and the Institute of Management Consultants USA report on a survey about how much clients trust consultants.

Say CN and IMC:

Survey results…reveal that the consulting profession is viewed as trustworthy. When respondents were asked to rank a list of 10 representative professions from most trustworthy to least trustworthy, they ranked consulting as the 5th most trustworthy profession, behind nurses, doctors, teachers and accountants. Rounding out the list of professions were sales representatives, corporate executives, attorneys, journalists and politicians.

Hmmm. If you’re ranked fifth out of ten, you’re “viewed as trustworthy.” Presumably, sixth place gets you “untrustworthy.” There but for grace of sales representatives and journalists…

Want to know why nurses consistently rank #1 on these kinds of lists? Meet the President of the American Nursing Association. She could sell me a used car. Why? Because she virtually bleeds low self-orientation. You’d have a hard time finding less than six degrees of separation between her and anyone with a selfish bone in their body.

Similar results come from an Australian survey of trusted professions done annually since 1970. Tops are nurses, pharmacists and doctors; the bottom four—numbers 26 – 29—are various salespersons. Just above them, at 24 and 25 (out of 29) are TV reporters and newspaper journalists.

In Australia, unlike the CN poll, politicians barely outrank journalists. Pretty scary, for both countries, if you ask me.

In neighboring New Zealand, the top three trusted professions are fire fighters, ambulance officers, and—you guessed it—nurses. The bottom three (of 30) are psychics, car salesmen, and politicians. Wow—below psychics.

Edelman’s Trust Barometer , in 2006, reported:

Global opinion leaders say their most credible source of information about a company is now “a person like me,” which has risen dramatically to surpass doctors and academic experts for the first time, according to the seventh annual Edelman Trust Barometer, a survey of nearly 2,000 opinion leaders in 11 countries. In the U.S., trust in “a person like me” increased from 20% in 2003 to 68% today. Opinion leaders also consider rank-and-file employees more credible spokespersons than corporate CEOs (42% vs. 28% in the U.S.).

In 2004, the Public Broadcasting System was “the most trusted institution on a list of nationally known organizations in the country…” Hey, I’m a fan too. But shouldn’t the most trusted institution tell us who was second, how many there were, and who was in last place? Come on PBS, dish a little—you’ve got your credibility to defend here!

In India, media is the most trusted institution. In the Ukraine—at least in 2004—it’s the church.

While polling about trust in Serbia, there were problems:

"Concerning trust in Milosevic", Bogosavljevic continues, "it is notable that many people simply didn’t want to answer questions about him. For years ordinary people were taught that Milosevic was the greatest, and now they are told that they are supposed to be against him. Many of them simply can’t do this, so their response is simply to say ‘I don’t know’ or refuse to answer."

What’s it all mean?

Sometimes trust stays the same for a long time—part of our trust for nurses is that we’ve always trusted nurses. When trust changes rapidly, it can be disorienting to us.

There are few surprises in surveys—they almost always “make sense” when we hear results.

Most of all, trust touches our lives broadly—people, professions, and institutions are only a handful of arenas in which trust plays out in our lives. It’s neither simple, nor one-dimensional. And it’s all very human.

Apologies, Forgiving and Forgiveness

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For some reason, I just ran across a September, 2004, article by Martha Beck titled “Always Apologize, Always Explain,” in Oprah Magazine.

It’s still a good read.  Part of what makes it powerful is a list of what is contained in a good apology (itself from Aaron Lazare, the man who—literally—wrote the book on Apology)

1. Full acknowledgement of the offense
2. An explanation
3. Genuine expresssion of remorse
4. Reparations for damage

It’s a fine list (and has prompted me to finally buy Lazare’s book). 

But what I want to focus on is Beck’s own additional thought:

The final gallant act of apology is to release your former victim from any expectation of forgiveness. No matter how noble you have been, he will forgive—or refuse to forgive—on his own terms. That is his right.

Quite right.

It’s instructive that the ninth step of the Twelve Step program literature (you know, the one that pops up in Seinfeld and other sitcoms—the one about making amends), also doesn’t allude to forgiveness. In fact, none of the 12 steps do.

I think this is because Beck, and the 12-Step program, recognize that life is a messy business. To forgive, one has to have a very clean heart in the first place.  And we—I’ll be clean here and just say I—rarely do.

If I’m in a rush to forgive people, I most likely am still judging them for some harm they did to me.  If I’m consternated about being forgiven, well, that’s all about me; and apologies don’t come from a good place if they’re all about me.

Apologies should not be tainted by forgiving, or by seeking forgiveness.  Those have their place, but it’s elsewhere. 

A good apology tries to set aright something that you set awry by impinging on another’s will.  It’s only appropriate that the apology itself refrain from further imposition of will. Hence the separation from forgiving or forgiveness.

Apologizing is fundamentally about taking full responsibility for your own role—no more, no less—in what goes on.  Fully owning your words, your actions, your life helps everything fall into place.  Blame is gone.  Wishing is gone.  Whining and tweaking and sliming and spinning are all gone when you take responsibility for your own role—no more, no less—in what goes on.  As Phil McGee says, blame is captivity, and responsibility is freedom.

In that vein, I want to apologize to (he knows who he is) for what happened back in (he knows when it was).  It was my doing—he knows that, and I want to say to him he was right.   And I’m sorry.

Is Neuroleadership More Than Reinventing Wheels?

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The man was dining alone. He looked up from his menu and asked the waiter, “What’s the soup du jour?”

Beaming with pride, the young waiter answered, “Soup of the day!”

Something like that joke is playing out in the buzzy new field of “neuroleadership.”

Business Week, July 28, “The Business Brain in Close-Up,” introduces David Rock and Jeffrey Schwartz, who are using EEGs and MRI scans to “explain” how leaders think.

One cited example: ethical dilemmas get weighed in parts of the brain associated with early memories, suggesting that moral thinking is formed early in life. Now there’s a surprise!

(In a related story, just-convicted Conrad Black, at age 14, was expelled from a private school for stealing exams and selling them to students. Thanks to neuroscience, we’re able to divine a pattern).

Another insight: to change, focus on the to-be state, not the as-is. Are you listening, change managers? Got that, personal growth teachers? Or did you already get that from, say, Buddhism, or Gandhi?

Final insight: focus on a few key ideas, not on too many. Wow.

See, here’s the thing. In our opening joke, the waiter thought he was offering new information—an explanation—to the customer. Of course, he added absolutely nothing. So it often is when “science” gets hyped as an “explanation.”

Take Strategy + Business’s most-downloaded-article-of-2006—surprise, it’s Rock and Schwartz’s “The Neuroscience of Leadership.” A direct quote:

“Cognitive scientists are finding that people’s mental maps, their theories, expectations, and attitudes, play a more central role in human perception than was previously understood… This can be well demonstrated by the placebo effect… the mental expectation of pain relief accounts for the change in pain perception… Dr Price and Dr Schwartz are currently working to demonstrate that the Quantum Zeno Effect explains these findings. [italics mine]

Since the placebo effect was named back in 1955, the power of mind over matter was pretty well known by the Greeks milennia ago, and probably by witch doctors for longer than that—this doesn’t strike me as a news flash.

Back to the waiter and the soup. Drs. Price and Schwartz’s "explanation" does not explain.

A valid "explanation" is more than translation. It may add context, suggest a cause, offer an exegesis, or give a definition.

Telling me that emotional distress or ethical thinking is associated with particular brain wave patterns is the exact equivalent of "soup of the day." It replaces a useful, common-sensical emotional vocabulary with one based in chemicals. Nothing good or bad about that—but certainly nothing new.

For anyone who’s ever done management or leadership training, Rock and Schwartz do get one thing right. They say that change must come from within, and it comes only when one pays attention. Bingo on both counts. That raises the question—whence cometh attention?

Trainers know it means you’ve got to create compelling experiences.  But I’m not sure the neuroleadership crowd gets it.

Michael Rennie,  a McKinsey Organization Practice leader, apparently thinks this is leading edge stuff.  As he puts it in the BW article:

"When you start talking about things like behavior change and psychology, executives’ eyes glaze over. What helps them change their behavior is a cognitive frame."

I am honestly not clear here.  Does Rennie mean the new vocabulary of neuroleadership is itself a "cognitive frame?"

If so—trainers, back me up on this—the last thing that changes behavior is a cognitive frame. What changes behavior is an epiphany, a moment of insight, a recognition, a shock, a surprise.  A theory of epiphanies is not a substitute for ephipanies themselves.  Describing epiphanies in terms of neurons activities adds little to explanation, and even less to real change.

In my experience, Rennie is right in one respect—the more uptight and Type-A and left-brain the audience, the more likely they are to demand a cognitive model, and to claim that cognitively "understanding" the model equals change. They are deluding themselves.  (A colleague described one audience of lawyers: he was told by the client, "don’t try to engage them; just talk, they’ll decide what’s important.")

Leadership guru Warren Bennis, in the BW article, says neuroleadership has potential but is "filled with banalities."  I like his instincts.

What would actually make neuroscience interesting to leadership?  To get beyond mere translation, it would have to show us something new or interesting, beyond things like "focus more."  Here are some themes that would make me sit up and take note:

* a taxonomy of leadership "moments" of differing types, distinguishable by brain waves
* linking of specific leadership moments to parts of the brain that deal with poetry
* linking of specific leadership moments to other parts of the brain that deal with deductive logic
* linkage of selfish vs. altruistic behaviors to other aspects of cognition
* more detailed description of some general concepts like "self-awareness" or "self-actualization"

Until then, to paraphrase Kierkegaard:

It is like seeing a sign in the store that says Sale: you go in to buy, but find it is only the sign that is for sale.

FUD – Why Sell Is Still a Four Letter Word

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Greg Milliken tells us about the origin of FUD—Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.  Think “Nobody ever got fired for hiring IBM.”

In other words, it’s selling by spreading FUD  about your competitor, rather than by focusing on helping the customer.

FUD-based selling, as Milliken eloquently points out, rots the soul.  And while I ultimately think that trust-based selling is more powerful, let’s give the devil his due—appealing to fear is a pretty powerful drug.

FUD is one manifestation of why “sell” is still considered a four-letter word in many parts.  Why don’t people trust a whole lot of salesmen?  Because a whole lot of salesmen aren’t trustworthy!  And many of them use FUD.  But FUD is just a subset of a larger category.

The biggest reason for not trusting a salesperson boils down to this: if they’re in it for themselves, they are not in it for you. And if they’re not in it for you, then you are perfectly right not to trust them.

Great salespeople live with a great paradox:  IF you are able to focus on other people and get them what they want, then—paradoxically—you get what you wanted all along too.  But—here’s the key part—as a side effect, not as a goal.

The modern corporate ethos is almost diabolically designed to thwart this kind of good sales thinking.  It tells us, over and over, in a million ways, to figure out what we want, then figure out how to get it.  Break it down.  Design a process.  Do a needs analysis.  Do competency modeling.  Define metrics.  Measure.  Reward.  Tweak, fine-tune, and repeat. 

Problem is, this way of thinking destroys other-focus from the outset. You will never be hugely successful at selling if you believe the modern corporate litany, because it can only, and always, be about you and your objectives.  That logic leaves no room for the paradox of caring about others.

FUD, of course, fits very well with a goal-oriented, self-aggrandizing methodology.  If the purpose is to gain sustainable competitive advantage over a competitor, then the customer becomes simply a metric, a vehicle, a means to an end.  FUD is a straight line that bypasses any genuine concern for a customer.

FUD fits the unexamined approach to corporate selling.  Which is why sell is still such a four-letter word.

Except, that is, for the exceptional salespeople, who recognize an eternal verity—the best way to get what you want is to focus first on helping others.

Linking Integrity and Success – CFOs and UBS

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For several years, Peter Wuffli was the CEO of UBS. A former McKinsey consultant, he set the firm on a path of integration—a global organization that would unite investment bankers, wealth managers and asset managers in unified service to the bank’s clients. Under him, the firm articulated the UBS Identity Framework: Vision, Values, Brand, saying

Our integrity is key to preserving our most valuable asset—our reputation.

March 30, 2006: UBS: Toward the Integrated Firm, Harvard Business School Case Study

Wuffli noted: You cannot [ask professionals to share client relationships] without knowing, respecting and trusting each other. When people ask how far we have come, I tell them we are probably halfway into a ten-year process. And you need strategic and leadership consistency. If you change your management every six months, it’ll never happen. We’re one of the few firms that has all that.


June 28, 2007 Investors’ Business Daily, Survey: Integrity is Number One

Integrity is the most important qualification for a successful business leader. That’s the finding of a survey of 1,400 chief financial officers… 31% deem integrity the top quality for a leader. Experience and communication, both at 27%, are next.


July 6, 2007: The Case for Breaking Up UBS, Wall Street Journal,

…the surprise ouster of Peter Wuffli as CEO. The main event was the blow-up of a hedge fund inside the firm…

… new speculation that UBS and its investment bankers will part ways. The bankers don’t like feeling underappreciated or having to beg for funds from Switzerland so they can help fund leveraged buyouts and remain competitive with the likes of Morgan Stanley. Also, are the synergies between investment banking and wealth management all they’re cracked up to be? How much business, for instance, are investment bankers at the firm steering from their corporate clients to UBS’s wealth management unit?

July 7. 2007, UBS’ Wuffli Slipped on Investment Banking, LiveMint.com, The Wall Street Journal,

[Wuffli’]s lost his job at a moment’s notice, in the tradition of his predecessor Luqman Arnold and former CS bosses such as Lukas Muehlemann and John Mack.

Where Wuffli slipped up was in his handling of UBS’ investment bank……his bet on an internal hedge fund, Dillon Read Capital Management (DRCM). UBS couldn’t make DRCM work despite a fair wind in financial markets and a roster of star bankers. That’s dented UBS’ reputation, even if it didn’t leave a huge hole in the group’s finances.

It has helped put the brakes on UBS’ shares too. After outperforming their European peers for most of Wuffli’s reign, they’ve fallen behind in the last year. What’s more, the group has lost some of its premium over rival Credit Suisse too. UBS’ bigwigs may have found that particularly hard to swallow.


Disclaimers: I don’t have any inside info about UBS; I haven’t talked to any acquaintances there since Wuffli’s ouster.

I do know this. The day after his departure, I checked the UBS website and found no mention of him; a clean airbrush job. And the analysts all cite short-term performance, internal power struggles, loss of profits, momentum, stock price. The usual suspects. Strategic failure? Values violations? Integrity? Not mentioned.

Back to those CFOs in the survey: are they right about integrity being the number one driver of success? I’m from Missouri on that one. When CFOs use that word, it carries overtones of financial statements, where “integrity” has very precise meanings.

More generally, “integrity” is related to words like integral; integrated; integrative; whole. Wikipedia says:

integrity is the basing of one’s actions on an internally consistent framework of principles.

Like what Wuffli was trying to do with values in his integrated, one-firm firm strategy.

From this outsider’s perspective, it sounds like another failure to achieve escape velocity from the more traditional financial services value set—the curse of short-term, clannish, me-me ego and money-driven values. Financial services (some parts more than others) have a hard time living relationship values internally—and if they can’t do that, why should customers believe it when they hear it externally?

Somebody tell me if I’m wrong, but it feels like we just witnessed a Tony Soprano whack where they got the wrong guy—and the response is hey, shoulder shrug, eh, waddya gonna do, huh?

Feels like a good experiment, cut short. Leaves you wondering, what might have been?

A Knockout Presentation

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The Ted Talks  are an annual event that include some truly remarkable presentations.

One of the best, I think, has got to be this one, by Hans Rosling.

Do yourself a huge favor—click on it and relish in the full 19 minutes.

You will learn about global economic and social history, values, human rights, and you’ll look at the world anew. 

You will laugh, maybe cry, certainly gasp in delight.

You will see software that makes the iPhone look like a four function calculator.

You’ll see a master presentation.

If you agree: please share your thoughts as to just what makes this so good. 

And do not, please, log out before the 1850s Swedish bayonet shows up.

Many thanks and shout-out to Sims Wyeth for pointing it out.

Leadership and Folk Wisdom

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The literature on leadership is distinctive in two respects—its volume, and its level of generality. Maybe it’s just me, but I tend to glaze over when I can’t figure out if the subject being discussed is a verb or a noun.

So it’s interesting when you run across a piece on leadership that is clear in its point of view. Even moreso when it blends two normally disparate realms—say, Harvard Business Review and, for lack of a better term, folk wisdom.

The February, 2007 issue of HBR contains “Discovering Your Authentic Leadership,” by Bill George, Peter Sims, Andrew McLean and Diana Mayer. Bill George is former CEO of Medtronic, now at HBS, and author of Authentic Leadership: Rediscovering the Secrets to Creating Lasting Value. All authors are now academics.

The juxtapositions are mine, but I like to think you’ll think to like them.

 

You do not have to be born with specific characteristics or traits of a leader. Leadership emerges from your life story. HBR

We are human beings, not human doings. Folk wisdom.

 

When the 75 members of Stanford Graduate School of Business’s Advisory Council were asked to recommend the most important capability for leaders to develop, their answer was nearly unanimous: self-awareness. HBR

The unexamined life is not worth living. FW

People trust you when you are genuine and authentic, not a replica of someone else. HBR

Be what you is, not what you is not. FW


Knowing their authentic selves requires the courage and honesty to open up and examine their experiences. As they do so, leaders become more humane and willing to be vulnerable. HBR

Where am I? Here. What time is it? Now. FW


Discovering your authentic leadership requires a commitment to developing yourself. HBR

If you don’t know what you don’t know, you don’t know much. FW


Being authentic means maintaining a sense of self no matter where you are. HBR

No matter where you go—there you are. FW

 

Authentic leaders realize that they have to be willing to listen to feedback—especially the kind they don’t want to hear. HBR

The truth shall set you free. FW

Authentic leaders are constantly aware of the importance of staying grounded. HBR

If you’ve got one foot in yesterday, and another in tomorrow, you’re well positioned to piss on today. FW

 

Intrinsic motivations are congruent with your values and are more fulfilling than extrinsic motivations. HBR

About playing music—if it’s not play, stop. If it’s not music, stop. Don’t practice scales, play music. Don’t work at it, choose it. FW


[authentic leaders]…see themselves not as passive observers of their lives but rather as individuals who can develop self-awareness from their experiences. HBR

Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional. FW


Superior results over a sustained period of time is the ultimate mark of an authentic leader. HBR

No one writes on their tombstone, I should’ve stayed a few more hours at the office. FW


Web 2.0 vs. the BBC | Danah Boyd vs. Goliath

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If you’re not familiar with Danah Boyd, thank me later. Read her bio , or her blog.

While grossly unfair to pigeonhole her, I’ll paraphrase Wes Neff, her agent at Leigh Bureau (full disclosure—he’s mine too):

Lots of people in academia are studying social networks; Danah is the first one who can easily hold her own in that crowd, but whose power comes from knowing that culture herself, personally,  intimately.

She’s hip, she’s smart, she’s well-spoken.  She totally knows her stuff.  She writes in a vividly personal, authentic voice.

And she has a knack for being controversial.  One gets the impression she’s a bit surprised, a bit bemused, and a bit saddened by that—but it shouldn’t be surprising.  She’s a revolution personified.  When it’s about Danah Boyd, it’s not just about Danah Boyd.

Case 1. Danah was asked to comment officially on Michael Gorman’ post that I blogged about yesterday. Read her (excellent) commentary, and the illuminating 27 comments following.  Result?  Advantage, Boyd.

But Britannica wasn’t enough.  Then the BBC tangled with her.

On June 24, Danah posted a brilliant little piece on her current research—how teens interact with social networks as part of their socialization process.  She talked about the relationship between Facebook and MySpace, and some implications for socioeconomic status.

Neat stuff, very nicely written, very provocative. She called it a “blog essay,” and wrote:

Hopefully, one day, I can get the words together to actually write an academic article about this topic, but I felt as though this is too important of an issue to sit on while I find the words. So I wrote it knowing that it would piss many off. The academic side of me feels extremely guilty about this; the activist side of me finds it too critical to go unacknowledged.

The next day, the BBC published an article titled “Social sites reveal class divide.” It talked about “a long-term research project…”, “the conclusions are based on interviews…”, “in a preliminary draft of the research…”, and “…suggests a study.”

So : an American writes about class, it’s published in Britain, in what sounds like an academic study—but, not completely so.  Instant controversy.  In days, Boyd got 100,000 hits on her posting.

This, from the (back home) EastBay Express on June 28:

Local Academic’s Blog Generates Premature Controversy

Berkeley PhD candidate Danah Boyd, has the web astir after she posted an informal essay on her blog about the class divisions associated with the popular social-networking sites Facebook and MySpace. Boyd, who is already among the most prominent of academics of the Internet’s social sphere, posted the essay on Sunday. On Monday morning, the BBC reported on Boyd’s “conclusions”, and by midday Monday, nearly 100,000 readers had flocked to Boyd’s original entry. Though many have written in support of the essay, others have taken major offense, calling the work “racist” and academically unsound. 
Boyd sees the negativity towards her essay as a product of its misrepresentation in the press—specifically in the BBC’s “hugely problematic” coverage of her essay—which she says referred to the essay as a final product of academic research, rather than the exploratory mid-process musing it was meant to be.

Danah Boyd is a lightning rod for the encounters between traditional, credentialist, individual-based academia, and the more free-wheeling, collabo, throw-up-the-beta-version ethos of the web.  Libraries vs. databases.  Wikipedia vs. encyclopedia.  It’s bound to rub a few people the wrong way.

Here’s from Green Tea Ice Cream, in a posting on Experts and Social media:

the fall-out from Danah Boyd’s (inadvertent) media bomb . The reaction to Danah’s essay in the newspapers suggests that mainstream media are still very fond of privileging expert, authoritative discourse – when it suits them (i.e. when it gives an opportunity to discuss/reinforce class divisions, say “Oooh, it’s bad this Noo Medjaa stuff, isn’t it?” and so on…).

Or this, from Deep Jive Interests:

Will the “Danah” report be the kiss of death to MySpace’s valuation? Why Rupert Murdoch is probably cursing Danah Boyd’s name.

Wow. Britannica. The BBC.  Influencing Murdoch’s market value.  What’s next, the Queen?  Where Dana goes, she can’t help but raise issues—she sits astride the intersection of old and new. 

Maybe she thought she’d become a mover of markets some day; though I bet she didn’t think it’d happen like this. (Wes, on the other hand, who knows how academic celebrities get made, may be unfazed).

The Adventures of Danah are like the coming attractions at the movies.   Arrive early to see what’s going to be playing in your own life soon. 

Credentials, Elitism and Web 2.0

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Ask professionals for a synonym of trust, and the most common answer will be “credibility.” Explode credibility, and you’ll often get “credentials.” Credentialization is a second cousin to branding and influence, and of course plays a role in trust.

But what happens when you over-stress credentials? Case in point: the reaction of some library science traditionalists to the phenomenon of Wikipedia.

Arguing the traditionalist side is Michael Gorman, former president of the American Library Association and a highly credentialed library scientist, in the Britannica Blog. In his post Jabberwicki: the Educational Response, Part II, Mr. Gorman the librarian lets loose on the barbarians:

"…attempts to downplay the central part literacy [which Gorman defines as “the ability to interact with complex texts and the ability to express complex ideas in clear prose”] plays in the life of the mind are malign attempts to come to grips with the changes being wrought by the digital revolution through abandoning the fundamental values of learning that have obtained in Western societies since classical Greece…

"…The same goes for the theories of different “intelligences.” Intelligence is the ability to think quickly and logically, to absorb new ideas and to incorporate them into existing knowledge, to express ideas clearly in speech and writing—in short, to learn and grow in understanding….

"…Perhaps these are elitist ideas? So be it. Learning and education are enterprises in which the academically gifted prosper and are justified in prospering. That prospering benefits the individual, but it also benefits society. A leveling academy that rewards semi-literacy and tolerates ignorance is, by definition, dysfunctional. We should be seeking to reward the intellectually gifted, not least because societal progress depends on their intelligence, understanding, and wisdom.

"[Wikipedia raises]…the central proposition that one can gain useful knowledge from texts written by any Tom, Dick, or Sally with time on his or her hands. Do we entrust the education of children to self-selected “experts” without any known authority or credentials?

"With the rejection of professionalism has come a widespread rejection of expertise—of the proper role in society of people who make it their life’s work to know stuff…

"…[it is] good to respond [to digitization] with changes in the ways in which we do things as long as those changes are firmly rooted in an intellectual meritocracy. In turn, that meritocracy must be based on respect for expertise and learning, respect for individual achievement, respect for true research, respect for structures that confer authority and credentials, and respect for the authenticity of the human record.

All right, translation for the hoi polloi. What’s at stake here? The values of western civilization, it would appear.

How is that so? Because the collaborative nature of wikipedia threatens “respect for structures that confer authority and credentials,” which then undermines respect for learning, hence meritocracies.

I also favor meritocracies, but don’t agree with his logical linkage to the rest. Which means either my logic is wrong, or his is. I vote for his.

Here’s a rule of thumb: when a highly credentialized person equates threats to credentialization with threats to western civilization, smell bombast.

Another rule: When someone starts a sentence with “intelligence is…”, what follows is bound to be complete twaddle. Intelligence “is” whatever the writer wants to define it as being; using the verb “to be” doesn’t endow the writer with metaphysical insights beyond those of anyone else—not even self-confessed elitists. Don’t state what “is,” unless it’s clearly meant to be argumentative; instead, argue what is useful to assume.

Credentialism is a disease in academia these days. Universities brag about the number of faculty with top-school PhDs. The BA now does what the high school diploma used to do—serve mainly as the cutoff point for any meaningful job. The line of sight between education and any meaningful sense of competence is getting more obscure, not less. I doubt that Tom Peters could get a job teaching MBAs at a regional state business school, because he lacks “credentials—“ as defined by the credentialled.

It happens in religion, universities, governments, and businesses. A successful idea creates an institution, which creates bureaucracies, which then strive to perpetuate their own existence. Credentialization begins as anti-anarchy; it ends with frenzied warnings about the threat of un-credentialled hordes battering the walls of civilization.

I’m not at all sure we have to “choose” between Wikipedia and academic excellence, but I know I’ve gotten the W habit. I learned it from my son. One more case where I trust my experience over credentials.

Methinks Mr. Gorman doth protest too much.