Wednesday, March 23, 2005

Are "nice" people always really nice?

We all know the "nice" person who is always ingratiating, says nice things and is always pleasant. Now perhaps the person is exactly what they seem. Howver, all too often they are actually cowards. Too frightened to risk confrontation, they tell people what they want to hear and then behind their backs act differently. These are the people who cannot tell a subordinate he or she is performing poorly until they fire them. This is the person who "strings along" a supplier and then won't return their phone calls. This person will tell someone they love them, but then disappears and says nothing. So be careful to differentiate between the genuinely decent person and the coward.

Wednesday, March 09, 2005

Lots of Opportunity for misunderstanding

We each have to deal with others. whether it be in business or in out personal lives, we soon learn that we can not alwsys take others at face value. So what you see is not alwsys what you get. Being accurate at this is critical, because just as we can be fooled by someone who does not mean well, so we can fail to value someone who should be. Recently, in my life, I was faced with the fact that in juxtaposition, someone who meant me harm had been positioned as meaning well, while I had come to be suspicious of someone else who mesnt me nothing but well. Some people feel no compunction about manipulating a situation, while others never will. While this has been the raw material for farce for many years, in real life the results can be sad.