One has to be very open minded in order to succeed in international commerce.
I consider my broad outlook to be among my greatest strengths, alongside world-class tiddlywink skills and diesel engine trivia knowledge. However, I struggle to tolerate business consultants or people with excessive letters after their names. Sometimes the combination of letters and consultants makes one feel somehow insufficient.
In an effort to rectify this I’m well into an MBA in Wine Business Management with a view to a role in consultancy, soon to be Mr Business Lifer, BA (Hons) MSC MBA-WBM 25M Front Crawl (1982) Esq. My business cards will have to be printed on A4 paper.
I have approached business much like real life, using common sense, humour and honesty to get by. But, for those who learnt ‘business’ in a lecture hall, it’s far more complicated, with graphs, acronyms, principles and text books whose titles alone can send you to sleep. My new favourite acronym is SWOT, which as we all know is a form of analysis that looks at strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats for a given company, product or service. So last month I donned my metaphorical SWOT helmet and went roaming.
I discovered that in France and Germany there is a new trend for putting passport-style photos on the cards. We all have a stash of business cards — I need a scanning and storage machine for them — but the chances of putting a face to a name are remote if we’re not in regular contact.
Admittedly the print on most cards is so poor that a normally mild-mannered network engineer from Hanover looks like a B-movie villain, and I’m pretty sure he has much less hair now. But it makes a real difference and I’m much more likely to re-link if an opportunity arises.
As a former taxi driver, I was also in awe of my surely SWOT-inspired driver in Moscow, who presented a wealth of additional profit points beyond the conventional A to B delivery service. I was offered not only suspiciously thick ‘coffee’, cheap cigarettes and a selection of snacks that had clearly travelled quite some distance, but also a ‘high speed’ option where he would use covert blue flashing lights to beat traffic and drive NASCAR style.
He even seemed pretty hesitant to turn up the heating or turn down the music without charging. Even when my therapy bills were taken into account, it still wasn’t expensive, but through the chest palpitations and tears of fear I still admired his pluck.
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