In business we meet so many new people each day that it is impossible to analyse and store our impressions of each individual we shake hands with. As a consequence, we naturally stereotype based on little more than appearances. For those of us who constantly travel, the job is made harder by the fact that we meet people from a much broader cultural background than mere domestic business folk, and we lose the sort of intelligence on which we usually base impressions, such as the type of car someone drives or the region they come from.
In the UK, if someone continually interrupts you during conversation, wears loud pinstripes, sports vast amounts of gold jewellery and drives a large BMW with chrome wheels and blacked-out windows, we can safely assume that he should not be trusted. Conversely, I have met similar characters in parts of Europe where such attributes are essential strengths for potential business partners.
I recently carried out final interviews with two candidates for a role in our accounting department. Both had passed all the psychometric and aptitude tests we could throw at them and, knowing very little about the world of numbers, I was the final hurdle to ensure they qualified as 'suitable' people for the organisation. Both were nice chaps in an accounting kind of way. There was nothing between them and, alas, they both drove Toyota Avensis diesels (though in mitigation they were the 180bhp versions), and they both used unmodified BlackBerry Bold smartphones. I was at a complete loss. There was no single distinctive feature that made one candidate stand out. They even had a similar twitch. So it came down to data storage techniques.
For travelling business people, immediate access to company servers is rarely guaranteed, especially when operating in regions where carrier pigeons have only recently replaced horseback messengers. Without a connection to the company VPN, we rely on portable storage. In my experience CDs and DVDs shatter or scratch, flash sticks get corrupted or lost, memory cards forget things, and internal laptop hard drives always fail eventually. Thus portable mini hard drives are the only option - my Western Digital Passport drive has survived the last three years.
One candidate relied on a memory stick, while the other used a Samsung alternative to my hard drive. There was no contest. The Samsung user got the job.
Unfortunately, from what I've heard, the selected candidate not only plays golf but has also volunteered to run corporate entertainment and invited me to an army assault course for a team building day. So it appears that data storage is not the key to accurate stereotyping.
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