Business Traveller

 Looks pretty ordinary, doesn’t it?

I’m used to paying over the odds for things sometimes. This is because, when I travel on business, I have to stay in an approved hotel for my company. When they process the approvals, the travel company that we use takes a number of things into account. These include: Health and Safety, Area, Price etc. and surprisingly price isn’t always the definitive factor.

As a result, on a recent business trip to San Francisco, I was staying in the Clift Hotel (widely thought to be the most expensive hotel in San Francisco). To keep riff-raff out of their bar, they charge a wopping $9 for a beer! I didn’t even blink at that, because the setting meant that I expected it.

Sometimes, though, a price hits you so unexpectedly that it is impossible to keep your cool. Case in point. Flying out of San Francisco, the BA First Class lounge has no cook-to-order chef (poor, I know – I should write a letter). After checking in, I was a bit hungry, so I decided to grab a burger and a beer before hitting the lounge.

I studied the menu, and saw that the burger was $8.95, and eventually some guy cleaning the tables told me that this was the one place in the entire continental US where you had to order from the counter – not the table. This had me irritated as they could at least pop up a sign, or print something to that effect on the menu.

Anyway, I strolled up to the bar, and placed my order, when the guy asked me what sort of beer I’d like, and rattled of a list where the only thing that I’d ever heard of was the Budweiser, so I ordered that. He pours the beer, passes it to me along with a number for the table, and says ‘That will be $21.95 please.’

I honestly thought I’d mis-heard him, so I spluttered an ‘I’m sorry – I thought I heard you say $21.95′. He must get that a lot, because he printed the receipt for me. It really was a $13 beer! In a place with no table service. At an airport. For a local (not very good) beer.

People often ask me what it’s like to work for a Global Multi-National company. They’re always surprised that the reality isn’t as slick an co-ordinated as it might appear from the outside. In fact my job is pure internal politics more often than not.

Take last week, for example. My company has just signed a major Joint Venture letter of intent with a big
Silicon Valley internet company that I’ll call Yahoo (because that’s who they are). We were there to do a technical kick-off, and get our understanding of the technical aspects aligned so that the final terms of the joint venture contract could be put in place and be signed. It’s a really interesting venture too, because we’re combining our customer base and technology with Yahoo’s Instant Messenger and VoIP technology to make something really funky and cool.

Anyway, we arrive in
Sunnyvale for day one of the meetings with the technical guys from Yahoo, and guess who shows up? I didn’t know him either, but it turns out he’s some senior director in our German operating company and he’s brought some executive manager with him to wow Yahoo with what the Germans can do. Now the dude from Germany was WAY senior, so I couldn’t just tell him to get lost, so the next thing we knew, they were demonstrating their funky new technology that can make telephone calls over the internet in excruciating detail (Think ‘Ja, and now you can hear it is ringing… so OK, I vill answer ze call…’ as if the poor kids at yahoo had never seen a call made over the internet before. It was Mickey Mouse, embarrassing, and it filled me with shame that Yahoo would associate me with the pricks.

After the cringe-fest was over, we got back on track, and started some serious work – which was interesting, and could deliver something awesome if we’re left to do it.

That night, we went out for dinner with our German colleagues at their request. I remembered all those courses that I was sent on – specifically to give me the tools to handle situations like this. There was ‘Cultural Sensitivity in the workplace’, ‘Influencing through people’, ‘Managing diversity’, and my favourites like ‘Assertiveness training’. Anyway, I decided to put my full political charm into effect. I was very nice and very amiable. He asked me what unit of the business I was in, and I explained that it wasn’t completely clear yet, but that the Group Technology unit that I was in before was being migrated into an Internet and Innovation unit. He had heard of this, and snorted derisively ‘So you are part of marketing!’ – HR Seriously needs to take into account personal injury at being called ‘Marketing’ when they calculate the cost to us of being migrated like that…

Not to seem puerile or anything, I decided to complement him on his dress sense, so I said ‘By the look of your stripy shirt, I thought you were in Marketing too!’. That didn’t seem to impress him, so I tried to find some new areas of commonality. I figured that my love of German cinema might strike a cord, so I explained to him that my first German phrase that I learned came from a German movie. This did seem to get some interest, and he asked what that phrase was.

I said, ‘Schnell, schnell! Ich Kommen!’

He seemed incredulous that I had managed to pick up such advanced German from a simple movie, and asked, ‘What sort of movie are you watching?’

It was a rhetorical question, so I didn’t answer, but I gave him the opportunity to prove his manlihod – which is important for German men. I said, ‘what are you drinking? Normally your German colleagues drink like girls!’

Even this sycophantic attempt at letting him be the bigger man failed, so I reverted back to an earlier success, and used my other killer German phrase: ‘Ich habe eine grosse bockwurst!’

He nodded sagely, and said that I should be careful who I say that sort of thing to.

My political ploy seems to have worked, and I gained his trust enough that he flew back home to
Germany the next day. Now, a less skilled political person would have upset him, and who knows what the consequences of that could be?