The Wrong Game

Kiwi Friendships: Loving People in a 'Stink' Way

Corrections, rectified statements, re-assertions. These are all hallmarks of the modern meeting, ways of marking down the opposition to maintain a professional superiority. Yet why does negativity have such a large part to play in the schoolyard of selected client relationships? Surely if you were after a great client-supplier relationship, as most claim they are, business emails would be filled with pleases, thank-you's, and best regard's. Yet beginning some business relationships appears to be the opposite of starting  personal ones. For some, the best way to yield a return is to 'frenemize': to keep the words pleasant but the tone derogatory, jumping at the chance for ways to prove their superior knowledge and quick wittedness (and yes, this does mean for many Kiwis a great friendship is made of derogatory words with a pleasant tone). Really, it is about being on the right side of the (who is more) wrong game.

Professional attire and sombre colours, I think, reflect this mentality too. It is hard to be wrong if you are dressed in grey, but easy to be a bimbo if wearing hot pink. Being safe goes a long way in these kinds of relationships, as does tampering with those recessive OCD genes your Aunt Nelly had by checking, re-checking, oh-wait-rechecking again, checking just-in-case, one last time. Which, of course, is all part and parcel of being professional, and doing a great job in whatever you put out to the world. Of course we all want to achieve perfection, and are especially paranoid about that contact report after a few too many Mocconas. This is not the problem. The problem is the jump to attack on the slightest of mistakes, the type where you can visualize the respondent's Cheshire-cat face licking its lips as if you were a Christian thrown to the lions. It is all very evil, and it is all very ouch.

Your Email Had A Spelling Mistake

The question for today is: do business relationships really have to be this way? Do snarling sent emails really inspire perfection and competition, or do they ignite low self-confidence and second-guessing in the recipient? You could say that depends on the type of person; but are there really people in the business world as there are in our personal lives, in that sense of the client-supplier relationship? Aren't many personalities dulled down, squeezed to fit, custom-suited for the boardroom, a bunch of humans with logo-esque faces? If so, depersonalization could have a lot to answer for in the catty client meeting. 

Perhaps, at the close of day, it all comes down to frantic funding. Monsters are made of money, which complicates any relationship. Throw a tight budget into an already tense relationship, the antithesis to your beautiful and friendly ones, and you have a certain word beginning with a b. But isn't that just life? When it comes to cash concerns, haters gon' hate.