Barry's Blog

"Do not forget that the value and interest of life is not so much to do conspicuous things...as to do ordinary things with the perception of their enormous value."  -Teilhard de Chardin

Office Depot CEO Steve Odland remembers like it was just yesterday when he was working in an upscale French restaurant in Denver. The purple sorbet in cut glass he was serving tumbled onto the expensive white gown of a rich and important person. "I watched in slow motion as I ruined her dress for the evening," recalls Odland. "I thought I would be shot on sight." Though thirty years have passed since that disastrous night (and Odland still can't get the image of the stained dress out of his mindl!), what sticks in his mind even more profoundly was the woman's kind reaction. Although she was startled when the accident occurred, she quickly regained her composure and in a calm and reassured voice, told the teenage Odland, "It's OK. It wasn't your fault." And when she left the restaurant, she also left the future Fortune 500 CEO an extraordinary life lesson: You can tell a lot about a person by the way he or she treats the waiter.

While most would agree that it is difficult at best to get a dozen business executives to agree about anything, many concur that the "Waiter Rule" is one of those intuitive laws that has been proven true through many years of experience. And while it is true that executives, and CEO's in particular, live in a "Lake Wobegon" world, where every dinner or lunch partner is about average in their deference, it is not how others treat the CEO that communicates anything. Rather, it is how others treat the waiter that is like a magical window into the soul. It goes without saying that those executives who play the power card, saying something like, "I could buy this place and fire you," or "I know the owner and I could have you fired!" have already revealed more about their character than their wealth and power.

BMW North America President Tom Purves, a native of Scotland, a citizen of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland, who lives in New York with his Norwegian wife, Hilde, and works for a German company, has observed that whoever came up with the "Waiter Rule" is "bang spot on." The fact that Purves has experienced so many different cultures makes him qualified to weigh in on this subject, and he believes the waiter theory is true virtually everywhere.

As reported in a recent USA Today article, the CEO who came up with the "Waiter Rule," or at least one of the first to write about it, was Raytheon CEO Bill Swanson. Swanson first noticed this principle at work in the 1970's when he was eating with a man who became "absolutely obnoxious" to a waiter because the restaurant did not stock a particular wine. "Watch out for people who have a situational value system, who can turn the charm on and off depending on the status of the person they are interacting with," Swanson writes. "Be especially wary of those who are rude to people perceived to be in subordinate roles."

Over the many years of observing these relational dynamics at work, Swanson wrote a little booklet of thirty-three short leadership observations, called Swanson's Unwritten Rules of Management. Raytheon has given away over a quarter of a million of these little books! Among those thirty-three rules is one in particular that Swanson says never fails: "A person who is nice to you but rude to the waiter, or to others, is not a nice person."

 For FinishingWell,

 Barry Morrow