September 9; Not Everyone Is As Nice As You
MANAGEMENT BY THE BOOK:
365 Daily Bible Verse &
One-Minute Management Lessons For The Busy Faithful

Chapter Nine: Finance; September 9

I am sending you out like sheep among wolves.

Therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves.

Matthew 10:16

Friction

I had just dropped off the product sample to overnight delivery barely making the six o’clock cutoff. The package would be there the next day. I sent a freebie to an existing account and made my contact, Nancy, look good.

Customer Nancy needed another size of my product and I promised her a no-charge device for evaluation the next day if she would order the product and carry the additional stock-keeping unit (SKU) in her inventory. She readily agreed to the generous deal (me being a nice guy and all). Her purchasing department was closed for the day and she asked that I call them the following day to confirm the order.

Which I did. I gave the buyer in the purchasing department the product ordering details.

The buyer asked, “Didn’t you send one to Nancy?”

“Yes, I overnighted a sample through your office to Nancy.”

I hear the buyer shuffle some papers, “Yes…I thought so. We received the overnight package”

Silence.

I’m getting worried, “Nancy asked that I process an order–”

“–I’m cancelling the order,” the buyer said. Unsaid was that the company had what Nancy needed and didn’t need to order. No need to purchase what I had just sent him for free.

I protested, etc., etc., but no order followed. I had been duped. (This would happen a lot.)

Nancy and her company had traded on our relationship.   The bond was destroyed; I no longer trusted her or her people. She and her team had just made everything more expensive.

Her deceitful company culture was, thankfully, a deviation from USA exceptionalism.  Nancy and her team might have had more common in other cultures.

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Nobel laureate Milton Friedman spoke to the problem. He said that a cultural prerequisite of making money efficiently is the holding of truthfulness as a common virtue.

“It cuts down transaction costs,” says Friedman, “when you can trust a merchant’s word.” And trust the customer.

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Bible Scholar Randy Yeager writes,

A harmless sheep, whose motives are pure, who is also as cunning as a serpent in his ability to fear the wolves, despite their ferocity. The pure in heart can understand God. The poverty –stricken in spirit own the kingdom of the heavens and the meek shall inherit the earth. Mourning may be our lot, but it is only temporary… Renaissance New Testament, volume 2 page 149

Your Business Professor has consulted with different cultures, such as the Chinese. Business leaders there will ask me, “We can do everything that you do in your country—we can make any product faster and cheaper and better. But why,” they ask, “is US richer?”

“The answer is simple,” I would reply, “We have more efficiency in our cost of doing business, we have more trust…The Truth.”

My Chinese friends were perplexed. They would ask, “What is truth?”

I am sending you out like sheep among wolves. Therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves. Matthew 10:16

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