Back when HEC (Humongous Electronics Company) boasted 130,000 employees worldwide and was riding the ill-fated minicomputer wave on the road to oblivion, a VP named Patrick Beauport assigned a new mission to his communications team.
Beauport, having witnessed a few lamentable breaches of decorum on the part of male sales executives, e.g., failure to rise when a lady HECie entered a conference room, chewing gum or eating meatball sandwiches in client meetings, decided to focus on corporate etiquette.
Beauport proposed a set of Sales Training tapes[1] based upon The Complete Guide to Executive Etiquette by Letitia Baldridge.
The team assigned to produce the tapes consisted of me (writer) and my colleague Martha (producer). I, of course, considered the project to be ill-considered if not ridiculous. So I decided to have fun with it.
Instead of a boring series of dos and don’ts, I concocted quite hilarious scenarios based, for some reason, on 19th century travelers in Africa and the Near East.
Martha, for some reason, and to her great credit, went along with my unconventional approach. (It should be noted that in a previous blog entry, Jensen Sits Stone-Faced and Bemused, Martha was the producer of the dancing customer video.)
Beauport and his team were not at all happy with our efforts and resolved to assign the project to more conventionally-inclined members of the Media Communications Group.
This failed to bear fruit, as there were no conventionally-inclined members of the MCG.
Rigorous unconventionality was assured by the procedure for hiring new writers and producers. For example, I was interviewed for the position by a senior writer, the interview consisting of a spirited discussion of T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom.
Here is an angry email from Beauport’s Director of Global Sales Training:
This missive evoked considerable mirth on my part, as there was no mention of camels in the script.
There was, however, a scenario about a Montenegrin dragoon on a train through the Balkans, and I assume the Director of Global Sales Training confused “dragoon” with “dromedary”.
Is it any wonder that, decades later, former members of the Media Communications Group cherish fond memories of HEC?
[1] Cassettes, to be played on cassette tape recorders (This was back in the 1980s.)
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