Please, By All Means, Read Me Your Resume

I'm easily impressed.  

Really.  I wouldn't just say that if it weren't true.

When I was a young kid working as an internal auditor full time and taking my first couple of accounting classes, I can't tell you how impressed I was by the CPA in the office.

The bank had received $30k as restitution from an embezzler.  When I asked the Controller why he had booked the money into investment income he responded, "I'm a CPA.  I'm a CPA." 

Seriously.  That's what he told me.  Maybe I was just a cocky kid, but that explanation didn't exactly fly with me, especially since I was the person who discovered the embezzler. 

Several years ago, I directed the Internal Audit department of a bank holding company which owned a mortgage company.  Loans held for sale were marked to market.  Simply meaning that you estimated the days to sale and the price you might sell each loan.  The calculation was a little complex, but certainly not rocket science.

The running joke among the executives involved the senior manager that was responsible for the calculation.  CEO, "I talked to Eric today".  CFO, "Did you understand anything he said?"  CEO, "No."

I was responsible for conducting the audit of the mark-to-market.  It really was simple mathematics, but the gentlemen just loved taking 12 left turns and one right to walk across the street.  When I would ask him a question regarding a calculation, he told me he was a math major.

About five years ago when I started as an independent project management consultant, I scheduled a conference call with the third-party project manager to go over the project plan that had been developed a couple of months before I started.

At the beginning of the call, the outside PM started off introducing himself by telling me he was a PMP, Six Sigma, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. When he took a breath, I replied in as friendly a tone as possible, "That's nice. I'm not. Now can we go over the project plan?"

Interestingly enough, the most intelligent guy at the company the CIO, always boiled things down to the simplest solution.  When going over tasks, he only wanted to know one thing.  Done or Not Done?   And when all chaos would reign around, he could quickly throw out all of the overwhelming issues to just concentrate the team on the top priority.

Remember the movie, Apollo 13? 

"Calm down people, Calm down.  work the problem."    Once you boil it down to dealing with the top priority first, then recreating the universe doesn't look so overwhelming.

This is the reason I like guys like Chris Christie.  I may not necessarily agree with every political position he might support, but there is something refreshing about people who are intelligent, yet can express their position clearly, without all the bull. 

Unless I am conducting a job interview, I really don't care about your resume.  And I am not particularly impressed when anyone tries to express themselves by attempting to get their point across using an inordinate amount of words when a couple will do.

I would have loved to have studied psychology, but Psych 101 taught me one thing.  I would never be able to endure the arrogance of the professors who thought they got paid by the word.

I remember when the Prof got through rattling on for about 20 minutes in one class, the guy next to me asked, "What did he just say?"

I said, "He said drinking alcohol affects the motor skills." 

The professor wasted 20 minutes of my life that I will never get back to not only state the obvious, he wasted his own time waxing on with 3,500 words when six would have been sufficient.

After spending too much time reading or listening to people who simply must express themselves in overly pretentious words or hurling insults at anyone who might disagree with them, I begin to feel like I'm sitting next to Charlie Brown listening to his teacher saying, "Waaa, waaa, waaa, waaa."

Want to impress me, take a complex issue and state it simply.  Not because I need some concept "dumbed down" for me, but simply because spouting on endlessly wastes my time.  

As do those who ruin someone else's blog by creating numerous online persona and overtaking the discussion.