The importance of quickly and accurately observing any individual and immediately and without the use of conventional testing methods extrapolating his value to others, trustworthiness, reliability, persistence, etc., cannot be underestimated.
So, the whole subject of human evaluation, of course, derives from ¬an understanding of human behavior. Human behavior is something human beings have been rather curious about in the last few thousand years.
Any time you meet a person and become associated with him socially, it would be of some benefit to know, by looking at him and talking to him for a couple of minutes, what this individual had in store for you in his friendship with you.
It would be of some small benefit to know whether or not he was going to run off with your wife or borrow your car and not come back with it or whether or not he's going to be a good friend and would loan you that hundred bucks when you needed it.
Now, in the business sphere where we have the high level of competition and contest, and so on, human evaluation goes into two levels:
1. one, the people with whom we do business as a business;
2. and two, the people we employ to take care of our business.
It's very important to know when one is dealing consistently or means to deal consistently with somebody in business, to have some forewarning if this individual is going to be something less than kind in his dealings; to have some idea in advance whether or not his word is to be trusted. If you notice, most business failures actually those that are not founded upon sheer ineptitude business failures most often, next to that, come about when trust is mistakenly placed in another human being. Be very nice to know how much you had to be on your guard with somebody doing business with him.
A banker, for instance, is subjected to a continual running fire of "I want a nice little short-term note here of well, I can use five thousand dollars," trying to select out of the mass of people that are coming in front of his desk, one right after the other, the person who will pay it back.
No, the banker has had to go around Robin Hood's barn about this and he says-and by the way, he's been stung so often through an inability to know, that he's had to go around Robin Hood's barn as his test he says, "How much collateral you've got?"
And you say, "Well, I've got so-and-so and so-and-so."
And he says, "You want to borrow five thousand dollars? All right You want to borrow five thousand dollars. You've got five thousand dollars in the bank. Now, if you'll leave your five thousand dollars in the bank, we'll loan you the five thousand dollars."
In other words, bankers become very trusting through an inability to forecast who is going to repay the loan. It'd be very interesting to a banker to know with considerable accuracy who would and who wouldn't.
In the matter of running a business, it becomes of the greatest interest to an employer who will be what in his business staff. He has a hard time with it.
The various applications, then, of human evaluation are valuable wherever you have two human beings newly met and without past experience with each other. If you had a method of establishing, with a human being, a few years of experience in a few minutes, it would have some value. On the subject of employers and employees, this one in particular.
The fact of the matter is, the tremendous expense to a business in running the business as a testing crucible for employees, if added up, would probably make a lot of businessmen faint. Not only that, but the employees themselves, since you cannot cross a management between management and labor there's practically no such thing as labor; it's management of a lot and management of a little. And the people trying to do their jobs in the plant, these too are very definitely affected by using the whole business as a crucible by which you test employees.
Now, the more employees that you hire, the harder it is to keep a line, …
You can have all sorts of beautiful tests. Civil service test that says, "Do you have a high-school diploma? Do you have a college diploma? Have you ever been in jail? Are you married? Do you have any children?" And you put down all this on government employment record and they look it all over and they say, "Yup, hire him," or "Don't hire him," or something of the sort.
These efforts to discover data about an individual cost a great deal of money. They cost a great deal of time. And they sometimes cost a business its efficiency to a point where the business will fail which might otherwise have succeeded, all because the business itself had to be used as a testing ground.
Now, every time you bring in somebody, if you had the feeling like you were hiring a pig in the poke, you put him on the job, three months later you happen to wonder if that job-if that fellow is doing well and you find out the whole job is collapsed and it's stopped a whole assembly line down the way here. That becomes very serious, doesn't it? Well, that's only one aspect of it.
In the business of counseling, in the business of trying to help and aid one's fellow man, it's very important to know who and what one is trying to aid. In, for instance, giving understanding or philanthropy to individuals, every so often on the assembly line there's a deadbeat, there is a professional desirer of sympathy, there is a professional-I'm trying not to use the slang terms, but some of these people, in this line of people seeking aid, are very, very deserving and some of them are not. How do you tell the difference?
How do you tell when a man is telling the truth? Is there a way of knowing whether or not a man is telling the truth without subjecting him to a lie detector, which has limited use and to which he very often objects? YES THERE IS AND WITHIN MINUTES.
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Otera Ltd. (East Grinstead) specializes in Human Behavior Predication Training for executives or sales professionals and offers the practical seminar “Predict your fellow man or how to sell even to an angry person”.
Glossary:
- Pig in the poke: something a person accepts or buys without seeing or knowing its value.
- Robin Hood’s barn, go around: to proceed, act or speak in a roundabout way; to arrive at a conclusion or result by an indirect method or course.
