Doing the right thing

 Was reminded off these two events. 

Things being cryptic are intentional!!

Bunch of us were evaluating a bunch of firms. 5 firms to be precise. Most of the firms were represented by the stakeholders themselves. One of the firm had made an exception and sent their senior person. 

None of us were bothered that an agent was sent on behalf of the principal. 

Across the board with all the 5 firms, the discussions were casual. More open, more informal. More friendly. As a result, guard was down and people were speaking freely.

This exceptional firm who had sent a senior person, made an off handed remark, in fact offered an information unsolicited, something to the effect of "Oh we don't do X because it is risky" Basically the person made that statement to showcase they are robust, they have best practices. 

The room was full of men. One of them, responded, "Thank goodness, She (mentioned the name) is not here, if not you would have had a tough time" The aforementioned "She" was the final decision maker for our evaluation. 

This exceptional firm was really exceptional, they were the largest, best, would have ranked the top in all metrics we were evaluating. 

At the end of the day, we huddled up internally for the review to prepare the recommendations before presenting to the decision maker.

The analyst who had prepped the deck outlining pros and cons for each firm had just mentioned, "Not culturally aligned" across this exceptional firm. None, literally none said anything about how exceptional this exceptional firm was or how they were actually crushing. All of us moved on without spending another second. 

Another Incident

Bunch of us were at a dinner. It was me who had organized that dinner with internal and external stakeholders to get to know each other and could help us with one of the critical initiative at the time.

One of the external stakeholder was unnecessarily rude to one of the waiters. It was odd, yet could be considered par for the course. Not always, folks treat the support people in a nice way and if they think not being nice is okay, they behave that way. 

One of my senior stakeholder pulled me aside and said, ensure we don't engage with this person. 

Good culture and Good values and Good principles are about doing the right thing, when no one is watching and even when stakes are really high!!!