Mark's Pages

August 26, 2003:

Parking lot, Sausalito, afternoon on a sunny summer day, 1999. Three of you in business suits: yourself, the COO of your company, and your CFO. This is DotCom Land, at the height of the great Internet Bubble. You've just concluded a business meeting with representatives of a potential partner company, and are walking toward your car. Unfocused meeting, unproductive, in which the potential partners made their incompetence clear within the first few minutes, bickering among themselves and insulting each other. Wasted afternoon. You have to pee like anything. Instead your COO is inspired to talk psychology.

She says, "CFO's a 'Type A Personality', aren't you CFO? Like me. We have that inbuilt drive to succeed. That striving to achieve something outstanding." While she's not eloquent, she's conveying a certain pride, as if to imply, "Us Type A Personalities are the engines of progress." "What about you Mark?," she wants to know. "Are you one of us?"

Your brain, marinated in urine, lacks the resources on this occasion to spark a diplomatic and business-savvy reply. Instead you tell her the blunt truth. "No. I associate 'Type A Personalities' with significant underlying insecurity, as if they feel the need to prove something to the world. I feel the world needs to prove something to me, and is failing."

Neither of them say a word on the trip back to the office.