Funky Talk

I was having coffee with a friend in business. He needs to hire people to take care of customers by phone. Those people will be giving their credit card numbers. Fairly large amounts. One qualification is the ability to instil trust and confidence on the phone to remove reluctance to do the deal.

Here's the rub, he has a big heart. He would love to hire someone from the community to do this job. The problem is language. A strong Spanish accent will not work. A Slavic accent is going to be problematic. An urban sounding person will not make it. That means that unless the person can speak in high english without any discernible dialect at all they are not going to make it. Yet I know many who could never do this.

If Morgan Freeman, Dennis Haysbert and James Earl Jones can speak high english and get paid really well for doing so... I think it might be time for others to unlearn some really bad speaking habits and begin to move up in the world. It might sound cool to you to talk all funky and all.. but you will starve to death being funky.

Learn to properly conjugate verbs. For instance the conjugation of to BE is not BE (I be, he be, she be, they be). I know how easy it is to fall into this. I am around it so much I do this sometimes. It's death in business.

This sounds like criticism, its not, this is a public service announcement is for those who want to make real money in business. It is also for those I care about. I care enough to point this out and encourage diligence. We can do better.