Rent a White Guy
June 14th, 2010Via: The Atlantic:
Not long ago I was offered work as a quality-control expert with an American company in China I’d never heard of. No experience necessary—which was good, because I had none. I’d be paid $1,000 for a week, put up in a fancy hotel, and wined and dined in Dongying, an industrial city in Shandong province I’d also never heard of. The only requirements were a fair complexion and a suit.
“I call these things ‘White Guy in a Tie’ events,” a Canadian friend of a friend named Jake told me during the recruitment pitch he gave me in Beijing, where I live. “Basically, you put on a suit, shake some hands, and make some money. We’ll be in ‘quality control,’ but nobody’s gonna be doing any quality control. You in?”
I was.
That’s not so different than any other corporate event. Companies hire face people, when the real bosses don’t want to be seen.
You see it all the way from the cute girl working the reception desk, to the recruiters and sales who sell with their bright smile and cleavage, all the way through VP’s who can talk a good game and look professional but couldn’t tell you any real facts other than what they’ve been coached to say.
I once knew a CIO who couldn’t comprehend how to set up his email (what’s a SMTP server?), but could tell you about the infrastructures he’s built and the deals he’s worked with fortune 500 companies. As it turned out, they were all lies.
So they hired an “executive” staff to play the role of a company. Like that’s never happened before. If you want to give the right impression, you have to hire the right people. So they wanted an all-American company this time. Maybe next time it’ll be a German company, or even a Japanese company.
Enron dedicated an entire floor to be a set to fool investors. The news of that came out years ago.
http://www.click2houston.com/news/1248368/detail.html
If you can’t get your way with bribes, get your way with lies. That’s the way business works, world wide.