Thursday, March 19, 2009

PC!

The relevance of PC still eludes me. And for those of us whose acronym quotient has been dimmed by old age (me included) I should advise that you should add this term to your vocabulary if you already don’t have it there. PC doesn’t have a specific definition. I have always aimed to keep this a universally readable space, hence I shall overcome my temptation to use more appropriate expansions of the acronym and settle for Polite Conversation. Its the conversation you have when you meet someone and you don’t know exactly what to talk about. So you have to fill up the silence and you ask him questions whose answers you are least interested in knowing. Yes.. and the relevance of PC still eludes still me. Maybe because I wouldn’t really call myself a champion at PC. I would rather suffer the unease of silence then carry out a inane and impotent conversation.

You do PC when you meet your boss, colleague, client, competitor or the person you hate most at work. I am not good at it. I am good at GC (Genuine Conversation) but not so good at PC. The limitation of GC is you can carry it out only with people you genuinely connect with. I admire people who are highly skilled at PC, (some even make a living out of it in my profession) and I try making up for my lack of skills in PC by connecting with most people I come across so that I can carry out a good GC. At least I can admit frankly that when it comes to PC, I suck. There are some who are not good at it but who just won’t give up. And sometimes it backfires. Like the time when a guy from the competitor firm who tries hard to be good at PC asked me the reason for a cut on the bridge of my nose, and I had to tell him that the reason was too scandalous to tell in front of a formal business group. The shade of red on his face was the most interesting one I have ever seen.

A close friend today got a call from a recruitment consultant who said he had got to know about his profile from LinkedIn and would want to make a job offer. I was impressed, this is what I call applied technology. Connecting the right people across the world. Being able to get job offers without even applying for jobs, just by the virtue of having your professional profile on a portal. It is probably the best solution to the age old problem of finding the right people for the right role, across boundaries of race and nations. I logged in to explore LinkedIn (I have one of the most updated profiles on the portal, I really believe in LinkedIn as a professional network that adds value). And it was interesting to see that even Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have their profiles up there, which I think are genuine profiles. More interestingly, Barack Obama is a second level connection in my network :). Well, now I guess you can call me a well connected person.

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