It is not surprising then that companies spend a lot of money on sales techniques training programmes for their employees; personally, I have been in a couple of those seminars and workshops. They’ll tell you that, usually, a meeting with a customer could last up to 1 hour (rarely two), and a well-trained sales person would know what to do to take advantage of every minute. For now, let’s talk about the first seconds.

Imagine for a moment that you are the sales representative. It is extremely important to make a good first-impression in order to have a successful meeting with a customer. Usually, you only have 30 seconds to do it; that is, the time it takes to walk from the door to the customer’s desk and shake his/her hand.

source: http://www.soyentrepreneur.com/reglas-de-protocolo-para-vender.html

But even before entering the office a quick check is required: are your shoes clean? Is your forehead sweating? What about your breath? All these are signals sent to the customer; thus, avoiding use the wrong ones is a good start.

You’re standing in front of the customer. A bit of emotional management is required here, take a deep breath, or do anything that prevents you from revealing signs of stress like sweaty hands, redness on your face or neck, touching your hair excessively (mainly women), among others. The aim of every sales representative is to look confident. Though you might find it difficult, depending on the situation.

Now, how to use your hands? There are different kinds of handshakes.

The informal is more often used with friends or acquaintances, it could be too strong or too soft and might include kissing; this should be avoided with a customer because it reflects low levels of formality. The political is a handshake that shows a certain level of intimacy and “caring”. It requires both hands, your right hand shakes the right hand of the other person, and your left hand is positioned either over the other person’s right hand, or on his/her shoulder; this could be used with a customer but not on a first appointment. The professional is the most commonly used on business meetings, it reflects high levels of formality and confidence; it requires eye contact, a smile on your face, a firm handshake (not too strong) and, when this is a first appointment, you must say your name and professional position while holding the other person’s hand, this increases the attention levels.

Of course, cultural differences should be considered for an international environment. If, however, you have no intentions to become a sales representative, and already kind of knew all this information, it is always good to remember the tacit knowledge that is hidden in your mind.

May this be a proof that not only factory workers require specialised hand-skills.

The ticket seller jokes with me. No need to worry about missing the train, he’s the driver, she says. He says he’ll go just as soon as he can be bothered to walk up to the cab, right at the other end. That’s his job: drive one way, walk back down 8 carriages, get in the other end and drive back. If only, he says, one day they’d set the points wrong and he could go all the way to Clacton.

And the new Fordism? Well, Santos has left the US army and gone to work for Ford. Santos checks how much work a body can manage on the production line. How many tyres can he unload in the heat before he collapses? Can he turn far enough to pick up that tool? Does that hurt? How long can he work for? But don’t worry, this Santos isn’t having his physical limits tested in some hot maquiladora. Santos isn’t a person. Santos is cyborg: software given human form to produce a “dynamic evaluation” of what sort of strain a person would be able to take. Understanding strain, say the research team at the University of Iowa, lessens the risk of injury to assembly line workers, and improves efficiency.

The body is modelled, its joint flexibility measured, its strength assessed and quantified. The fleshy materiality of a body is transposed into data, data, data. And in the end this will change the experience of working on the line. It will standardise work schedules and restrict movement — because science will have generated the best way of doing work. And I’m all in favour of saving strain and lessening damage. But I’m not quite sure this is what Santos will do; Santos-data enhances Taylorism; it treats the body as a machine and makes no allowances for what it is to be a working man on that line. To be tired one day, to feel.

Here’s the trailer, though you can’t hear the exchange about passports.

At the UK border there are signs remarking on (not apologising for) the delays in passing through border control. These signs invite you, the good citizen, to celebrate the stricter checks for blocking incomers, they normalise and institutitonalise your fear of the other. The eyes of the border guard needn’t worry you, red passport holder, you’re allowed through. But they’re sharp eyes, nonetheless and you might still flinch at the gaze of power.

So when the border guard is staring down the queue, not at the person in front of her, you wonder what, who she’s looking for. But she’s got soft eyes, that’s unexpected. She’s looking for the crying baby, and stands up to go and bring the baby’s family to the front of the queue. There’s a moment of care in amongst the regime of control.

I wonder if jobs that are made up of looking are tedious because they require repetitive glances at bland faces, or exciting because there is always something to see – someone new. I wonder also what it’s like to look for the shock, the unexpected, the wrong, the absent, the abnormal. It’s a difficult mental process, I guess. And I wonder also at the pleasures of power.

Routines are supposed to feel demeaning, to destroy our imaginations. I like routine, perhaps because whatever routines I have are not imposed by anyone else. In Ways of the Hand David Sudnow (1993) reflects on learning to play jazz piano. The routine of practice gives him a baseline from which being creative becomes possible. His fingers learn where they need to be to make certain chord shapes, and that means they know where they need to go next to make certain sounds. Unpredictability — new sounds — relies on this knowing. It’s a process that becomes un-thought, and once it is un-thought, Sudnow says creativity is possible.

Nick Dunn is a freelance shoe designer.He draws shoe after shoe after shoe, tiny variations, maybe 50 at a time.Then he takes a few of the best and refines them. It’s someone else’s job to build a prototype, to make them real. There is joy in seeing the prototype, sure, especially as the trainer moves from the page into three-dimensionality, and Nick is fully engaged in the conversations that make this happen. But the biggest pleasure of his work is in the routine, the repetition and the refinement of the sketches. Nick describes drawing as therapeutic, occupying a calm space beyond thought. Creativity needs the routine; creativity is in the routine; the routine permits flow.

In the sketches, this flow is present in the pencil lines that outline the shape of the trainer, and that mark the details. I didn’t expect from Nick’s description that each idea comes in three sketches, showing the left side, back and top. Whilst he draws on flat, seemingly translucent, paper, the three dimensional trainer that ends up on your foot is already in his imagination. It’s not that routines end up with creativity; to say that would be to viciously misrepresent the experience of controlled, routinised work such as that portrayed in Pravda. It’s that creativity is not well-conceived when it’s seen as a product of free-floating inspiration produced by a romantically starving artist. It stems from practice, skill and routine.

References

1. Austrin, T and West, J (2005) ‘Skills and surveillance in casino gaming: work, consumption and regulation’. Work Employment and Society. 19 (2) 305–326.
2. Braverman, Harry. (1998) Labor and monopoly capital: the degradation of work in the twentieth century. New York : Monthly Review Press.
3. Leidner, R. (1993) Fast Food, Fast Talk: Service Work and the Routinization of Everyday Life. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press.
4. Sudnow, D. (1993) Ways of the hand: the organization of improvised conduct. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

The film also has a pedagogic point to make. Most documentaries of the time, including the ones we saw on British TV on the Czech rebellion, worked really hard to make their depictions seem realistic. In the process, they reproduce an ideological ‘reality’, for marxists. One way to show this ideological effect is to break the usual conventions, which is what Pravda does in a determined way. In the most-often quoted scene, some Czech workers appear on screen, speaking Czech. No subtitling or dubbing is provided for the viewer, unlike in the usual documentary – ‘Vladimir’ tells ‘Rosa’ ‘If you don’t speak Czech, you had better learn fast!’

The work scene is also disturbingly unusual (forward to 46min 30 seconds in this version). We see a young man tending a large rotary cutting machine in the Skoda factory (which made weapons as well as cars, the commentary reminds us). The machine cutters move slowly up and down the piece they are working on. We get extremely noisy natural sound. There are no edits or shifts in camera position, and no other sound for 5 or 6 minutes(a very long time in cinema). The worker tends the machine, lubricating it occasionally, but largely just watching it as it does its job. There are no ear defenders, no guard rails, and no other workers to talk to. After a couple of minutes, we are all longing for it to end.

My students often nominated this scene as the most annoying and challenging in the whole of a very unenjoyable film (but it did them good!). That was the whole point, of course. They found 5 minutes enough, so what of the poor guy who spent 8 hours a day doing that?

References

1. Monaco, J ( 1976) New Wave: Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer, Rivette Oxford: Oxford University Press.