My Musings on Life, Poetry and Short Stories

I can imagine the  reaction of most of the viewers when they see this title! How often have you said the Truth in situations when it would have been convenient not to say it. I had been shifting from one job to another rather frequently and I was once asked , "Why I changed so many Jobs?". The convenient answer could have been looking for better prospects, job satisfaction etc. Instead  I chose to say the truth that I did not have enough work to match my Salary. It really jolted my interviewer. He recovered quickly and  continued with the Interview. Needless to say that he looked a bit disturbed. His next question was, how would I react if I were to be posted in a Loss Making Unit of the Organisation.(I am a Qualified Accountant). I looked him in the eye and said that if the Unit was making Loss because of the wrong choice of product or wrong people heading the Unit then only God could help him. However if it was making Loss due to faulty systems, wrong financial decisions etc then I could help the Unit to turnaround. I did get the Job and the Unit turned around so well that It established a record of reaching the financial / commercial  targets for 48 months continuously without a break. Another instance that comes to my mind is a negotiation with a major supplier of our organisation. As usual he insisted that the rates quoted by him were final and that he could not reduce them further. We badly needed the goods and he was indeed a quality supplier. However since our final product did not have sufficient margin to afford this material cost we were in a fix.  I asked the supplier as to what is the margin that he would like to have on his sale and to produce the cost details for the material he supplied. I agreed to protect his margin over and above the "Truthful Cost". Believe it or not, the price dropped by a whopping 5% and we could accomodate the cost within our product. It is the fear of protecting the margin that makes us act greedily at times and a little bit of truth about our "Real wants and Needs" could solve the problem. Are we ready?