Monday, April 5, 2010

To Know When to Say, ‘It’s None of Your Business’ – Mark McCormack

The author in this essay gives few situation when can say ‘it’s none of your business’. One of his executive in the company has the habit of looking into others matters. One of his favorite plans was to ask a senior executive’s secretary about her boss’s whereabouts. He always wanted to pry into anyone’s affaires-subordinates colleagues, senior executives, even assistants on his staff but nobody dare to say him ‘it’s none of your business’. Only few people used to tell him.
The author says this executive collects all information about everyone. But still people hesitate to tell him ‘It’s none of your business’. According to author there are two topics for which ‘None of Your Business’ should always be one the top of one’s tongue:- someone else’s money and someone’s personal life.
In the matter of money paid for their house, or jewellery we cannot pry into their salary. One of the example is a literary clients called up his agent in New York office and told that they have negotiated the fee for this writer to write the text of an illustrated book. The writer also agreed for the fee given to him by the publisher but later he had a second thought and called up the office and started enquiring about the publisher’s salary. In one sense the writer wanted to know whether he is given fair salary or not but in other sense it look awkward that he is trying to pry into publishers salary.
One’s personal life another area which is nobody’s business but lot of people allow their professional and personal affairs to get blurred. In an office where the boss and subordinate work, they develop a healthy friendship and try to pry on personal things.
The author describes one incident related to personal life. Once he met the CEO of another company and his senior staffers. One day the boss snapped at his staff telling him that ‘May be you would have known more if you didn’t spend your evening on the phone to your girlfriend in Chicago’. The author says the CEO would have not used personal life in front of everybody and made the staff to feel insecure.

4 comments:

hemachandran said...

Tank

Unknown said...

From newyork to illustrator it confused

Saravanan said...

This summary is very useful for boss and the subordinate.


Unknown said...

What are the two topics that are quite unwelcome in social discussions according to the writer

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