A guy from the United Way called me recently. Actually, it was a volunteer from a company with which I’ve occasionally done business; he was calling as part of the United Way’s annual campaign and wanted to discuss setting up my company’s giving plan.
Huh?
This, he explained, would make it easier for me and my employees to show our concern for the community. We could enroll in an automatic payroll deduction program, thus making our giving easy as pie (mmmm, pie) and also affording me the exciting opportunity to show my concern all the more by matching employee contributions.
I once asked a client—a bank—to pay a few invoices early to help me with a cash crunch. Could they handle that, I wondered? “D.F.,” said the woman from the bank, “We’re a bank. We’re made of money.”
I like that attitude! I, however, am D.F. Krause, and I’m decidedly not made of money. So I wondered exactly why this fellow was approaching our conversation not as an “if” proposition but rather as a “how” and “how much” proposition. OK, I didn’t wonder; I know the answer. It’s a sales technique. If you ask a question in a way that doesn’t provide the option of no as an answer, you theoretically have to get an answer you like.
The theory will hold only if the person you’re asking voluntarily limits himself to answering in multiple choice fashion.
“What are my choices again?”
“A: Give me all your money right now. B: Put $10,000 on your credit card and wire it to my bank. C: Pay me $2,000 a month for the rest of your life. D: Set up a payroll deduction system through which you and each of your employees send me $25 per paycheck.”
“Those are my only choices?”
“Yes. You must choose one of them.”
“Why?”
“Because ball don’t lie.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“OK, I choose D.”
Only if the caller gets an independent thinker, one who isn’t afraid of going off the board, as they would’ve said on The Joker’s Wild, will he get a no. (By the way, do you know why contestants hardly ever went off the board on The Joker’s Wild? Peer pressure. It wasn’t against the rules. If you got the $25, the $50 and the $100, you could always go off the board for something else. But no one did, because it didn’t seem like you were supposed to. It was sort of like going to McDonald’s and asking for your Big Mac without the special sauce. They’ll do it, but they’ll be sure you know that it’s a really big hassle, and they’d have preferred you hadn’t asked.)
So it is with the United Way volunteer.
“I choose not to give you anything,” you say.
“Oh!” he says in a stunned tone of voice. “Well…let me see here. Um, can I put you on hold? I might have to call my campaign coordinator. I mean, we’ve never…I mean, oh dear.”
You went off the board! Joker, Joker…no special sauce! You jerk.
For me, however, there’s an even more basic issue at play here. Beyond the assumption that I have extra money to give him is the equally presumptuous notion that I’m concerned about the community.
What if I’m not? You may find the question shocking, but the community is a pretty big thing. Am I supposed to be concerned about all of it? What if I care about fire safety and storm water management, but I don’t give a crap about after-school programs, wayward animals or the hungry? These are just examples. Maybe I care about all of them. Maybe I care about none of them. Maybe I don’t care about anyone or anything but myself.
The point is, concern for community seems like too much to presume of anyone. I get the whole idea that, as business leaders, we’re supposed to “care” and “give back” (although if I took something, I must have misplaced it). But the presumption that we all want to start turning over our cash to some nebulous group of professional carers seems to be painting us all with a very broad brush.
Maybe the guy who calls me should start with a different kind of multiple choice question:
“Do you: A: Care deeply about every person in the community, even the really annoying ones? B: Care only about nice people and the occasional grouch? C: Care for your friends and neighbors, but generally think people on the street are all a bunch of creeps? D: Want everyone to just leave you alone?”
“Are those my only choices?
“Ball don’t lie.”
“I still don’t know what that means.”
“Me neither.”
