Chapter 2
 The World as We Found It

Remember when the people at the supermarket checkout counter actually greeted you as a fellow human being? Remember when the tellers at the bank actually knew your name? Remember when you could call a company and actually speak to a real person who, more often than not, could actually put you in touch with the proper party? These are remnants from a world that used to exist but is rapidly disappearing.

In this chapter, I’ll explain factors that make it harder for you to get anyone’s attention, let alone get them to act on what you’ve said. Once you understand what the challenges are and the societal changes that have caused them, you’ll be better able to manage your behavior to get the results you want.

Press “Two” for Service, Press “Three” for Returns . . .

If you’ve been hiding in a cave in France for the last 16 years, you’re probably unaware of the emergence and dominance of voice-mail systems in western societies. Otherwise, undoubtedly, you’ve listened to more menus with more options and more numbers to press than you had ever wanted to or believed would be requested of you.

Technology can be a wonderful thing. For example, people don’t have to go deep into mine shafts to dig because machinery can do it. Most people would agree that this is a benefit to society. Sure, some jobs may be replaced, but who wants to work deep in the mines anyway?

At organizations throughout the world, telephone receptionists and customer service representatives are being replaced. At the current rate of replacement, they one day will be as rare as dodo birds. From a profit and loss standpoint, it’s easy to understand why organizations would rather have robots answer their phones than people. A whole year’s worth of salary and benefits that the company doesn’t have to pay, no vacation time, no sick time, and no complaints can be quite attractive.

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 Just the Facts
Whatever the technology costs, it’s usually far less than having a person in that position. Studies by prominent management magazines have borne this out time and time again. The cold reality in industrialized nations is that machines often replace people, whereas people rarely replace machines.

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Even if the company installs an 800 number so that customers call at the company’s expense, the overall cost of handling calls in this manner is still bound to be less than installing one person in the same position. The underlying philosophy is that as long as callers eventually reach their destination, all is fairly well. Never mind if the callers were frustrated, had to listen to eight inane choices, and even then didn’t get the service or satisfaction that they wanted on the first couple of tries.

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 Word Power
When you use an expression or example to refer to something that it does not literally denote in order to suggest a similarity, you’re using a metaphor. Metaphors add power to your speech by evoking associations that make other people respond more strongly or more quickly.

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The metaphor of voice-mail systems—what you have to endure to reach your party—typifies developments throughout our society. No one is listening, or if anyone is, it’s because they’ve figured out ways to harness technology so that they don’t have to actually deal with you.

Start the Revolution Without Me

Fine, you say; as consumers we’ll revolt. We won’t do business with people or organizations that subject us to endless decisions via voice mail. What happens when, say, all airlines put you on hold, when all retail stores have switched to voice-mail systems, or when one industry after another subjects you to a voice-mail system?

Technology designed to aid interpersonal communications, business efficiency, and dispensing of products and services, is often used as a screen, mask, dodge, way to hide, way to delay service, way to screen calls, and, if you’re in the federal government, a way to ignore citizens altogether. Because it’s not likely that this trend is going to reverse itself soon, people have already begun to develop strategies to effectively get their messages through in spite of having to cope with endless voice-mail selections.

Many books on marketing, for example, now suggest that you have a 30-second message rehearsed so that when you encounter voice mail or an answering machine, you’ll be able to succinctly fire off everything you want to say with one breath, leave your phone number, and get off the line before you hear that irritating recording, “Your message has exceeded the limit,” if you hear it at all.

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 Word Power
When your speech or actions are succinct, they proceed in a brief and efficient manner. Being able to state your position or make a request using succinct language improves the response you get, because you’ve made yourself clear and haven’t wasted anyone’s time.

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Such books also offer alternative ways of getting your message through (such as using fax and e-mail), most of which are probably familiar to you. In fact, texts on this singular phenomenon—getting through to prospects who have arranged their work and home life so as to not be reached easily—practically represent their own genre!

Just the Symptom

If the inability to reach others via the telephone and other readily available technology was the core of the problem, and not symptomatic of a much larger issue, I could devote all of my attention to assisting you in this narrow realm and I would only need about 20 pages. However, the challenge of getting through to others is much larger.

Whether you’re a naturally assertive person, shy and retiring, or somewhere in the middle, increasingly, in all arenas of society in which you interact with another person, it’s becoming more difficult to be heard, understood, and heeded. To understand why, let’s explore other converging issues.

A Quarter-Million More People Per Day and Counting

Suppose I told you that every four days, there are one million more people on earth?

Suppose you learned that every two years and nine months, the world gains a population count (live births minus deaths) equal to the current population of the United States—275 million people? In fact, every decade, the earth gains four times the current population of the United States.

Would such information shock you? Would you be upset? Would you begin to understand the ramifications of a world facing exponential human population growth?

As you’ve guessed by now, everything I just said is true. I don’t wish it to be this way. You probably don’t wish it to be this way. Reality being what it is, however, you and I are part of a world population growing to 10.5 billion people by the year 2050 or so. At that point, demographers say that the population will level off.

From the standpoint of supply and demand, some areas of the world are certainly going to be in dire need of food, water, and natural resources. History tells us that in cases of severe overcrowding, calamities such as fires, flood, typhoid, viral and bacterial breakouts, and other phenomena that you wouldn’t even wish on your mother-in-law, have a vastly improved chance of occurring. Keep in mind that for everyone, not just you, it is harder to be heard, understood, and heeded now than perhaps at any time in at least the last century.

High Density, Low Manners

New York City, with its eight-million-plus population, is often regarded by outsiders as a place where people are brusque, uncaring, and constantly in a hurry. It would be easy to pick on New York as an example of how the individual is quashed in a densely packed environment, so let’s begin.

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 Make It So
To thrive in a densely populated western urban environment, you have to be assertive—there isn’t much way to get around it.

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When you live and work in an overcrowded area where traffic is a mess all the time, long lines are the norm, and many people perceive they have to fight tooth and nail to make it through the day, it’s predictable that the quality of responsiveness among service providers, even to their key customers, might decline.

Walk into a typical New York City bank. Even if you have a million dollars invested there, the teller is not likely to know your name and in many cases won’t even look it up during your entire transaction. In an environment where you’re a number, not a name, or where so many people are prostrate on the sidewalk that you can’t stop to deal with them all, it’s understandable that individuals feel depersonalized.

If you live in New York or Los Angeles or some other teeming metropolis, all other things equal, your need for this book is likely to be somewhat less than that of other people. Not so curiously, when New Yorkers are out of their native environment, visiting other parts of the country, it’s often easy to spot them. They have been politely characterized as loud, pushy, and abrasive. At least that’s the way it seems to the folks in Podunk or Pocatello.

Your environment can have a profound effect on how assertive you need to become in this life. At the tail end of that observation is another—as all rural, suburban, and urban areas increase in population as a natural function of simply being in such an environment, most everyone feels an enhanced need to assert themselves more often than previously to continue to be heard, understood, and heeded.

Numbers Don’t Lie

You can’t fight the sheer numbers; in a world of six and one-half billion people and counting, where exponential population growth since the 1960s has been the norm (incidentally, there were only three billion people in the world in 1960), and where the population density has more than doubled since 1962, each person’s ability to be heard is challenged.

Here’s a recap of how much the population density per square mile has increased in this century:

• 1936: 38
  
• 1966: 59
  
• 1996: 100
  
• 2026: 160?

This Update Is Brought to You By . . .

If you thought advances in technology that enable people to screen themselves from others and an ever-increasing world population density weren’t enough, you neglected to consider a third factor. The sheer volume of information that you’re exposed to also has significant impact on your ability to catch the attention of someone else.

If you travel for your work, you know that there’s a CNN monitor about every 50 paces in just about every major hub airport in America. These ill-placed television sets bring you the “up-to-the-minute news” so you won’t be “deficient” or a couple seconds behind the rest of the world in terms of what’s happening. The only problem is that these updates don’t represent news.

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 Handle with Care
Most of the information that you get today via news and information services is from carefully crafted packages paid for by the organization or person featured. So think twice before believing anything vaguely resembling a “news feature.”

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By some estimates, at least 75 percent of all the features and profile pieces you read in newspapers and magazines have been “placed.” The features and profiles you see are part of a coordinated effort, undertaken and funded by the company or individual publicized.

“Notice Me.” “No, Notice Me.”

Because publishers have long known of the healthy number of executives and entrepreneurs in their community who wish to be written about and who have the funds to commission an article, they often get their material for free.

If you’re not aware of this phenomenon, it may seem to you that others in your industry or profession do so spectacularly well that they generate spontaneous press coverage. Hmmm . . . wonder why the roving reporter never makes it to your door? Unless your house is on fire, pal, nobody’s coming to interview you, until you partake of the process and get yourself a PR agent!

The small percentage of items broadcast and printed each day that do actually represent news are presented to us in endless variations. It’s not enough that xyz candidate is charged with campaign donation irregularities, then you and I have to hear about it all day, all week, all month, from every conceivable angle and news source.

Would you believe there are 1,800 reporters who cover the White House on a daily basis? Couldn’t, say, 300 reporters do the job and maybe share their insights with everyone else?

The volume and quality of information we’re all subject to beyond news and attempts at portraying information as news is staggering. The typical issue of Orbit magazine, which carries television programming for people who have satellite dishes, lists more than 61,000 television programs a month. To give you an idea of how much programming 61,000 shows is equal to, if you watched six hours of television a day every day for 31 years, you would have watched 61,000 shows.

Deluged Around the Clock

Obviously, no one person on earth is subject to this amount of information. The magnitude of information to which we are all exposed vastly exceeds that of any previous generation in the history of the earth. You live in a world where more information is generated in an hour than you could take in the rest of your life.

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 Just the Facts
I calculated the volume of broadcasts and publications presently available and added a conservative growth factor over the next several years. The conclusion: Within a few years, more information will be generated in one minute than you could take in the rest of your life.

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Think about this; every minute, more than a lifetime of information is generated. Thankfully, you’re not exposed or impacted by 99.9 percent of it. The dramatic effects, however, are readily abundant. Drop too much information in the lap or the mind of anybody and he or she will become overwhelmed, agitated, perhaps even disoriented. Spew a constant stream of news and information at everybody throughout society all day long in all directions, and you’ll end up with a population that has an increasingly difficult time with the following:

• Determining what’s important
  
• Interacting with others
  
• Achieving agreement or consensus
  
• Simply being heard

The State of the Union

Consider how difficult it is for the man who is arguably the most powerful person on Earth to be heard. I’m talking about the president of the United States. Findings from the U.S. Election Commission, League of Women Voters, Nielsen’s Rating Service, and Library of Congress reveal that most people:

• Do not vote in elections.
  
• Do not watch the Inauguration or Inaugural address.
  
• Do not watch the State of the Union addresses.
  
• Do not read The Federal Register.
  
• Have no idea what executive letters have been signed.

When the President and (for now) his spouse want to convey a message, it often has to be simple, short, and pounded into the heads of targets. Consider Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” message. You can scoff at it, and say it was or wasn’t effective. It’s one of the few things, however, we remember about the Reagan administration.

The very reason why we pay so much attention to the phenomenon of sound bytes is the resulting hyper-explosion of information that infiltrates every corner of our society. In a world where so much data is thrown at so many people for so many hours each day, the 30-second sound byte, predictably, is all, if anything, that could get through to the electorate.

Hence, a “thousand points of light,” “building a bridge to the 21st century,” or other equally inane, meaningless drivel are often all that linger in one’s memory following four- and eight-year presidential administrations.

If the commander-in-chief has a hard time getting through, what chance do you and I have? Fortunately, with the help of this book, your chances have dramatically improved. I’ve got to give it to you straight, though; this will take some effort on your part. As sure as your eyes are glancing across the words on this page, it’s getting more difficult for people to simply hear each other.

Six Minutes of Quality Time

The steady stream of books coming out in the last decade or two about making relationships work is testament to the fact that men and women are having a harder time being understood. Whether it’s Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, or You Just Don’t Understand, the market for such tomes seems to be insatiable. People want to know how to get along, particularly in an intimate relationship.

You’ve probably encountered articles stating things such as, “The typical couple spends only six minutes together each day in conversation,” or “The average couple has only a minute and 30 seconds of quality time each day.” I don’t know how anybody can come up with such information, unless they have built hidden video camcorders into the walls and ceilings of every place a couple might go in the course of a day, and have monitored the couple’s conversation for weeks on end, along with several thousand other couples, to derive an average. It’s a little like the Ann Landers observation a few years ago that the typical woman kisses 65 men before she kisses the man she’s going to marry. I mean, how absurd! How could anybody generate such data?

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 Handle with Care
Whether it’s a minute and 30 seconds, six minutes, or 40 minutes, if your partner is tired, frazzled, over-informed, and feeling lucky just to make it back home, it’s unlikely that he or she is going to be in a highly responsive mood when you’re ready to pour out your heart.

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Like, take Stat 101!

Nevertheless, even if observations and “calculations” about the amount of time couples spend actually conversing with each other are off by a factor of five or six, we’re still talking about people who are in intimate relationships and only converse with each other for less than 40 minutes a day.

You can’t force “quality time” (if there even is such a concept) in between long stretches of frenzied activity. And, if you happen to be in a relationship with a workaholic, overachiever, or someone who is simply stressed to the max, how effective do you think anything you say to him is going to be? How effective would you be if your partner was rested, balanced, and in harmony with nature? I rest my case.

Even Your Mother Has an Answering Machine

Now for an easy quiz. Please get out a number-two soft lead pencil and answer the following four questions. Please be sure to keep your eyes on your own paper; otherwise, you’re only cheating yourself.

1. In the future, will there be more technology in our lives or less?
   
2. Will there be more people in the future or fewer?
   
3. Will we be besieged by more information or less?
   
4. Will intimate partners face more impediments or fewer?

How to grade your score: If you answered “less” or “fewer” from one to four times, immediately reread this chapter. If you wrote “more” for all four questions, give yourself an “A.” Your grasp of reality is sufficient to continue on to the next chapter.

You see, when even your own mother has an answering machine, it’s a safe bet that before too long, everyone will be “wired.” Then, your machine will call my machine about the message your machine left for my machine last week, and you and I will be out of the loop altogether! The only people who will encounter each other will be sleepwalkers, and they won’t have much to say.

Tell Me to My Face

You could make the argument that no matter how technological the world becomes, how many people are added to it, how much news we’re hit by, and how many impediments to being heard develop, there will always be situations in which people converse with one another. I agree. From employees responding to their boss, to a teacher lecturing her students, to a father and son on a fishing expedition, to a baseball manager in sight of an umpire, we will always have things to say to one another on a personal, face-to-face basis.

What will be the quality of the interaction, however? Will the parties actually listen? What’s the quality of your interaction with others today? Has it been improving in recent years, staying the same, or declining? I’ll bet it’s slightly declined, perhaps through no fault of your own.

I’ll bet you’re finding it harder to get people to return your phone calls, harder to get the IRS to respond to your tax question, harder to have your children do what you say, and harder to have your co-workers understand you.

If any of this is true, even a little part of it, you’re probably going to want to know how to be more assertive. With that, let’s turn to Chapter 3, on when to be assertive, so that we can get you back into the winner’s circle.