Famous !@&#-laden “Closers” speech from Glengarry Glen Ross. Definitely skip in mixed company.

Apparently those of us in the middle class are better losers than middle-class millionaires.

In what authors Russ Alan Prince and Lewis Schiff called the “dark side” of their surveys for The Middle-Class Millionaire, they found those with the higher net worths were more likely (at 50 percent) to agree that you “have to be Machiavellian to succeed” and willing to “take advantage of weakness in others.” Only 20 percent of the middle class agreed.

• More than 65 percent of the more wealthy said they “do whatever it takes to win” in a negotiation.
• Almost 25 percent of the middle class agreed that it was okay to lose if you doubted you’d win in the first place, but less than 3 percent of millionaires thought this outcome was acceptable.

I have to wonder about wording. If you tried to factor in the costs of being or not being Machiavellian, you might get a different outcome. Of course, those are things you ultimately can’t know until it’s too late. Exhibit A being the spectacular downfall of John McCain, who just two weeks ago sunk to depths he refused to plumb in his 2000 campaign for the Republican nomination against George W. Bush, and may have irreparably damaged his reputation in the process — most of all in his own eyes.

It’s not that I don’t have sympathy for him. I do. After he was trounced in 2000 by the very same smear tactics, how could he not think, “I’m a good guy, let the ends justify the means this time. I’ll fix everything when I get in.”

I get the impulse. I just have hope that for most of us, the other urge, the sense of honor that served McCain so well throughout his life, and that I’m sure will again, prevails.

I take heart in the fact that half of middle-class millionaires did not cite a “win at all costs” attitude.

Yet I congratulate the authors on getting at a truth by degrees that they wouldn’t have if they’d asked something like, “Do you agree that it’s important to be assertive in negotiation?”

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Tags:   John McCain · losing · Machiavellian · winning1 Comment