Sarko the syco..
Posted on 01 April 2008 by Dan O'Shea

Did you hear Sarkozy’s speech to the House of Lords?

“My dear British friends…:

  • “I was so often inspired in my youth by the greatness of Britain!”
  • “Your nation represents a touchstone of everything our democracies stand for!”
  • “France will never forget (the war) because she has no right to forget!”

“Vive le Royaume-Uni! Vive la France!"

I like flattery as much as the next man but Nicolas needs to work on his feedback skills: discard the platitudes and focus on the real praise.

Dale Carnegie warns against the perils of fawning and idle flattery in business, pointing to the value of the specific and the evidential – Sarko needs to ditch the sycophancy and smarten up.

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said...
PS - DFAT is the Aussie State Department or, if you're a Brit, Foreign Office - the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. So Rudd is in many ways the mandarin's mandarin.....
04/04/2008 14:54:08
Nick said...
check out Nick Robinson's take on all this - http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/nickrobinson/2008/03/french_flattery.html

04/04/2008 14:52:48
Marc said...
what is DFAT?
04/04/2008 13:49:50
StephenJ said...
Mmm, depends on what you want in a politician. Don't we want leaders to inspire us - politically and at work? Maybe it's a national thing. John Howard and Kevin Rudd are very different characters but neither could truly be described as inspirational.

Maybe in Rudd's case it's all his years with DFAT, as Nick suggests. And in John Winston Howard's case, who on earth could say. Even moving out of boring old Canberra and over to dynamic Sydney couldn't cure him of his chronic leadership deficiencies. But surely we want our political and business leaders to inspire as well as to do, to develop some big picture for others to flesh out? Isn't that what Reagan did par excellence?
04/04/2008 13:46:01
Nick said...
It would nice if they were irrelevant Marc (and thanks for your posting) but I'm afraid our work shows that this just isn't the case - particularly for our clients in the public sector.

So many civil servants these days seem to have come to believe that talking about doing something (or 'consulting' about it, for goodness' sake) is as good as doing something about it. Quite patently, it isn't.

But when they look at their 'leaders' - the ministers who supposedly guide their departments - who can blame 'em?

I suspect the same is true in France and the US for that matter.
31/03/2008 10:29:25
Marc said...
Yes but....isn't this what they all do? It's not limited to la belle France, that's for sure. Look at all the nonsense Obama, McCain and Clinton spout.

The minute we as business leaders and HR professional start mimicking our politicians is the minute we all kiss goodbye to any credibility whatsoever.

They just look irrelevant to anyone practising normal business.
31/03/2008 10:26:52
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