Where is your trumpet?

It was about twenty years ago. Our MBA class specialised in Marketing was seated in a circle at the birds park in the lovely campus of Christ college in Bangalore. The class was in progress with Professor Dikshit at the helm taking us through multiple facets of Marketing.

As usual, in between the session, special words of wisdom came from him which you will never find even in a Peter Drucker book. ‘It isn’t just enough to do a good job; you need to be shameless enough to let the world know about it. Learn to blow your own trumpet! That is the corporate world you all will soon step into’. These words sounded quite prophetic but didn’t make much of an impact then. Now with close to two decades of being in the corporate environment, and observing the behaviour of people, no other management lesson seems to be more relevant than this!

Interesting enough, if you observe, there are three kinds of trumpet usage you generally see in the corporate world. There is the first category, who does solid work and climbs on top of the roof and shouts to the world about their success. These are the people about whom others say, these folks certainly deserve it! With their supremely positive attitude, success usually gets chauffer driven to the doorstep of these folks.

We then have a second category, who does a fantastic job of blowing their own trumpet, but practically does nothing to truly substantiate it. Every organization in the world are ‘blessed’ with best actors like these who absolutely avoids any work that comes their way but has the tremendous potential to make people believe that everything went well only because of their gracious persona. The management team usually sees through such people and most often their drama remains that and are rarely considered genuine. But that never deter these people to make even Shakespeare ashamed of his creations!

There is the third category of people as well who may not even know what a trumpet is. These folks are truly awesome when it comes to productivity and professionalism but are the worst in the world when it is about marketing themselves. They never talk about their success, but more importantly, they detest telling the world how fantastic they are. These are the ones who most often get sidelined by the above two categories since the top management either does not recognize their merit or dislike them for being painfully transparent in their approach.

For the record, we may have a fourth category as well in the corporate world, who neither does a good job, nor blow their trumpet. These folks don’t last too long in an organization in any case.

It is worthwhile doing an introspection of which category do we belong to. While I aspire to be in the category one, many times the tentacles of third category pulls me down. It takes an effort to put on that thick skin and shout out to the world about your success when you have put in your blood and sweat into it. Else, you may just remain dejected to see the category two people who does this so seamlessly.

Nevertheless, being truthful to yourself helps you with one thing for sure. At the end of the day when you hit the bed you can guarantee that you get a peaceful sleep since unlike a few others, you have not pawned your conscience to the devil!