"Human Being"

I am lucky enough to own my own business. I am lucky enough to have clients that I think are decent people. And I am lucky enough to have experienced a moment in college that has since become an important part of how I conduct business.

During the first day of one of my art classes, our instructor walked into the room and said:

"My name is Frank Herrera. I want you to call me Frank. Even though we all know that art is subjective, I will be grading you with a letter grade, because the rules say that I have to. I will do my best to judge you by how much you've tried and improved throughout this semester. If you do your best to show up on time, and finish the assignments, and approach the class with enthusiasm and be there for your fellow students, you will almost always get a good grade."

"But there's something else I want all of you to know. Regardless of how important grades are, and what your curriculum demands of you, and how many other classes and assignments you will be expected to complete this semester, I want you to remember that all of you, all of us, are human beings."

"And since we are human beings, we are not perfect. We sometimes get sick, or have a real emergency that is more important than what goes on in this university. If that happens to any of you here, please, PLEASE tell me. If you are truthful about your emergency, I will understand and will let you make up your work. And since you know that I will treat you as a human being, I hope you'll do the same to me, and treat me with the same respect and consideration. Because I am also a human being."

Before that moment, I always thought that college was this place where a "teacher" taught you specific skills so that you can make a living, and after you left college, you went to this place called WORK, where you did your job and got a paycheck. I never thought about the "human being" part of it.

But it's there. Whether we like it or not, we are all human beings. We are human beings first, and employee-of-the-month second. We are human beings first, and straight-A student second. No matter what our grades are or how much money we make, or how much we want to make our career our first priority, we will never escape the fact that we are human beings.

This is how I try to approach every business transaction, every business conversation, every contract negotiation. No matter what the project is, I know that the people I am dealing with have bills to pay and children to feed. They have first names and nicknames, hobbies, favorite movies, and favorite restaurants. They have the same worries that I do, and it is my job as a human being to understand them as human beings.

When I first started my business, I had a naive, narrow, tunnel-vision approach. I had temporarily forgotten what Frank Herrera said. I conducted business "by the book", and didn't really pay attention to the human being-ness of my clients. If they didn't understand my by- the-book explanations, I assumed that it was their fault. If they didn't follow the by-the-book contract that we had drafted, then it was their fault. If they acted like people instead of businesspeople, I thought that they were doing something wrong. After all, personal is personal, and business is business, and the two shouldn't mix, right?

Wrong. The more I opened my eyes and took a really good look at the businesses that I dealt with, the more I realized how much human being-ness was around every office. The boss had a framed picture of her family at Disneyland sitting on her desk, and she kept a pack of Jello pudding in the office refrigerator in case her kids visited. The guard at the gate wore a Dodger cap when he wasn't wearing his uniform. The financial officer's wall cabinet was plastered with his three-year old's crayon drawings.

During one of those early business meetings, in the middle of negotiating with the company's chief administrator, I took a chance and commented on a small painting that was leaning against the back wall of his office. "Nice abstract painting. Did you do that?" I asked.

"My little daughter actually painted that," he said. "Pretty good for a ten-year old, huh?" And for the next five minutes, we talked about his daughter's painting. It was a nice little break from so much serious moneytalk. And it established, to both of us, that regardless of what happened with the project, whether my company got the contract or not, we regarded each other as human beings.

For me, the nice thing about doing this is even if I didn't get the project, at least I enjoyed being able to meet a new person, a new human being. And if I did get the project, then it was bonus that I also got to know another human being.

And so now, whenever I meet with a client, in addition to learning as much as I can about their project, I will do my best to understand him or her as a human being. Because in case the going gets rough during the project, like if we have a disagreement, I will remember that we are both human beings. Neither of us is perfect, and it's probably just a misunderstanding, or we have to figure out a way to compromise. Sometimes we have to figure out a new way to solve a problem, and not always go "by the book", like preprogrammed machines do. Unlike machines, we can adjust ourselves and make new rules to fit the situation, to meet the personal needs of each person involved. We can do this because we are human beings.