5 lessons Manti Te’o will teach the world, whatever truth emerges

Across every social media outlet on the web pictures are being uploaded every other second of gorking students, office workers and even celebrities, with their arm around a whole lot of fresh air, captioned with ‘my girlfriend’ and hashtagged ‘Teoing’.

For the uninitiated (which by now should include a couple of Tibetan monks and a single penguin somewhere in Antarctica) Manti Te’o is a highly tipped American college football player, likely to join the NFL from Notre Dame University in the upcoming draft. Here is the short version of the hottest story in America right now. He said he had a girlfriend he met at a football game. He said they went to Hawaii together. He said she had leukemia  He said she died in a car accident in September. He told his college that he got a call from her three months later. Now he says they never actually met. He says it was an online relationship. He says the woman he knew probably never existed. He says he was duped.  The press say he was in on it from the start and that he knew the woman never existed. They say he created a fake girlfriend.

At time of writing it seems extremely unclear what actually happened. Whatever comes out in the wash, there are lessons for us all as professionals and as people.

Accept that hoaxes happen, and that it could happen to you.

If you’ve seen the movie Catfish, you’ll know that a pretty smart guy can be dragged a long way into a fake relationship before it even occurs to him to go back to where he started and ask the most obvious questions. Is this person real? Is the voice on the phone the person in the pictures online? Accepting that there are hoaxers with all sorts of motivations out there and that you are as likely to encounter one as anyone else is key to avoiding them. If Te’o is on the level and he is a victim, then he has some serious questions to ask himself. Don’t wait until it’s too late to run through your sanity checklist, whether it’s at home or at work.

Tell the right people

Confirmation bias is a dangerous thing. Using anything convenient to reinforce your belief, at the expense of more obvious evidence to the contrary  is harder to do if you’ve got some input from some people you trust. If Teo’s version is true and he has just been fooled, then you have to ask why none of his friends smelled a rat. Most likely because he hid it from them.

If you’re going to lie, lie good. Better still – don’t lie at all.

Whether it’s business or personal, we all know that the moment we start to lie we lay the first strand of what is likely to become a tangled web. I have yet to encounter a moment in my career when lying would have been the most sensible strategy. We’ve all exaggerated a tiny bit; we’ve all overpromised slightly; we’ve spun something a bit more than was reasonable. We’re not angels, but there’s a long leap from this to creating and maintaining an absolute falsehood. Every kids fable you ever heard is true. Your nose gets longer and longer as it becomes harder and harder to keep a lid on your original lie. You end up lying about more things. You end up lying to more people, all to cover up the lie you should never have told in the first place. Nothing makes us look more foolish than being caught in a lie. It’s so embarrassing. Embarrassment is going to be served to Mr Te’o for breakfast, lunch and dinner from now until lord knows when.

 It’s never too soon to start handling the fall out.

The strongest piece of evidence suggesting that Te’o has been fooled, and is the innocent idiot that he claims to be, is that he went to Notre Dame himself to tell them about the call from the voice he had recognized as belonging to the girl who was supposedly dead. It’s strange he would do that. If he had made her up, why would he not just leave it alone and move on? But he still waited three weeks to talk to his employer and the people who were responsible for keeping him on the pitch and out of the tabloid press. This was a serious misjudgment. It’s never too soon to take your problem to the person whose job is to fix it for you. Talk to your PR department early, talk to your lawyer early. Equip the people you trust with the ability to help you as soon as you can. Get out in front of it if you can, whatever it is.


Beware the internet. Still.

Don’t get complacent about the net. We’ve all been desensitized by fifteen years exposure to the world wide web. It’s safe now. It’s policed now. Everyone is meeting safely on line these days. Business is secure online. You know better than this. Some simple precautions will protect you from the world’s largest single collection of scroungers, scammers, spammers and other digital ne’er-do-wells. Surfing the web without protecting yourself is akin to walking down the most dangerous street in your city at 2.00am towing all of your cash behind you on a trolley. In this case, the web will offer two lessons. Firstly, it’s easy to get scammed. Secondly, if you make a fool of yourself, there will be nowhere to hide. Your story will be everywhere, and open to everyone.

Nobody is safe. Not at work, not in their personal life. As the new adage goes, and Te’o should mark this well, the internet is the only place where geeks bully football players.  

Richard Spragg writes about a number of issues related to social media, marketing, engineering jobs. Find out more about Talascend, about electrical engineering, about civil engineering and about mechanical engineering jobs from Our Website.  

5 free online tools that you might actually find useful (you know, for business)

1.     Twitter

Common perception: 

It’s a way to tell people what you just ate for dinner

Newsflash: 

It’s a way to find out what your potential clients need right now

You don’t need to tweet anything yourself. It is unlikely that anyone in the world wants to know your every unedited thought. I wish this message would get through to athletes everywhere, who seem intent on Twitter-assisted career suicide by sharing every response to the boss/coach/owner’s latest statement without any pause for thought.

The key to Twitter is to follow and listen. Follow all of the customers you have and all of the customers you want. They are talking constantly on Twitter. At some point, a 15-year-old marketing consultant told them all they’d be bankrupt in 6 months if they didn’t start tweeting every day. And they listened. The result? Genuinely live information reaching the market faster than any corporate PR announcement or press release ever did. ‘ABC Ltd is pleased to announce Jane Smith as the company’s new head of engineering and construction jobs.’ This kind of information should be gold dust to your sales teams in staying ahead of the game.

2.  YouTube

Common perception:

A total distraction

Newsflash:

It’s the best training resource in the world

Yes, there are dogs in party hats and teenagers kamikaze stunts on skateboards. But there is a lot more besides. YouTube is to training what the Nintendo DS is to parenting. It may be a shortcut, and it can’t replace the real thing – but it’s extremely useful when you’re stretched.

YouTube contains videos from genuine experts on every subject from How to Input a Table of Contents in MS Word, through to explanations of the Liquid Natural Gas industry. Running a business in New Zealand and don’t know enough about doing business in China? How about an interview with the New Zealand Enterprise Commissioner & Consul General in Guangzhou? It’s called ‘Doing business in China.’

PowerPoints are good. Training sessions are great. But unless you’re going to commit resources to the design, production, execution and updating of these materials, you may find YouTube better value for money. Its available 24/7, anywhere in the world and can be immediately accessed. It’s also free.

3.   Trello

Common Perception: 

What’s Trello?

Newsflash:

It’s a life changer

If you haven’t discovered Trello yet, you might be one of a good number of people whose world it could change forever. Are you using MS Outlook to perfectly integrate all your action lists with your calendar and e-mails? No? Nor am I. If you’re one of the 0.1% who have actually mastered the full functionality of Outlook and found a way to make it practical and interactive across your team, congratulations. You may stop reading and go for some frozen yoghurt from that stall you like in the mall. 

For everyone else, there is Trello. Trello is an online system of post-it notes on the wall. Like the post-it notes on your desk and computer, you can move them around, add a new one easily and take down the ones you don’t need. Unlike the post-it notes, you can share them with others across the web, attach notes to other people, organize them into easy lists and protect their security. You can change their color coding, keep them in various different projects, and get updates every time someone adds or subtracts anything. Most importantly it works because it’s like your post-it notes. It’s simple and visual for the non-superheroes amongst us who just don’t want to forget anything.

4.     Skype

Common Perception: 

It’s an instant messenger where my staff can distract each other all day, or avoid picking up the phone for tricky stuff

Newsflash:

It’s free international video conferencing.  

I talk to my team almost every day using this tool. I feel like I’m in the room with them. This is helpful, because with Talascend’s global footprint and our global engineering staffing framework – I’m not often actually in the room with them. This tool has changed the way we operate. Get a $30 web cam, click call and start enjoying the instant benefits of a tool that used to cost high-end big businesses a fortune. And on the weekend, you can call your mom and make her day.

 5.    Join.Me

Common Perception:

GoToMeeting and WebEx are the only solutions

Newsflash:

No they’re not

Join.Me requires no permanent downloads, is available immediately and is completely free. All you need is a phone (or better still Skype) and you can share your screen (and control of your screen) with anyone you like in a secure and simple environment. No planning required, just a link you cut and paste in seconds. Sometimes you just need to see what your colleague is talking about. Join.Me lets you do that.

So there it is – five tools that can make a genuine contribution to your business. Yes, there are down sides to each of them. But one of the best pieces of advice I was given when I wanted to ban a distractive tool from a team I was running was this – you have to manage the people, not throw away the tool. If your systems are blocking any of these tools – I understand why, but I’d urge you to find another means to manage their use that doesn’t involve dispensing with the real benefits of the technology.

I’d also urge you to make sure your perception of every available tool is accurate. You could be missing some major opportunities to streamline the way you work, whether it’s just your own workload you’re balancing, or if you’re managing a team, a region or an entire business. 



Richard Spragg writes on various subjects including global engineering jobs, staffing and marketing in the technical sector.

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What get’s tweeted gets done. Can Social Media provide accountability for our businesses?

According to Seb Coe, the former British 1,500m Olympic champion, there’s a correlation between how much you tweet and how you perform.

Lord Coe expressed concerns
that tweeting is a distraction 
for Olympians.

Lord Coe, who is head of the British Olympic Organizing committee, noted this week that the people who find time to tweet, also seem to find time to lose.

“I have found quite a close correlation between the number of tweets at competitive times and the level of under-performance,” says his Lordship.

It’s an interesting question for sure. To what extent can social media updates, that require such a small input of time and energy, distract you from what you should be focused on?

Colleagues of mine spend a lot of time defending social media, because it takes so little to fire out a tweet, or update Facebook. I think it’s a reasonable defense.  The question is really what the wider cost is. What Seb Coe seems to be saying is that talking to your audience a lot, may put you at risk of disappointing them.

But if you think about it, there are also positive possibilities. To what extent do we alter our behavior in order to satisfy our virtual audience?

I know people who like to sound clever on Facebook updates. No kidding; I have had people confess to me after a couple of beers that they make a real effort to sound smart and engaged when they post. They feel like it’s a way to make a good impression, on friends, on family… they’re fueling their own ego. They will read news sites and newspapers, looking for the day’s smart story, so they can be seen to post it. If that sounds pathetic, OK – but they’re still reading the newspaper. They never did before. In their attempts to look engaged, they have accidentally become engaged.

Another friend of mine posts all his runs to Facebook, via the Nike + app. So-and-so has just completed his 3.01 mile run in 28 minutes. He claims to train more often and run faster because he knows it will be seen and measured.

In reality Social Media represents a great way to encourage accountability. What gets measured, gets done, right? So why not openly encourage your staff to post their successes on every social media? Even create your own social media networks inside your company to encourage bragging. It might help the staff reach to achieve for something to brag about.

So the end of the day, an Olympic athlete shouldn’t need Social Media to report on progress. They should have medals to wave around. They should have newspaper clippings.

But for the rest of us, there’s no harm in wanting to look better, especially if it encourages us to actually do better. 

Do you have thoughts? Can Twitter help with productivity? Should athletes put the smartphone down?

Richard Spragg writes on various subjects including global engineering staffing and global engineering jobs.