Everything in the young man's achievements, education, and training indicated that he was qualified to be much further advanced in his chosen field. But when I looked at him, fresh and eager, his crew-cut blond hair as neat as the bristles on a brush, his clothes representing the last word from Yale, I was reminded of the old adage, "Don't send out a boy to do a man's job."
I handed him a current issue of Fortune, suggesting that he scan the pictures of the executives featured in the various articles. He studied the magazine for several minutes, occasionally pointing out a man he knew or had heard about, but when he handed the magazine back, his face was a blank. "What's the point?" he asked.
"Did you see any executives dressed the way you are?" I asked. It was a delicate question with no delicate way of putting it, so I let him have it.
You could see the chips piling up on his shoulder. "Are you criticizing my clothes?" he demanded.
"Would you go to a wedding dressed the way you are?" I continued, ignoring the chips.
"Of course not!"
"Nor a funeral, nor a formal ball, nor a deep sea fishing trip?"
Somewhat less frostily he agreed that his campus garb was hardly appropriate for those occasions.
"What you recognize then," I said, "is that certain kinds of clothes are appropriate for one occasion and not for others. Could it be that the clothes that make the big wheel on the campus do not make the big executive?"
He was bright enough. He got the point. Realizing that if he was going to compete with grown men he had to look grown-up, he appeared in his office the following Monday looking like a junior executive. And when he looked like one, it is not too surprising that he was recognized as one. Of course the new suit did not make him. Clothes do not make the man. Only ability can do that. But clothes can so unmake man that ability has difficulty in finding a chance to shine.
This is such an important point that I will illustrate it with another case history. This concerns a 36-year-old Greenwich Village spinster who was left frustrated by both art and life. She wanted to be a member of the Bohemian set and paint in oils, but what she actually did was design packages. Time and again her packaging skill had won national and international prizes yet her income was far below that of rival designers; the reason: she looked like a French scarecrow, and a poor one at that.
She wore a faded beret from beneath which strands of black hair hung limply and unevenly, as though the beret was leaking its stuffing. Her face, except for her dark eyes, was colorless, untouched by the cosmetics for which she designed her most attractive cartons. For a cloak she wore a shapeless French cape, her dress was on the order of a blue smock, and her black lisle stockings and black, flat-heeled shoes did nothing to improve matters.
At our second interview I asked her if she believed in packaging. "It's the only thing to believe in that I have left," she said unhappily.
"You don't act like it," I said. I wanted to say that anyone seeing the way she packaged herself wouldn't believe she could put beans in a bag, but I had to let that go. "I should think that anyone who can package perfume as beautifully as you can would be tempted to package herself."
The tears came on then, and after that the story. She was actually a very timid woman, far more concerned with trying to "belong" than in developing her own personality and career. And since it was the current fashion of her set in Greenwich Village to run around looking like spooks-the fore-runners of the beatniks-she had accepted the garb rather than risk the disapproval of her neighbors, or at least those of her "arty"- neighbors with whom she was trying to "belong."
One she discovered through an analysis of her success factors the value of being herself; she was able to see herself as her employers had seen her. Her weird garb had not made her a Bohemian artist in oils, but most certainly it had impeded her progress in the field for which she had real talent. Within a month, a living example of her own packaging skill, she became chief package designer for a large cosmetics firm at a salary commensurate with her talent. And from a new confidence in her voice I gathered her other frustrations were within a fair way of being removed, too.
