[As running two companies seems to have been eating into my writing time, blog entry ideas have been piling up, unposted, for the past week. I’m hoping to start chipping my way through the list over the next few days. To wit:]
Mark Twain once famously observed, “clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.” Which is the primary reason I get dressed in the morning. And, more to the point, why I try to do it well.
As countless studies have shown, the way we dress deeply impacts what others think of us, how likely they are to listen to us or to do what we ask. Sure, we all occasionally chastise ourselves for so blithely judging books by their proverbial covers. But, whether or not we should, we most certainly and subconsciously do. Which makes pulling clothes from the closet a strategic exercise. How does a given shirt make me feel? How does it make me appear in the eyes of others?
It’s important enough that, spending my days the past week bouncing between meetings with filmmakers and meetings with investors and corporate execs, I’ve even stooped to mid-afternoon changes, pulling from two disparate subsets of my wardrobe.
Most business books, on the subject of clothing, advise that you dress to match the people with whom you’re meeting. Which, like most advice doled out in business books, is hopelessly misguided. Far better, instead, to dress to match their expectations of how someone in your position is ‘supposed’ to look.
The jeans, blazer and vintage button downs, then, come out not for the filmmakers, but for the staid execs, a group for whom sunglasses worn indoors bespeaks a certain desirable level of cool, rather than suggesting total douche-bagdom, as it would to fellow filmmakers. Similarly, then, the suits come out for meetings with screenwriters or prospective key cast. Without a tie, certainly, and perhaps erring towards DKNY shirts rather than Polo Ralph Lauren’s, but still formal enough to say, “yes, I’m intimately familiar with the finer points of GAAP and SEC filing laws.”
This ‘dress like they want you to’ rule is not a recent discovery. Instead, it’s something I stumbled across my freshman year in college. Having just launched SharkByte, I quickly found that the odds of success in a new-client sales pitch were directly proportional to the number of electronic gizmos I clipped to my belt for that pitch.
Or, as I so tastefully summarized the idea to the Wall Street Journal: “show them a laptop and they’ll wet their pants.”