A friend recently had this phrase directed at him at the tail end of an interview with a company’s CEO: “Well, we’re impressed by the breadth of your experience and the fact that you’re deeply familiar with the subject matter and are a published authority on it. I want to set up a follow-up interview for you with our COO ASAP. We need first-rate folks first. There’ll be time to hire b-players later.”
Are you surprised that my friend never heard back from them? I’m not.
If I were his consigliere, I would have told him immediately after that interview to put the half hour he had just wasted, as well as any prospects of working with this company, out of mind, and move swiftly on.
“But, Davíd, how could you know?”
Easy. He used ‘b-player’, and to me that speaks volumes about his view of the world. As the saying goes, there are two types of people in this world: those who divide everyone into two types of people, and those who don’t.
Those who speak of ‘b-players’ are convinced that, in this world, there are ‘a-players’ – a category into which they firmly place themselves first and foremost – and ‘b-players’, which means everyone else, except for their cronies, toadies, and favorites. The surprisingly high probability that these binary-based pseudo-sociologists are capable of behavior worthy of a c-player – never responding to a job applicant after telling them in no uncertain terms that they’d follow up – never enters their minds.
‘B-player’. The very existence of this second-rate descriptor assumes that somewhere out there there’s someone who’s always bringing his or her A-GAME—another played-out sports term that should be catching z’s in a retirement community for words and phrases, surrounded by tenth-rate D-leaguers on their last legs.
Speaking of games, we’d be remiss if we missed ‘level up’, the underwhelming gift that gaming has given our language, but that’s for next time. Don’t miss the exciting opportunity to “dial in your language game” – expect us to dial back the excitement about the ubiquitous ‘dial in’ – and look for the next installment of Honesty in Speech, right here, next time.
