Visual Based Stereotyping (7/16/14)

I’m all about efficiency. There is very little that bothers me more than when I have to endure living through inefficiency. When I was getting my MBA I literally setup my day so that there was not a wasted minute. My classes where scheduled to within minutes of each other. I actually knew how long it would take me to walk over to the gym. My workout, showering and transit to work could be clocked in at 2 hours and 30 minutes exactly on an atomic clock.


It was in this period of rigorous maintenance of punctuality that I learned about how visual clues are the quickest way to impact stereotypes. In order to shave off fractions of a second I would wear my gym cloths to class two days a week so that I didn’t have to walk back to the locker room. Well this had an impact on my statistics professor Dr G.


Dr G later told me that he reluctantly brought me on as an intern. He was impressed by my in class performance, but my attire in class left him a little skeptical. A few months after the project I was working on began a collection of interns were sitting in front of the board of directors for the client sharing the results of our findings. Nearly 15 years later the client may have been well served to follow through with our recommendations because in not doing so they cost themselves tens of millions of dollars. However, one thing I do know is that they didn’t make their decision to not follow our advice based on the way I was dressed.

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Published on July 16, 2014 06:00
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