10
AGGRESSION

Lots of people like to give junior employees advice. Some of this advice is great and useful, but most of it is outdated and not very actionable. Case in point: a very senior employee (Mr. Aggression) that I had to take a taxi with on one of my business trips to Tokyo. As you'll have gathered by now, many of my best stories are taxi stories. 
On this particular spring Tokyo morning, my two other colleagues thought it would be a fantastic idea for me to ride in a separate taxi with Mr. Aggression. We all couldn't fit in one taxi, so I got nominated (of course I did) to accompany him to the client's office. I already knew it would be an interesting car ride when we hit traffic - I've never been in slow traffic in Japan, but on this particular day, there was congestion on the roads. Shortly after the taxi ride began, he began telling me about Japanese culture and teaching me Japanese greetings with a thick Quebec French accent. He then pivoted to negotiation and career advice, explaining to me that good customer relationships were extremely important for business results. As he explained his convoluted negotiation strategy with far too many obscure Franglish acronyms, he got to the key piece of advice for me after a 1 hour and 45-minute soliloquy.

He elaborated that even though a positive client relationship was key, "You know, if you gonna aggress me, I'm gonna aggress you." To be clear, "aggress" isn't an English word, but he meant that if things got contentious during the customer meeting, he was ready to fight and argue his point back. As much as I wanted to see what "aggressing" meant in a business context, the customer meeting was not aggressive at all. When I met up with my two other colleagues after Mr. Aggressive left for his flight home, I sarcastically thanked them for the amazing opportunity to ride on the long taxi journey with him. They were chortling and were curious what we had spoken about on the lengthy ride. I relayed what he spoke about and the "you aggress me, I aggress you" advice. Suffice it to say, we all learned a valuable lesson about how to behave in customer meetings: only aggress if aggressed!