Thomas Madison

Hello, you can of course not believe me, but I'm 21 years old and I'm already a multimillionaire. Now, I can say it with confidence, but recently I was an ordinary manager in a translation agency. I started to work during the study, my parents had enough money, only to pay for my education, so I lived at the expense of part-time work.

Business and Management Consultant Gary Lilienthal at Interview

On 11th December 2018, in GUANGZHOU in the Peoples’ Republic of China, business and management consultant Gary Lilienthal answered detailed questions at personal interview.

With a Sydney University Law Degree, a Graduate Diploma in Legal Practice and a Masters Degree in Freudian and Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Lilienthal has been engaged in business and management consultancy for more than thirty years in Australia, East Asia, both coasts of the United States and in the United Kingdom. He has consulted to all levels of city, county and state government in the United States and spent many years crafting and delivering public presentations to boards of elected officials throughout North America. Lilienthal was trained by London police experts in criminal intelligence analysis, and has written and published extensively about the vagaries of executive talent acquisition. He holds a United Nations Certificate from the UN in Geneva in international dispute resolution, and has presided over some 7500 international cross-border commercial mediations.

The following questions were put to him, and his answers were as follows.

Issues in Hiring Senior Executives
Question: What are the main issues with adequately staffing an organisation with competent senior executives?

Answer: “There is a 15th century maxim written by an Italian philosopher called the Riccordi saying that a master can never know his or her servant. I have mulled over this maxim for several years and have realised that the main problem with hiring executives is the interview itself. It can’t possibly reveal the applicant to the manager, because the manager can never know his/her employee. I learned in my practice in Los Angeles that the consultant should sit with the hiring manager at interview and guide the questioning. That way the consultant can privately advise the manager in an oral report right after the interview finishes. Every time I have done this, both management and the hired person have worked well together for a long time.”

Hiring by Contract vs Hiring by Interview Process
Question: How do hiring by contractual negotiations and hiring by interview process differ, and how does each style benefit the hiring organisation?

Answer: “The two sides of the coin in management are contract and status. A contractual negotiation as the main part of the interview and induction process generally provides more certainty to the organisation. I say this provided management is skilled at contractual interpretation. Many need outside advice on this point, sometimes without realising it. For example: most think that a contract should be interpreted strictly, but that is just not true. Both the common law and statute imply many “invisible” terms into contracts, so that hidden terms operate whether written into the contract or not. Also, employers should be aware of their possible liability for tortious acts or omissions, such as interference with business and economic interests, defamation, negligence and misleading & deceptive conduct. On the status side, employers like to conduct multi-stage interviews, both to try and locate the relative status of the applicant, and to establish employer authority. I think this is inherently self-defeating because the employer already has authority by virtue of his/her position, and need establish no more unless management lacks supervisory skills. Status-based interviewing should be minimised, or else when the employee naturally grows in stature, the employment relationship will either fail very quickly or self-terminate much later after organisational damage has been done.”

The Psychopathic Applicant
Question: How can hiring executives avoid engaging with psychopathic applicants?

Answer: “By gaining an understanding of what a psychopath really is. Psychopaths are much more preoccupied with self-definition than with relationship. They enjoy duping others and subjecting them to manipulation. Psychopaths are competent impostors, and they may either be aggressive or passive-parasitic. Aggressive psychopaths tend to have identified with a violent or abusive caregiver. Because of this, they feel anxiety less frequently or less intensely than non-psychopathic people, and lack a moral center of gravity that, if it were present, would direct them toward socially valuable ends. This can be assessed at interview, but not by resume. Psychopathic people may be charming and even charismatic, able to read the emotional states of others with red flush casino and great accuracy. They may be hyper-acute to their surroundings, but their own emotional life tends to be impoverished. Their expressed affect cannot be trusted as it is directed at manipulative purposes. They lack the ability to describe their own emotional reactions with any depth or shades of nuance. They usually experience no remorse, reflecting a grave disorder of early attachment. The psychopath does not respond to sympathy, but rather, reacts in preference to acts of power or to a powerful presence. I test for all of these at interview and they can’t detect that I am doing it.”

Interpreting and Working with Written Employment Contracts
Question: What is the main issue with written employment contracts that employers should be aware of?

Answer: “The main thing I want to point out here is that employers can be sued in tort, whether or not they think they complied with the employment contract. This is a litigious argument that can be extremely expensive to run and is an argument that no-one should want to have. For example: an employer who terminates an employee using the contract’s termination clause may still be sued in tort for misleading and deceiving the employee, and this litigation might damage the business substantially. There is one other issue. And that is the employee can have a well-drafted complaint submitted to ASIC in Australia, alleging unlawful board activity or negligence, by virtue of a junior manager’s conduct, and have the company investigated by federal officials. The employee might pay almost nothing to get this moving, and can sit back and watch it all happen. This is the kind of thing every company director has nightmares about.”

Managing the Casual Professional Workforce
Question: What are the problems with managing a casual workforce of professionals?

Answer: “The problem with these kinds of organisations is that they tend to be managed to maintain employee casualness. In other words, management is actively seeking the temporary nature of the casual employee. The natural outcome of this starts with low employee loyalty and can move along to active internal criminal activity, such as for example the crimes of larceny by a servant, false pretences, or more. These casual staff organisations should have an operational criminal intelligence analysis program and management should receive regular reports to consider carefully. Those managers who either cause or miss these problems will have truncated careers.”