Your future career success just might depend on how you answer that question. And your answer comes in how you act, not in the words you use to answer it.

Talk is cheap. Actions speak louder than words. (Don't knock clichés. They got to be that way because they are so true.)

As a teenager, Office Depot CEO Steve Odland worked as a waiter. One evening he spilled a purple sorbet onto a woman's white dress- and expected the worst.

But the lady was gracious and let him off with a reassuring, "It's OK, it wasn't your fault." Odland never forgot the experience and has since made it a principle: You can tell a lot about a person by the way he or she treats the waiter.

A great many other CEOs have learned the same lesson and use it in evaluating potential employees or when deciding on which junior executives to advance.

The rule may have appeared first in a 1944 book entitled "The Unwritten Laws of Engineering" by W.J. King, a UCLA professor. Raytheon CEO Bill Swanson was so impressed that he plagiarized from King's book in creating a popular booklet he called: Swanson's Unwritten Rules of Management. (Swanson was penalized by the Raytheon board for his plagiarism. See Wall Street Journal, 5/4/04, p. B7.)

A person who is nice to you but rude to the waiter...is not a nice person

One of King's rules, as Swanson reported it, is: "A person who is nice to you but rude to the waiter, or to others, is not a nice person (This rule never fails.)" The worst are those who are rude to people in subordinate roles, such as hotel maids, bellmen and security guards.

Readers of this website are probably not surprised by this information. A person who is cordial, or even obsequious to others at his level or higher, but rude and obnoxious to those he perceives as "underlings," demonstrates lack of self-esteem and confidence.

Many CEOs make a point to observe how potential employees conduct themselves with waiters, secretaries, assistants and the like because they have learned that this provides sound predictive information about the person. Rudeness to the waiter or secretary indicates future rudeness to workers in the company. That implies unhappy employees and lost productivity. Why hire a person like that?

I am not suggesting that you be nice to waiters just to improve your job prospects. Be nice to waiters and other working people because it's the right thing to do. (One's ethics should be applied consistently regardless of who the other party is.) Much good and no harm will come from it.

My own story

My own waiter story is about an event some years ago in a newly opened restaurant on the Sunset Strip.

It was a busy lunchtime and the operation was suffering growing pains, resulting in some mistakes and delay in our order. The young waiter (probably an aspiring actor) apologized for this and I reassured him by saying, "Don't worry, we're all in this together, so we'll work it out satisfactorily, I'm sure."

We got helpful and excellent service thereafter. That was long before the Internet and this web site came along, but I think I was following a sound principle.

When dealing with waiters, clerks, bellmen or whatever, enroll them in a team effort of equals working together to achieve your objective.

[Information for this article appeared at USATODAY.com,4/17/06 ]

David Bergland, the Libertarian Party presidential candidate in 1984, is the author of "Libertarianism In One Lesson" (now in its 9th Edition), available from the Advocates for Self-Government. Mr. Bergland is a retired attorney and active martial arts and self-defense instructor in Kennewick, Washington. Email him at dpbergland@yahoo.com.

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