Bill Morrow grew up in the “slums of San Francisco”. He’s now the CEO of Australia’s third largest telco and subjects all job candidates to an important personality test: how they treat serving staff.
David Ramli of the AFR reports that Morrow grew up poor and moved to a trailer park with his mother at the age of 15.
Morrow told the Fin that poverty taught him to manage without arrogance – an attribute he demands from every manager.
He recalled interviewing an Ivy League graduate who answered every question perfectly, until they went to lunch at a seaside cafe. The candidate reacted badly when the waitress made a mistake with a dish, so he didn’t get the job.
Here’s what Morrow told the Fin:
Don’t write me off because I come from the east side of a city that was incredibly poor, crime-ridden and where people barely finished high school let alone did anything with their career ambition or personal goals.
[…]
How you treat people and how you see yourself relative to those others is really important.
We had a call centre in Las Vegas, Nevada where the staff made about $20-30,000 per year, and they really just worked pay cheque to pay cheque.
If you take some guy that’s going to come in and make a half-million dollars a year . . . and they lead with a ‘this is my position and you do as I say’, almost king-like fashion, it just doesn’t work.
There’s more on the Fin.
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