When the Emperor Has No Clothes He Should Stay Home

Back in the mid-1990s, I worked for a large telecommunications company. The industry was changing as the internet was asserting itself as the dominant place for technology-driven companies, who were positioning themselves for the future.

To meet the challenges of this new technology, companies sought expertise from a small group of industry experts and through training programs designed to ramp up workforces.

Given my background in electronics, my qualifications, including many industry-standard certifications, and my twenty-plus years of experience deploying and maintaining high-tech systems, people viewed me as an expert in the new technology.

An international standards group hired me as Manager of Training and Education to help spread the word. My task was to implement and deliver the latest information on high technology to my clients and customers.

Despite my credentials, I always felt apprehensive when it came to teaching. I took the responsibility seriously, so I worked hard to learn all I could. If I were going to claim expertise, it was important to be an expert. It was all new, so if I didn’t know something, I said, “I don’t know, but I will find out.”

One spring, my company sponsored a two-day event intended to showcase the latest technology and to feature our latest training courses on how to implement and use this technology to solve business solutions going forward.

We wanted to draw a large audience, so we hired a widely read author of a popular technical publication to be the keynote speaker. His popularity meant he was well-paid but, in our estimation, a worthwhile expense.

The response to our event was good as professionals from across the country packed the room.

The big-name speaker started his presentation with a joke that elicited considerable laughter. I immediately thought, he knows how to capture an audience. That was the last good thought I had about his presentation. It went downhill from there.

He had a pre-written program, including a slide show and handouts. Yet, I noticed he had difficulty staying on task and in sync with his own program.

He made repeated mistakes, which made me question whether he had written any of the presentation. Even worse, his lack of depth made me question his understanding of the subject matter itself.

At first, I appeased myself with the idea he was trying to keep it simple. He didn’t want to overwhelm the audience. As the presentation wore on, he replaced knowledge of the subject with crude jokes. The brash rhetoric seemed to be his only vehicle for keeping the audience’s attention.

When he finally made an inappropriate and demeaning comment about a young female engineer seated in the front row, the room went silent.

The woman, who was used to fighting for respect in a male-dominated engineering career, snapped back. She not only corrected his interpretation of the facts, but she also re-explained the technology correctly to the rest of the audience. Then she stood up, called him a fraud, and stormed out of the auditorium.

Realizing he had lost the room, he tried to dismiss her outrage with another bad joke. But it was too late.

Try as he did to recover, it was painfully obvious he was not only unprepared, but he wasn't the expert he claimed to be. He had no understanding of the technology. The book that he authored, his claim to fame, was not something he could have written. He likely copied from other industry experts, his students, or subordinates who worked for his company.

Somehow, this industry expert had been fooling audiences by doing little more than entertaining them without providing them with any value. His lack of expertise finally caught up with him.

He left the conference in shame, yet unapologetic. The audience, who had hoped to learn more about groundbreaking technology, left that presentation disappointed as well.

We were able to recover from a bad opening act with the help of additional presenters and hands-on demonstrations, which helped make the conference a success. But I will never forget the debacle. For weeks afterward, the buzz around our industry was the speaker’s folly. Sometimes bad press can be a double-edged sword. His book sales likely waned, but everyone remembered our 2-day event.

In the end, I was happy the young female engineer disrobed the fraud. Along the way, she gained some notoriety for herself. I lost track of her career after that event. But I can assure you that even if people did not remember her name, they remembered the day she told off an impostor.

It also reinforced my belief that if you do not know something, don’t pretend. Someone might call you out.

Photo by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash