From my childhood days to the present, I’ve had a unique opportunity to observe how people interact with technology and with each other. The more I see, the more my theories about technology are shaped in my year as “Then00b” ( another definition: a novice, one who plays, thinks or behaves like a novice, one whose self-acclaim is greatly superior to their actual expertise or accomplishments). Incidentally, I’ve come to understand that I’m not quite as “N00b”-ish as I thought when I first represented “the N00b” at Blogworld ’09 while sitting across from an “expert” during a BlogWorld Radio interview. As usual, the soil of my childhood and young adulthood, as well as my education, provided a fertile ground of knowledge. What is left for me is a hunger for experience. Like everything else, I’m confident that time (and people) will provide.

The Back Story: The Family Business

At the beginning of the home computer wave in the early 1980s, my parents opened a computer retail store, learning world, and small business dream center in Bellevue, WA. I watched my mother put together newspaper ads by hand (translation: piece of paper, cut and paste, tape, U-Hu glue stick, and a brayer), and I sat in the back of the store’s classroom while my father, a former professor of Computer Science, taught small business owners how to use their newly configured desktops. I packed computers into boxes and carted them off to the local post office, filed computer orders into large cabinets, and listened in on the marketing, government bids, and business meetings that launched my parent’s little company into a contending money maker.

The Front Story: More Heresy Dressed Up in Space Suits

Almost a year and a half ago, I went through a difficult and painful split with a friend and business partner. Before I even understood what was happening, I was being told I was this business partner’s enemy. In order to preserve the peace, we dissolved our business dealings. After a series of incidents, we mutually agreed to part ways entirely. What went wrong? One of my professors, who specializes in cross-cultural communication, believes the conflicts we encounter are just more of the same: “New heresy is just old heresy dressed up in space suits”. Translation: nothing new under the sun. What went wrong — and what keeps going wrong — is really the same things that have been going wrong. We simply make it look more complex. When we pull back the curtains and silence the bells and whistles, we shouldn’t be surprised that miscommunication is often at the heart of the problem. You don’t have to be a computer programmer – or a rocket scientist – to understand what kills a business relationship in the social media world. As I watched a friend try to kill a spider on his Christmas tree with bug spray, I realized I had a visual for how to make sure that a business relationship in the social media sector would have no chance in hell of recovering without intentional interventions. Want to make sure you that a business relationship you value dies a painful and embarrassing death? Look no further than the elements that kill ANY relationship of any kind: parent to child, spouse to spouse, business to business, friend to friend.

The easy and effective five step process (patent pending):

1. Stop listening. Ever notice how a person formulates his thoughts before the other person has finished speaking? When two people or two groups have stopped listening, neither have a chance to understand what is important to the other. Often it is not the content that is the problem, but the style of relating that is on the line. Compound that by adding in your own thoughts about what you think the other person is thinking, and next thing you know, you’re not fighting with the other person anymore: you are fighting yourself. According to — well, me — that is the worst kind of battle to fight, because you always end up losing.

2. Label and/or name call. Nomenclature can be used to help us understand something, but it can also create barriers when we drop someone into a box, stick a label on him, and ship him off to some destination where he does not really belong. Once we start calling someone an asshole, guess what? We start treating him like one, we start mapping all his actions as that of an asshole, and lo and behold: the man has little defense to anything he does. We give him no room. Essentially, we mold him into the very thing we do not want him to be. It is not so much the words that are shared or the actions committed that hurt. It is our interpretations of those words and actions that cause us suffering. The childhood taunt, “Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me” lives only in the hearts of children and adults who have been emotionally maimed with bullying in the form of name calling and labeling. For more information on the connection between interpretations, suffering, and relationships, read Byron Katie’s book, Loving What Is.

3. Gossip, mock, and/or publicly shame the other party. While attending my second graduate school program, a scandal broke out involving a professor and one or more of his students. Though he was never found guilty of wrong-doing, the accusation about forming inappropriate relationships with students and the ensuing gossip was no different than a modern-day version of the movie “Doubt.” The professor quickly left the school. A cursory review of the chat room entries on the subject made my stomach turn. People who were not even associated with the school inserted their noses into the business of others, a practice that I found repulsive, sad, and unnecessarily cruel. When a business partnership is struggling, shameful gossip – whether behind closed doors, Twittered, YouTubed, or Googled to the ends of the earth — float freely like electronic leaves in the virtual wind. If you want to kill a relationship quickly, simply tell anyone who will listen that your business partner is difficult to work with, incompetent, lazy, or unethical. If you’re really ruthless, make a video or post a blog entailing everything you can’t stand about the other party. Those with wagging tongues will enjoy the process of repeating and reposting those words and videos even if they have nothing to gain by them except a few more trolling followers.

4. Withdraw. During a class on the subject of marriage, a woman asked a professor what to do when her husband escaped a difficult conversation by hiding in the bathroom. The professor paused, grimaced, and said, “Let him know that you don’t have a problem talking to him through the door. All night, if necessary. If he continues to not talk to you, withhold sex.” When you or your business partner make yourself unaccessible, the relationship goes into death mode, only it’s a more slow process (think Captain Kirk’s death in “Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country”). Processes go into defaults and holding patterns, nothing gets done, and eventually someone will pull the plug because the bottom line (money) doesn’t get met. However, if you or your partner is passive aggressive in nature, it’s an oldie-but-goodie choice if you have time to kill and something else to fall back on.

5. Suffocate the relationship with resentment. At the University of Washington, the Gottman Institute developed an interview process that helps predict the viability of long-term relationships or its likelihood of tanking. Wanna know what one of the single-most reliable indicators is? Eye rolling. This subconscious behavior, often accompanied by deep sighing and silence, is statistically correlated to an early death of a relationship. Like bug spray, resentment chokes off the emotional connection that people build with each other, whether they are aware of that connection or not. Resentment severs camaraderie, humor, playful banter, and calls into question any foundational underpinnings of trust. Non-verbal cues like eye rolling, silence, and deep sighing signal to the other person that you have given up, that you no longer believe in him/her/them/us, and frankly, your appreciation has dropped so low that you wish they would go away and leave you alone. When you are no longer grateful for their presence, your own body will betray your feelings. With 80% of communication existing in non-verbal forms, you can expect that you are being read more thoroughly than a Kindle.

Take a look at any business disaster on record, and observe how many of these five elements were primary factors to the company’s demise or irreversible and horrific decisions. Whilst formulating this blog entry, I borrowed a book from Chris Pirillo called The Geek Gap by Bill Pfleging and Minda Zetlin (2006), and though the book targets managers and geeks, the primary issue is communication for understanding between two culture-clashing groups. The book includes case studies we can learn from on what NOT to do when two groups don’t agree. All the stories share the same breakdown in communication, and you’ll quickly decipher the keys to killing any business relationship.

Why is this information valuable? As bleak as the problem looks, however, there is hope. In some cases, there may even be life after death! If you are aware of the problem, you are also in better control of your own reactions and solutions. In another blog entry, I will share with you five effective ways to strengthen a business relationship (and none of them involve sleeping together or making creme brulee).

Bernice Imei Hsu, nurse psychotherapist, Belly Dance and Bollywood artist, Yoga instructor, gourmandise, travel enthusiast, musician, food magician, collage artist, and pet lover, continues to write about 365- 1/4 days as “The n00b” with wide-eyed wonder as a newbie to the world of Social Media; today is day 90. Her writing can be found on www.hipsforhire.ning.com or @hipsforhire on Twitter. She lives with her cat Charles-Monet and cooks a mean seafood risotto. She lives in Seattle, WA.

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