Style versus substance

I was having coffee with a colleague of mine, Steve, this week. Steve works in international sales for a highly successful Australian air monitoring business called Ecotech.

Over coffee we were drawing a parallel between pain and knowledge. Basically pain doesn’t seem to hurt as much when you get older because you have a much larger “backdrop” of pain to measure it again. “Sure the cut hurts, but no where near as bad as the time I cut open the roof of my mouth”. Which makes kids tend to think you have a really high tolerance for pain.

In regards to knowledge, we both felt that there was plenty of stuff we knew and simply took for granted. Interesting and useful bits and pieces picked up over 20 years don’t tend to stand out as a dramatic insight, especially when you have hundreds or thousands of the things stuffed away in your head. So it always comes as a surprise when you are asked to explain something that appears so obvious to you, but not to a graduate or someone at the start of their career. The type of person who can explain the weighted average cost of capital – but gasps at an insight like managing your cashflow actually matters.

So this was the context I was thinking in when I got an email today from a Churchill Club member who asked me whether I thought clothing was important, even though it had nothing to do with a person’s substance behind the scene. The position was kind of “are these things related?”

My answer was of course they are – but nothing as simple as the old saying “dress for success”. People who say that are almost certainly fools you should run away from, and never do business with.

I tend to think of the matter as a two axis graph. On the Y axis (the up and down one) you have style and on the X axis (the left to right one) you have substance. Style I tend to think of as how you present yourself, substance is your ability. Jon-Michail, who spoke recently at the Churchill Club on the topic of personal brand says that style includes your clothes, language, habits and environment. Style is not just wearing a nice suit – it’s wearing a beautiful suit if you are in business, cutting edge clothes if you are in fashion and outrageous clothes if you are creative. It’s creating the style to immediately portray what you are and how good you are at it. As a contrast – substance is not just your technical capability, but your depth of experience and authenticity.

Style versus Substance

When you put them together, you get a graph that suggests to me four types of people.

No Style No Substance = Larry Loser
If you have no skills or capability and you don’t present yourself in the best light, opportunities will never ever come your way and what you have will be eroded. If this is you, do something now – don’t bug me about it though.

Style but no Substance = Fast Eddy
I see this person all the time. They tend to move up through the world very quickly, impressing the people ahead of them and making those left behind bitter and angry as they never actually achieve anything at all. They’re very big on weasel words, and in my experience – always come a cropper (the universe is brutally fair after all).

Substance but no Style = The Not-so Quiet Achiever
This person endlessly whines about other people taking credit for their work and they never seem to get a break. They feel that their abilities are all important and only shallow people wouldn’t recognise this. Despite life long evidence to the contrary. These people make good workers, not leaders.

Bags of Styles and Substance = Winner
Sometimes you meet someone and from that first moment they appear to be really good at what they do, and then surprise, surprise they actually do what they say they were going to. You can’t help but become a true fan and rave about these people. These “winners” with both style and substance endlessly have first-class opportunities offered up them and are forgiven for any mistakes they might make. One can only aspire…

So here’s the guts of it. If you’re a technician and want to be known as a technician – dress like one (I have immediate confidence in the guy wearing blue KinGees rather than blue jeans). But if you are a technician who is trying to cross over to run your own business – start wearing a suit (a good one not a crappy one), learn the language and act with confidence. I reckon that all this is obvious but decided it was worthwhile mentioning, just in case it wasn’t obvious to everyone.

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Brendan Lewis is a serial technology entrepreneur having founded: Ideas Lighting, Carradale Media, Edion, Verve IT, The Churchill Club, Flinders Pacific and L2i Technology Advisory. He has set up businesses for others in Romania, Indonesia and Vietnam. Qualified in IT and Accounting, he has also spent time running an Advertising agency and as a Cavalry Officer with the Australian Army Reserve.