| WORLD VOICES CHOICES
BY WILLIAM EATON |
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Contents
Home Introduction About the Author The Riddle of the Miners The Anvil and the Hedgehog The Beauty of the System John Ruskin and His Mother Kleptomania and Its Discontents Smile and the Whole World Smiles with You Transgression Tiens, voilą une baffe There is an object called 'circle' Sick The Prophet Jonah World
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The
Riddle of the Miners In a book on investing
I came across a riddle of two miners who emerge
from a mine, one with a clean face, the other with a dirty one. The
question
is, which of the two will wash?
The
author offers
three
possible answers: (1) The
dirty one. (2) The two
miners will
look at one another, and,
seeing his partner’s clean face, the dirty one will assume that his own
is
clean, and vice-versa. So the clean one will wash. (3) It’s a bogus
riddle,
based on a false
assumption; it’s impossible for two men to be so differently affected
by the
same experience.
In my experience the
correct answer is none of the above; rather, the clean one will wash
his face
because his appearance coming out of the mine reveals his commitment to
cleanliness.
I
learned
this (or learned
that this is what subconsciously I believed) from the former employee
communications director of a major corporation. When he was forced to
golden-parachute and became a consultant, he made a list of all the
major
corporations whose employee communications were, let’s say, “dirty” —
that is,
in need of great improvement. He approached the managements of all
these
companies and did not get a lick of work. So then he turned to the
“clean”
companies, those whose internal communications were so good, they
didn’t seem
to have any need for his services. Quickly he had more work than he
could
handle.
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