Terminators, Dogs, and Skills

I have a test that I used to give my vertical salespeople: if I dropped you into an industry cocktail party, how long could you last before someone figured out you didn’t work in the industry?The A+ outcome was that, after 20 minutes of talking with (for example) a group of senior publishing executives, someone would ask, “So, Larry, what publisher do you work for?” Larry would reply, “Oh, I don’t work for a publisher. I work at a software company that serves the media industry.”That was the standard. Larry understood their world well enough that they assumed he belonged to it. He could follow the conversation, ask good questions, talk at a business level, and contribute something useful without revealing through his language or assumptions that he came from somewhere else. That he was an outsider.Which brings me to dogs and Terminators. Remember the original Terminator movie? In the dystopic future, humans hid underground while machines controlled the surface. Terminators were built…