What would a village elder have done?

I read a bit of a rant on line on Friday. My husband retweeted a link to the post - so I had a look. Quick summary below:

Someone in a digital media agency had their time wasted by a would be competitor who used a lame old trick to get the media agency chap to talk about his business. He rang up posing as a potential customer and wasted a couple of hours of this chap's time. It was a very clumsy and lazy approach to doing a bit of competitor analysis, made considerably worse by the fact that the misguided "analyst" lied about where he worked. The first time he lied, it was part of his disguise and the second time through fear, no doubt realising that he had been found out.

Not a hugely interesting story - but it was retweeted by someone else I follow on Twitter and who knows a hell of a lot more about how these things work than I do. So I had another look at the story and all the comments it had attracted. And the thing that struck me is just how powerful social media is and in return for having a couple of hours wasted, this understandably annoyed person has effectively ruined the career of some silly newbie idiot who didn't understand what he was doing. The blog post in which his annoyance is vented links to the "analysts" deleted linked in page. That's going to take a lot of explaining at the next job interview.

One of the comments reads "kudos to you for outing him without resorting to ranting and name-calling". But surely this was the digital equivalent of ranting and name calling? The author of the post ends by wishing the "analyst" and the company he works for the very best of luck - which sounds a bit disingenuous - really. If he had genuinely wished him luck, he could have called him up and explained that all he would have to do was write a blog post on the incident and the "analyst" would never work in socal media again.

I don't work in this industry. Perhaps I would feel differently if I did. It certainly appears to be an industry that champions openness and honesty and I can see how this would be upsetting to people involved. You believe that you are successfully creating a new way of doing something, then someone comes along who doesn't know how it works and gets it wrong. But does it really justify throwing the full power of what you're working with at him in order to teach him? Granted - I'm a bit of a hippy - but still - it just seems a bit too unkind.

For me, the problem lies in the distinction between dealing with people and organisations. Maybe name calling is okay if it's an organisation but not if its an individual. People make mistakes - it's how we learn. Organisations make mistakes - which are the collective mistake of a group of individuals. Organisations have strategies for recovery and brand protection etc.... I'm not sure the average individual does. In this particular case, the individual was rapidly disowned by the organisation he represented.

So what would a village elder have done? Pulled the new guy aside and said - that's not how we do it - here's how it works - try again. It's more graceful and more mature that way.