“So what do you do for a living?” That was the question posed to me by a cab driver the other day, as we waited for a friend who’d popped into a laptop repair shop to come back out and join us in the car. And, to be honest, it’s quite a tough one to answer, if the person answering isn’t used to the world of business, sales, procurement. “Proposal manager? What’s one of them, then?”
My son Benedict used to ask me a similar question when he was much younger: “What do you do at work, daddy?” I guess if one’s an engine driver, a police officer, a teacher, it’s easy to respond. But how to explain to a small child about the world of proposals?
My answer, which seemed to satisfy him? “I go to work to help business people to tell stories.”
Now he’s somewhat older, and he knows much more of what I do, I think he’s a bit disappointed that my working life’s not quite as glamorous as “storytelling” might imply. But I actually think it’s a pretty good summary of what we do.