HNB - the hard-nosed business(wo)man
Often when we're talking about how to sell something, somebody will bring up what they think a "hard-nosed businessperson" would think of a proposition, a product or a service. I think this HNB is an interesting figure. Like a character in a fairy tale, he or she is not any one real specific person, although they may be based on someone we know of and have had dealings with in the past (I always think of Alan Sugar in this role for example, although I've never actually had anything to do with him).
But the role of fairy tales is to help us think about ourselves, the world and the other people in it, the story is not real life. It's important to remember that we're dealing with a fairy tale, an illusion. It's easy to get swallowed up in what we think they might think and then get paralysed and stop. It's easy to forget that we made it all up in the first place. If our imagined HNB is beating us into a corner and we're stuck and can't go forward then it's no longer serving us, we need to wake up and remember that it's just a story, a mental tool to help us think. It should serve us, not the other way round.
I rambled about this further on audioboo:
