You know that the single most important word to a person is his name? And the most beautiful sound to a person is the sound of his name pronounced correctly? And the most beautiful sight to a person is his name spelled correctly letter by letter?

I have to make confession here that remembering people’s name, especially the one that I just met proves to be a difficult task for me. Regardless of this weakness, I also do my best to remember people’s name using various ways I know, for example, mentally repeating my new acquaintance’s name several times and associating the name with his face or something else. Not an easy undertaking though, as my business environment often puts me in the situation where I meet people from different nations with various different way of pronouncing the name. I have failed many times and when it happened I’d find a way out by asking someone else, avoiding asking the person whose name I forgot directly. Of course, worse comes to worst, there is always a clear way out, that is “I apologise, but I am very lousy at people’s name. For my benefit, can you say your name again?”. My goal is to say the person’s name correctly when we conclude our meeting and say farewell. It will leave a long lasting impression and it will benefit our networking purposes.

Equally important is to spell the name correctly in written communication. This is much easier than face-to-face moment because the time is on our side and we have access to all information if we care to do it right. When I write email, before I click Send, I will vet the whole email once again, starting off with the first line “Dear Mr. ….” and make sure there is no spelling mistakes in the name. The fact that some people still make mistakes in spelling names in emails is simply beyond me. Either this person is in such a haste to send, doesn’t know that auto correct in smartphone exists and can mess the whole things up, or he simply doesn’t care. For the latter case, if this email comes from a sales guy, you know what quality of products or services he will deliver if you buy from him. People who doesn’t care much about your name which is the most beautiful word to you, wouldn’t even care much about you as the potential buyer.

In less frustrating circumstances, I have found some guys simply say ‘Hi’ in the first line of his every email without inserting any name. My guess is that this guy is used to talking to the wall and, granted, the wall doesn’t have name! Or he just doesn’t care spending a little time to find the person’s name to make things perfect. A small thing leads to perfection and perfection is not small thing.

This case of the name spelled wrongly has happened to me. My name is an Indonesian name which is not a popular name to the rest of the world. Sometime people address me as ‘Arroyo’, a Philippines name and ex president’s name, ‘Aryano’ which I don’t understand how they’ve come to this, or ‘Haryono’ which is more popular in Indonesia than Aryono. I understand that they don’t mean it. One question remains though, do they care enough?