The Waiter Rule
According to all CEOs interviewed there is one, infallible way to tell what kind of person someone is. Without fail (I did say infallible), how someone treats the waiter or others in similar positions says more about their personality and character than anything else. Here's a snip from the USA Today story on Yahoo! News:

How others treat the CEO says nothing, they say. But how others treat the waiter is like a magical window into the soul.

And beware of anyone who pulls out the power card to say something like, "I could buy this place and fire you," or "I know the owner and I could have you fired." Those who say such things have revealed more about their character than about their wealth and power....

The CEO who came up with it, or at least first wrote it down, is Raytheon CEO Bill Swanson. He wrote a booklet of 33 short leadership observations called Swanson's Unwritten Rules of Management. Raytheon has given away 250,000 of the books.

Among those 33 rules is only one that Swanson says never fails: "A person who is nice to you but rude to the waiter, or to others, is not a nice person."

Swanson says he first noticed this in the 1970s when he was eating with a man who became "absolutely obnoxious" to a waiter because the restaurant did not stock a particular wine.

"Watch out for people who have a situational value system, who can turn the charm on and off depending on the status of the person they are interacting with," Swanson writes. "Be especially wary of those who are rude to people perceived to be in subordinate roles."

The Waiter Rule also applies to the way people treat hotel maids, mailroom clerks, bellmen and security guards.

Wow! Is this ever true. I would add check-out people in Wal-Mart, strangers in front of you in line, etc. Anytime someone who is in a one-up position over someone else, how they treat the others is remarkably predictive of what they are really like.

But I sure hope this doesn't apply to telemarketers who have yet to figure out that the word no means NO!