Trust-based Selling Between Cultures

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The hardest thing about describing Trust-based Selling to Americans is the idea that the first step in selling has nothing to do with selling. They just don’t get it. Maybe this will help.

Jim Peterson—lawyer, accountant, former newspaper columnist, blogger—told me this delightful story about himself.

I’m an American, and had moved to Paris as an expat, to be senior in-house counsel in Europe for my global firm. The dossier included oversight of our litigation, disputes and risk management.

I inherited a very large piece of pending litigation: we were one of the several defendants — the lead plaintiff was a large French bank. The case had been going on in the course of Germany for several years — but it was then dormant.

I got from the files the name of my in-house counterpart at the bank — whose office was near mine in Paris — and invited him to meet over lunch. The ground rule was–no discussion of the case or its details or merits, since I had no background on the matter and there was no activity then or on the horizon. We did in fact meet up — had a fine and proper French meal including a good bottle of wine — and parted company.

The case ran on in Germany for a year and a half or so. Eventually the local lawyers for both sides called to say that it was time for a settlement, but that they were at an impasse and there was no prospect for fruitful discussions.

I went back to my phonebook. I called the bank’s lawyer in Paris, got caught up on the current status, and asked for a meeting. In a Paris conference room, in about an hour, a successful resolution was reached.

To the French, relationships are vitally important in the conduct of business of all kinds. This could not have happened if we had been coming together for the first time. (The American mis-apprehension about the rudeness of French shop-keepers, waiters and taxi drivers is misplaced — they simply don’t know or have any relationship with a new arrival. By taking the time to be courteous and conversational, ahead of the desire to transact business, the entire atmosphere can be changed. And even more so when you become a repeat customer.)

We Americans, with characteristic brevity and impatience, have an urge to "get on with it." We consider this a virtue, despite the fact that this approach will often leave us frustrated and will yield sub-optimal results. Neither does this alter our belief that we are results-driven.  But the truth is: slowing down rather than rushing to finish in time to catch the afternoon plane will often yield a better outcome.

By extension, I have used variations on this approach even in the American context — where the investment of a small amount of time and effort is often seen to bear fruit.

Jim is not alone. One Japanese bargaining technique (as per Riding the Waves of Culture, a great book) is to wait until the Americans have confirmed their return flights before demanding an additional item or making a small concession in their position. The urge to hold to a preset plan is so strong that the Americans will jump at the offer rather than reschedule.

The point is not just that Americans are prisoners to our own US-centric views of culture, but that we are mistaken even about our own culture. The simple powerful truth, anywhere in the world, is that people prefer to do business with those with whom they have some kind of relationship. The mechanics of that differ; the principle does not. Tons of sales are left on the table in the US because of an inability to deal with relationships. 

Want to sell? Then first Stop Trying to Sell. 

This truth is no less truthful for being a truism: People don’t care what you know, until they know that you care.

The best sales begin with relationship. Deal with it.

TrustedAdvisor Associates Workshops & Events, Winter 2010-11

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Join us at one or more upcoming Trusted Advisor Associates events. In January we’ll be hosting or participating in events in Fairfield, New Jersey; Seattle, Washington; Portland, Oregon and through the globally accessed radio show "Trust Across America." Also, a few words about the new Trusted Advisor Mastery Program, and an offer to vote in this year’s Annual Top Sales Awards. 

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Wed. Jan. 12th        Global/Radio         Charles H. Green

Charles H. Green will be guest-hosting the Trust Across America Radio show, guests to be announced. Noon EST.

Thurs. Jan. 20th          Fairfield, NJ     Charles H. Green  

Charlie presents to Wharton Alumni Club of New Jersey on Trust, Influence and Advising. Club Cucina Calandra, Fairfield NJ, 6PM.  Email us at [email protected] to be notified of signup link when it goes live (within a week).


Wed. Jan. 24th            Seattle, WA       Charles H. Green

University of Washington, evening:  Details/venue to be announced: email us at [email protected] to be notified of details when finalized.


Mon. Jan. 25th            Portland, OR     Charles H. Green

Charlie is luncheon speaker at the CFA Society of Portland luncheon; subject Building and Maintaining Trust with Clients and Prospects. Open to the public.   Click to register here. 

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The current edition of the Trusted Advisor Mastery Program is entering its third week and hitting its stride. Participants bring their own unique experiences sharply to bear on issues we all address, so we all benefit from the perspective. Some perspectives: 62 Tips for Selling in a Recession.

To get on the notification list for the next Trusted Advisor Mastery Program, write to: [email protected]

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Vote for your favorite Sales Blog at The Annual Top Sales Awards.  And if you’re moved to vote for Trust Matters, well that wouldn’t hurt our feelings one little bit.

Beyond 51 percent: Gaining Buy-In

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In the airport recently, coming home from New Mexico, I just picked up John Kotter  and Lorne A. Whitehead’s new little book, Buy*in: Saving Your Good Idea from Getting Shot Down.  The authors outline four ways in which attackers – consciously or not – try to kill new ideas:

–        Fear-mongering (hmm, where have we seen this before?)

–        Death by Delay

–        Sowing Confusion

–        Ridicule or Character Assassination

Their strategy for disarming these objectors is, at its heart, simple and counter-intuitive: instead of trying to work around naysayers, lining up votes in the cloakroom, ignoring vocal critics or trying to shout them down, Kotter and Whitehead suggest throwing open the doors and inviting the lions in. 

The key is then LISTENING WITH RESPECT. Kotter and Whitehead point out that trying to overwhelm the idea-attackers with more data and rebut them with more logical arguments won’t succeed. The critics need to be heard.

This research comports exactly with our teachings around building trust and gaining influence: listening as a sign of respect, letting others be heard before offering advice, the principle of reciprocity. Without first listening, we cannot be heard. And without being heard, our good advice or new ideas will never be accepted.

It really is that simple: to be heard, you have to listen first. 

The authors go on to give specific strategies for handling 24 objections, acknowledging the critic and at the same time avoiding getting drawn into inappropriate merits arguments. Take for example their Attack #18:

ATTACK: Good idea, but it’s the wrong time. We need to wait until this other thing is finished (or this other thing is started, or the situation changes in some specific way.)

RESPONSE: The best time is almost always when you have people excited and committed to make something happen. And that’s now.

****

As I read through Buy*in and thought about it in the context of Trusted Advisor Associates’ work, I was also struck by a conversation I had had the day before with my sister, whom I had been visiting in her home near Taos. I mentioned that people of all sorts seemed willing to tell her anything. 

She just smiled and said: “It’s because I’m not afraid to hear it.” A lesson I’m bringing home with me.

Is Trust Trending?

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Here are six events I’ve noticed recently. I think there’s a connection, and perhaps even a trend in them. Help me sort out what that connection and trend might be, will you?

1. In mid-October, 100 of the world’s leading authorities on corporate disclosure gathered at Harvard Business School to attend an event called “A Workshop on Integrated Reporting: Frameworks and Action Plan” sponsored by the school’s Business and Environment Initiative. (Very briefly: Integrated reporting means combining traditional financial reporting with non-financial, i.e. Environmental, Social and Governance, issues). You can download a free ebook from the event with papers by about half the participants—it’s excellent.

2. The new Dean of Harvard Business School—who among other things had been a counselor to the MBA Oath program the year before—opened the conference, saying: "It’s a matter of great concern to me that society has lost so much trust in business.  It’s something that I think each and every one of us needs to pay great and serious attention to.  We live in a time in which business leaders are often trusted even less than politicians."

3. The New Yorker magazine printed an article titled, “What Good is Wall Street? Much of What Investment Bankers Do is Socially Useless,” whose tone is considerably less strident than its title might suggest.

4. October saw the release of the documentary “Inside Job,” a serious (and seriously critical) look at the recent financial crisis by Charles Ferguson, an MIT PhD in political science.

5. The MBA Oath, something that many considered faddish a year ago, seems to be gaining steam. 

6. Robert Ketchum, head of FINRA, seems to be advocating for a fiduciary standard of some sort for the brokerage business. 

One robin doth not a Spring make; and maybe I’m generally an optimist. But I think there’s something positive going on here.

When I see integrated reporting discussed by 100 people—not just non-financial reporting, but integrated reporting—I think that’s significant.

When I see global business institutions like the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration making serious trust-talk at the Dean’s level (and Dean Nitin Nohria was appointed in part, I’m sure, because he talks that way), I think that’s significant.

I realize the New Yorker is not Forbes magazine, but when they decide that it’s time to write a serious business article, and to do so with their high standards of journalism, I think that’s significant. 

When the financial legislation was passed earlier this year, the fiduciary issue was left out of the mandated laws, and left to the discretion of the SEC. Given the recent election results, I wouldn’t have predicted FINRA’s reaction. That feels significant.

What I think is significant about all this is not that an argument is being won or lost. This strikes me as refreshingly not about good and evil. It’s about a new willingness to take seriously some complex issues of trust. How do we integrate stakeholders? What does trust mean for governance? Can we have intelligent regulations that increase trust? 

Most of all, I sense a willingness to bring trust to the business table as a core and valid agenda item—a willingness that I don’t think was there as recently as just 12 months ago. 

Is something going on? Or am I on drugs? What do you think?

Five Ways to Create Trust with Stories

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You already know you’re supposed to use stories to convey your point, right? Yet be honest: are you still using Powerpoint decks crowded with 12-point fonts and multiple bullets? And no stories?

If you suspect you might not be using story-telling as much as you should, let’s review the bidding.

Five Reasons to Use Story-Telling

1. Many of us veto the use of a story because we think it makes us appear unprofessional, or risks being seen as “too soft” on content. That right there’s a good reason to increase your use of stories: professionals especially under-estimate their utility.

2. Sims Wyeth describes why story-telling is the perfect solution to the “split audience” problem: when half the audience are technical, half aren’t; half are old, half young; and so on. And he tells you how to do it.

3. Stories create emotional connection. Sean Kavanagh of the Ariel Group explains the Irish version of the story connection. 

4. There is something about a story that lowers the emotional resistance to advice. The best way to get a teenager not to do something is to tell them to do it. And we’re all in touch with our inner teenager. But stories get past that. Somehow, when we hear the ‘meaning’ of the story, it becomes our meaning. Our inner NIH syndrome disappears, and we accept the advice, even if it’s very transparent, in ways we never would directly.

There’s a reason that we watch Jimmy Stewart play George Baily in It’s A Wonderful Life every year–because we love the story. And part of that story is the story that the angel Clarence tells George Baily—the story of his life-as-it-could-have-been. This story-telling device was used precisely the same way, to equally great success, in The Christmas Carol. Come to think of it, ditto for 1,001 Arabian Nights—the story of 1,001 stories. 

5. And then there’s metaphor.  A story is a form of metaphor. Metaphors allow us to make connections in ways that our linear, rational minds never allow. In some ways, deploying stories as metaphors gives us the widest range of all in terms of uses. 

Anne Miller has written a book on precisely that subject, called Make What You Say Pay. In chapters organized by application, Miller gives example after example of metaphors: to explain new concepts, to simply a complex pitch, to shift a paradigm, to close a deal, and so forth.  

Miller’s book gives at least five times five ways to use stories as metaphor, you’re bound to find several that help your work. 

Want some advice on how to get better at telling your stories? I can think of no one better qualified than Patricia Fripp. Here is a 7-minute YouTube piece from a National Speaker Association talk by the Frippster. You will not get more insights-per-minute anywhere else.

Fripp says, “Stories are the creative conversion of life itself, into a more powerful, clear, more meaningful experience.” And an audience will always prefer a simple story well told to a brilliant story badly told. (For the few combination speaker-musicians out there, you may know Patricia’s brother—King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp). 

When Journalistic Trust is a Matter of Life and Death

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We in the US are frequently critical of the media.  And when we talk about trust, it is often in at a luxury level.

But tonight I attended the 20th Press Freedom Awards, presented by the Committee to Project Journalists –and got rudely reminded of how trust and journalism and life and death play intricate dances with each other in this world.

Yes, it was a swish event: black-tie, about a thousand guests, celebrity hosts—Tom Brokaw (who pinch-hit for Brian Williams—something to do with his day job and Korea), Christiane Amanpour, Gwen Ifill, Sir Howard Stringer. But it was a very serious event too.

Journalism is Hazardous to Your Health

39 journalists have been killed in 2010. Since 1992, 840 journalists have been murdered with impunity. Murder may be the leading cause of death for journalists–and the killers are rarely prosecuted, or even sought.  At this moment, 140 journalists are imprisoned around the world. The Committee to Protect Journalists fights on their behalf; in Iran, Sri Lanka, Venezuela, Russia, Mexico. They provide legal assistance, personal help—and aggressively intercede with national governments. 

Interestingly, virtually every government at least admits the principle that they shouldn’t be harming journalists. And thus the power of the press to “name and shame,” as one awardee put it, is far-reaching.

The Power of Truth and Trust

One of the most basic parts of the Trust Equation is credibility—can we believe what we are told. At a social level, this is a critical question: are we being told the truth? 

If a social group believes it is being told the truth, then we can trust what we hear, and trust the teller. If we do not believe we are being told the truth, then we don’t trust the teller—and it all goes downhill from there.

In society, the enemy of truth-telling is typically a government, a would-be government, or a quasi-government: some group of people who want to control others, and who fear that the truth will get in their way of doing so. 

And in society, it is the job of journalists to tell the truth. By that definition, it is journalists who are in charge of the level of trust in society. If they are allowed to operate, they oxygenate our dialogue. If they are repressed (or, as one awardee pointed out, simply denigrated over and over), then our oxygen flow is reduced.  We don’t believe.  And then we don’t trust–government, business, the other political party, our neighbors. 

Is Truth Relative? Come On

Some critics will say that ‘truth’ and a ‘free press’ are bourgeois affectations of a society that is itself corrupt. Sara Palin talks about the ‘lamestream’ press, and both right- and left-wing critics say there can be no such thing as ‘truth.’

And then there are the facts staring you in the face in that room tonight.

Journalists are convicted of terrorism for reporting the facts of arrest in Russia. A journalist ‘disappeared’ in Sri Lanka 300 days ago, but the government hasn’t initiated efforts to ‘find’ him. 30 journalists were massacred in the Philippines, but attorneys are not being granted access to the evidence.

You have to be Taliban-far out of the mainstream to argue that this kind of suppression isn’t a bad thing. We can all agree.

And if so, there you go. Social trust thrives on truth. Truth is sought by journalists. The attempt to suppress or neutralize them is anti-truth, and anti-trust.

As Tom Brokaw pointed out in his closing, we have luxury debates in the US. Our freedom of speech is enshrined in a constitutional amendment–the first one, in fact. Watching five people from foreign lands who put their freedom and even their lives at risk in search of those rights is a humbling experience.

Sales Training: By Good, or by Bad, Example?

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I was recently chatting with Mahan Khalsa, as part of an upcoming Trust Quotes Series interview I’m doing with him. I’m excited about it, because his Let’s Get Real Or Let’s Not Play was one of the three Great Sales Books I considered when writing my own. Stay tuned for that interview sometime this winter.

While we were talking, he asked me an interesting question.

“Why,” he said, “did you place the S factor in the trust equation into the denominator as a negative item?”

Here’s what he meant. We could have defined the trust equation as:

(Credibility + Reliability + Intimacy + Other-Orientation)

Instead, we chose:

(Credibility + Reliability + Intimacy)

            Self-Orientation

I had to think about that, including after our phone call. Here’s what I came up with.

I thought a+b+c+d was inherently boring. It raises the question, “why not e, and f, and g?” That kind of model just looks to me like one long string of positive attributes.

But by changing other-orientation—a positive attribute—into self-orientation (a negative one), and flipping it into the denominator, I think we made it far more human. And by human, I mean—we do dumb things. We screw up. In fact, that’s what makes us human, one could argue. (Man is the only animal who blushes. Or has cause to.  Mark Twain.)

So by enshrining that little negative component and very clearly making it a limiting factor on our potential for being trusted, I felt we mirrored something human. There are the good things we have to do—and then there’s the bad things we have to watch out for.

What a Contrarian View Means for Sales Training

I don’t know if Mahan thinks this way, but the natural instinct of a great many trainers is to focus on the positive: to show the model of how things should be done. 

You describe the model; you show how it makes sense; you demonstrate it, you practice it, you focus on refining the essence of it, and you gradually get better and better at it.

I have always felt a little squirmy about that. I just have a predilection to want to know how things fall off the rails, how they go wrong. I’m interested in the psychology behind how we are our own worst enemies, how we sabotage ourselves. This comes, I’m quite clear, from my own inner struggles at how to think and feel about selling.

My first major sales article, Selling Professional Services, was written this way. I just felt that if I couldn’t come to grips with the fears in my own head, I would never be at ease with selling, nor would or should any client be at ease with me. So I wrote about my own fears, assuming others felt them as well.

Enough people clearly did, and that article was the beginning of what became, with much more material, the book Trust-based Selling four years later.

In the sales training work I do, I still reflect this bias. I prefer role-play examples that tend toward the train wreck, because I believe we can all nod knowingly down that path—and when we see how we went wrong, we can conquer that fear.

I prefer sales discussions that focus not on great elevator pitches, but on why elevator pitches make us feel smarmy; that focus not on great objection-handling, but rather on shared objectives. Years ago Thomas Harris wrote “I’m OK, You’re OK.” One of these days I intend to write I’m an Idiot, You’re an Idiot: Let’s Just Get On With It. 

I believe this parallels William James’ views in Varieties of Religious Experience. He described the “once-born” and the “twice-born.” The once-born come into the world religiously, live religious lives of peace and happiness, and die at peace with their god and their religion. 

The twice-born, by contrast, have been to hell and back—and know the difference. Their religion is constantly informed by a sense of grace, because they know how thin is the line that separates sanity and insanity, rich and poor, lucky and unlucky. In case you didn’t gather, I identify more with these guys.

And how about you? How do you like to learn, or teach, sales?  Does it work better for you to focus on the good, the right way to do things, the model of success? Or do you like shining the light under the bed to scare away the sales monsters?  

The Best Movie You Haven’t Heard Of: Inside Job

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Here are the ratings (% who liked) from Flixster for some of the movies playing this weekend:

90%            The Social Network

88%            Inside Job

81%            Unstoppable           

78%            MegaMind

78%            Jackass 3-D

77%            Red           

75%            Skyline

65%            Due Date

65%            Morning Glory

64%            The Next Three Days           

54%            Saw 3D

You know The Social Network. But how about the #2 movie, Inside Job? Ever hear of it?

96% of the critics liked it. Rotten Tomatoes rated it 96%.  It’s narrated by Matt Damon. Feeling out of the loop yet? Why haven’t you heard of this movie?

More on obscurity later, but here’s the official synopsis:

‘Inside Job’ is the first film to provide a comprehensive analysis of the global financial crisis of 2008, which at a cost over $20 trillion, caused… ‘Inside Job’ is the first film to provide a comprehensive analysis of the global financial crisis of 2008, which at a cost over $20 trillion, caused millions of people to lose their jobs and homes in the worst recession since the Great Depression, and nearly resulted in a global financial collapse.

Through exhaustive research and extensive interviews with key financial insiders, politicians, journalists, and academics, the film traces the rise of a rogue industry which has corrupted politics, regulation, and academia. It was made on location in the United States, Iceland, England, France, Singapore, and China.

There has been no shortage of books and articles about the meltdown. But most of those have had a reporter’s flavor to them—here’s what happened, then here’s what happened next.  I felt that no one had really pulled it together with a narrative theme and the data to back it up. Until this weekend, that is.  

The theme is now clear. Bad things happened. They were not an accident. They were the results of bad people behaving badly. They knew what they were doing. They did them anyway. And to this day, they refuse to acknowledge responsibility.  The issues of trust that became so manifest were not just about systems and markets; they were inescapably about people as well.  It’s one thing not to trust a system; it’s yet another to not trust those who inhabit it.

Think of this movie as what Michael Moore would produce if he had a PhD in economics and a career as a Federal Prosecutor. It’s the project of Charles Ferguson, who in fact does have a PhD in political science from MIT (he has also consulted to the White House and the Department of Defense, was a Senior Fellow at Brookings, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations).

You may know Ferguson as the director of No End in Sight, a powerful documentary about the Iraq war. He’s confident enough to interrupt an economist and say, ‘You can’t be serious about that. If you would have looked, you would have found things.’ Or to tell a former Bush administration under-secretary of the Treasury, “Forgive me, but that’s clearly not true.”

Here is a review by A.O. Scott, in the New York Times.

Boston.com calls it “a masterpiece of investigative nonfiction moviemaking — a scathing, outrageous, depressing, comical, horrifying report on what and who brought on the crisis.

Here’s Kenneth Turan’s review in the LA Times.

Go see for yourself; see the trailer here.  

The Role of Ideology in the Meltdown

There’s much to say about this documentary; I’ll limit my thoughts to just one—the role of ideas in the meltdown. 

In this day and age of neuro-explanations and insistence that only measurable behavior is relevant for management, the role of ideas gets pooh-poohed. Big mistake. 

I’ve written before about the power of strategic doctrine taught in business schools to negatively influence our general business thinking. But after seeing this documentary, I’m newly persuaded. Ideas have huge power: especially when those ideas happen to greatly serve the economic interests of patrons.  

In the pharmaceutical industry, it’s become well accepted that a researcher or writer who takes money from a drug company is at the very least subject to rules of disclosure. Failure to do so constitutes an immediate presumption of conflict of interest.

Yet somehow, we have never held our nation’s leading economists and business school faculty to the same standards. One of the most eye-opening aspects of Inside Job for me was to put this issue front and center. 

Some of Fergusons’ hardest-hitting interviews are with the elite heads of academic institutions: Frederic Mishkin, a former Fed governor, now at Columbia Business School; his boss Glenn Hubbard, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under George W. Bush; John Campbell, Harvard’s economics department chairman; and fellow Harvard economist Martin Feldstein. 

They come off, respectively, as incompetent, blustering, inarticulate, and smug. None of them seem to have noticed a disconnect between their laissez-faire ideas and the disasters engineered by those who quoted them; much less any sense of impropriety at the comfortable financial relationships they shared with those very firms. 

Somewhere there is a researcher at Harvard Medical School screaming at the injustice of his not being published in NEJM because of some disclosure requirements, while his academic counterparts in business and economics were happily and openly opining on the health of the Icelandic banking system and the liquidity of the US subprime mortgage market, all the while getting very well paid. (Note: b-school profs provide functional consulting services to companies all the time; I don’t see that as an issue. This is vastly different; more another time). 

Results of the Meltdown

Ferguson touches clearly, albeit briefly, on one enduring outcome of this decades-long debacle–the increased gap in the US between the haves and the have-nots. 

In 1976, the richest 1% of Americans had 9% of the income. Now they have 24%. From 1980 to 2005, 80% of the gain in income went to the top 1%. Guess what industry disproportionately accounts for that gain?

But the most significant casualty, I think, is a great old American belief: the belief that you can make it here in the good old USA, land of opportunity, where anyone can be what they want. You don’t have to be limited by the circumstances of your birth, like in all those Old World countries.

Sorry: no longer true. By one study, it is harder for someone to get ahead now in the US than it is in Denmark, Australia, Norway, Finland, Canada, Sweden, Germany, Spain, and even France. Only Italy and the UK are more class-bound, and I’ve seen other studies where even the Brits are less class-bound than we are. That decline in opportunity is another result of greater income disparity. Again, one of the legacies of the financial industry. One trust expert states very clearly that a key driver of low trust is high income inequality.  And here’s a good explanation of just why that is true.

You may disagree with a lot of what I’ve said here. You may think this movie won’t change your mind; and since it’s extremely hard to change people’s minds, you may be right. But if so, may I suggest you owe it to yourself to see it—if only to write back and point out the flaws in the movie.

TrustedAdvisor Associates Workshops & Events, Fall 2010

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Join us this Fall at one or more of our 2010 TrustedAdvisor Associates events through globally accessed programs and webinars.

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Mon. Nov. 15th        Global          Charles H. Green & Stewart Hirsch

A new Trusted Advisor Mastery Program group began this week.  This session is full, but you can send an email to [email protected] to be notified when we begin another.

The group is getting acquainted on the proprietary forum bulletin board, downloading customized audio-video content on building trust and relationships, and beginning to work their individual specific client and customer relationship issues in one-on-one personal coaching sessions.

We described the program in a blogpost last week.  Contact us at [email protected] to get on the notification list for the next session.

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 Next Thursday marks the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States. We wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving and hope they enjoy the holiday well past the stuffing and cranberry sauce. We warn you though, tryptophan does set in! Enjoy the time off with family and friends, as we will be doing the same!

All Change is Linguistic

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That title is lifted from Peter Block, and I want to make sure credit is given where credit is due.

I think those four words are wonderfully meaningful and I want to add my own take on it (any flawed interpretation is all mine, not Block’s). It has to do with a larger question: the relationship between thinking and doing.

Do Thoughts Drive Actions, or Do Actions Drive Thoughts?

This is not some abstraction. It matters greatly to businesses whether you can better think your way into right action, or act your way into right thinking.

For example: can you better train for soft skills via role-playing, or through readings and multiple-choice quizzes? Are pick-up lines best practiced in a bar? What about sales pitches?

So, do thoughts drive action or does action drive thoughts? The proper answer is ‘yes.’ Actually ‘yes, but it depends.’ Proving causality of anything is an impossibility, much less proving proportional causality. But in the commonsense world we all live in, we can see that the arrow points both ways. The only useful question is: when does it point which way?

Acting Your Way Into Right Thinking

This is the kind of phrase you hear in 12-step programs, or from motivational speakers, or—interestingly—lean management. It usually means, “You’ve been kidding yourself all these years by talking a good game; when are you actually going to [quit drinking] [lose weight] [ask her out] [practice what you preach]."

You also hear it in HR groups, advocating for certain kinds of change management: “You’ve been kidding yourself all these years by talking a good game; when are you actually going to [go to the networking meeting] [hire someone not a mirror image of us] [actually promote on values].”

Seems to me these are typically situations where ‘whole body’ involvement is required. You can’t just isolate one aspect of a situation, but rather you have to engage physically and emotionally in a full sense.

When Thinking Drives Action

Does that mean thinking works better in small, focused change efforts? Yes, but that’s only part of the story. For example, visualization is used by athletes to tweak the mindset, or attitude—before a golf swing, before a marathon. 

But there’s another sense in which thinking drives action: it dates back to Aristotle, who suggested there is a steel cable leading from thinking to doing.

Aristotle has his modern counterparts in NLP theorists, change specialists and neuro-everybodies who all point to the semi-conscious inclination of the brain to create beliefs, assumptions, habits, instincts—and then to act on them. 

How do you drive thoughts? Some tried-and-true methods include message-repetition (depending on your perspective, this equates either to propaganda or to staying ‘on message’), linkage (‘Marlon Brando smoked, it must be cool’), or authority (‘my doctor recommends it, it must be good for me’). You may think that in this day of digital social media we are immune to direct mail and tv ads from Madison Avenue—wrong, wrong, wrong, the same techniques are here, just in new clothing.

All Change is Linguistic

Full circle back to Peter Block. One of the most profound ways we have of unconsciously altering mindsets and attitudes is through language. Most overtly, Big Message repetition uses language. Chant “Obama was born abroad” enough times and you’ll get 20-30% of the US public to believe it.

But it isn’t just the denotation of words that drives change. It’s the emotional tone as well. The language of etiquette and empathy drives reciprocity—the most important form of influence, according to Robert Cialdini. The tones in which such words are said also add influence. Even the vocabulary of differing languages (French vs German) convey differing meanings to those who hear them.

To Think? Or To Behave?

If you’re wondering whether to change people or organizations, the usual answer is ‘both.’ But it does make sense to lead with one or another depending on the situation. 

The power of frequent close, personal, physical interaction—in schools, in the military, in marriage—probably does more to tear down racial barriers then any educational program. Better language constructs will follow.

But if you’re trying to get people to behave rightly in a corporate merger, for example, slogans are your friend—lead with language like ‘make a friend first,’ or ‘the first word in merger is ‘me,’ or ‘no more old-company name.’  

Whether you start with the behavior or the language, you’ll get to both. All change is linguistic, sooner or later.