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Dewey, Cheatham and Howe

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Payback is a bitch.

Last blog, I suggested that many business academics were naïve for not noticing the level of fear in the corporate world.
Well, apparently I’m beyond naïve when it comes to legal billing practices.

I was shocked—not in the Claude Rains sense, but honestly, shocked—to read the Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog of May 1, Study Suggests Significant Billing Abuse.

William G. Ross, a professor at Samford University’s Cumberland School of Law…polled 5,000 attorneys from various walks of life throughout the country, and 251 responded…

Two-thirds said they had “specific knowledge” of bill padding ─ a finding virtually identical to one reached by Ross in a 1995 billing survey. Also, 54.6% of the respondents (as compared with 40.3% in 1995) admitted that they had sometimes performed unnecessary tasks just to bump up their billable output.
Ross says that bill padding involves invoicing a client for work never performed — or exaggerating the amount of time spent on a matter—- while unnecessary work is that which “exceeds any marginal utility” to a client.

…the percentage of attorneys who admitted that they had double billed rose from 23% in 1996 to 34.7% in 2007. And only 51.8% regarded the practice as unethical in 2007, as compared with 64.7% in 1995.

I spent 20 years in the large general management consulting firm business. I’ve consulted to Big 4 firms for several years (that’s not double-counting). I’ve worked with a dozen or so law firms and internal law departments. I should not be surprised.

But I am. I don’t recall ever invoicing a client for work I didn’t do. I’m not saying I didn’t, but I don’t recall it. More importantly, in 20 years in consulting, I don’t recall ever hearing of anyone in that business charging for time not spent. I’m not saying they didn’t—but I don’t recall it.

As for accountants, it’s hard to get them to bill actual time, they’re in such a rush to discount.

I’m aware that lawyers are different. Many charge you for their secretary’s time drafting up the retainer agreement they hit you with when you walk in the door. Ridiculous hours get billed. I know that.

I also know some work is charged at a flat rate, which can occasionally cost less than the “standard cost” of that product. I know that.

But this—half the industry with its thumb on the scale? Half the lawyers in the country think it’s not unethical to charge the same hour to two clients?

I just do not get it. Am I hopelessly out of date? Do consultants and accountants do this too nowadays? Or is it really true that There’s Something About Lawyers?

The ethical principles I lived by still seem fine to me:

1. Envision it on the front page of the Times.
2. If the client saw this, would (s)he be okay with it?
3. If another client saw this, would they be okay with it?

When the night lights were on in consultants’ offices, consultants were working—but often not billing beyond the standard 8-hour day.  We called it the quality variance, and it went to the client. At law firms today, if the lights are on, are they charging time-and-a-half plus utilities?

I hate being naïve, but I clearly am. I just didn’t know this was going on at such scale.

How many of you did? And what do you think of it?

How do people in Abraham Lincoln’s profession end up this way? I know some fine, exceptional people who are lawyers; even a good firm or two. I’d like to think there is a reasonable explanation for the results of this survey—other than the obvious one screaming at us.

Is there a reasonable way to explain this? Or is it really just simply, flat-out, plain and simple, a case of a money-grubbing, anti-client, unprofessional, unethical industry?

And if the latter—how did this happen?

I’ve got a few theories, but I’d far rather hear yours. Please speak up.

Corporate Fear and Performance Anxiety

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The West Point of Capitalism, aka Harvard Business School, lets us peek under the covers in an excellent blog called Working Knowledge. This week features a Q&A with Professor Amy Edmondson on her research (with James Detert) called “Latent Voice Episodes.”

That’s b-school talk for why so many corporate employees are afraid to speak up—even when it would be in the best interest of all to do so. From the interview:

"Perhaps most surprising to us has been the degree to which fear appears to be a feature of modern work life.

"…two beliefs are essential preconditions for the free expression of upward voice: first, the belief that one is not putting oneself at significant risk of personal harm (e.g., embarrassment, loss of material resources) and second, the belief that one is not wasting one’s time in speaking up. In short, voice must be seen as both safe and worthwhile.

"Ultimately, every manager needs to work at being open and accessible and taking action on ideas or reporting back on why action can’t or won’t be taken. These are behavioral skills that all of us can continue to practice and improve.

Meanwhile, over at Adam Smith, Esq., Bruce MacEwen has also discovered Professor Edmondson, in another entry called Are Great Teams Less Productive? (Much better title, Amy). Bruce says:

"In hospitals, "errors" are an indispensable input to learning and organizational change. So Prof. Edmondson assumed that she would find a positive correlation between high-performance teams and low error rates.

"She found the opposite: The more integrated, effective, and highly functional the team, the more error rates were reported.…In well-led teams, the climate of openness made it easier to report and discuss errors, as opposed to teams with weak or punitive leadership.

I think Edmondson’s work is fascinating because of its subject matter: linking soft topics and hard environments. The conclusions seem solid. Nothing wrong with what she said, and a lot to like about it. And yet…

It raises some questions too.

1. That the finding most surprising to a Harvard Business School professor should be “the degree to which fear appears to be a feature of modern work life” I find pretty curious itself.

I would have thought it was pretty damn obvious.

My question is: How does one get on the HBS faculty and yet find the endemic presence of fear in one of our dominant institutions to be a surprise? I sincerely doubt that Ms. Edmondson is unique in this respect. Quite the opposite, I suspect.

And if so, don’t we have to call that naive?

2. The conclusions drawn are almost entirely about the managers. We need to create a healthy environment; we need to listen better; we need to more open, accessible, etc. These are all, as Edmondson says, “behavioral skills that all of us can practice and improve." Good. Agreed. Need to do. And yet…

What does it say that a study finding endemic fear only draws conclusions about the behavioral skills of the zookeepers?

Edmondson says fear comes from two factors: personal and situational. "Individual differences include personality dispositions such as one’s level of extraversion or proactivity, or one’s developed skills such as how to communicate in ways that don’t evoke defensiveness, and also personal concerns about job security and/or mobility." The paper then goes on to discuss what organizations can do—the situational.

This viewpoint is endemic in business. The individual is unchangeable ("disposition"); all the work to be done is organizational.

Think about the potential arrogance implicit in this view. You, lowly employee, are stuck with your dispositions. But we, the Enlightened Managers at Harvard et al—free of fear ourselves—will save you by creating fear-reducing environments. And that’s all that need be done.

First of all, there are plenty of fearful people at HBS. One of my profs once said, "It’s incredible how we can hire for brilliant independent people and within weeks of their first year, they all turn into sheep." Fear is an equal-opportunity disrespector of hierachy.

When the fearful set out to free the faithful followers from fear, failing to fix the fear that festers within, heaven forfend!

Second, if all we focus on is the environment, we degrade individual responsibility. What’s a fearful person to conclude from the emphasis on organizations and environments except that his or her fears are the fault of his bosses? Maureen Dowd today writes about George Tenet as the Ultimate Staff Guy. He was fearful. He didn’t speak up. Bad consequences ensued (okay, not to him). So who does he blame? His boss, of course (who went to Harvard Business School—coincidence? meanwhile, over on the grassy knoll…)

Dowd and others are right to hold Tenet accountable for his silence. We all must be held accountable for our silence. Fear is inevitable—cowardice is a moral choice.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t train people to be polite.  It means we should also be teaching them—and ourselves—how to be accountable, to live free of fear and blame, to see and transcend our emotions, to take charge of our own lives. To become fully authentic human beings, capable of expressing ourselves, of saying “screw you” to the sheepherders when that’s what must be said.

Fear is endemic in modern corporate life—Edmondson’s right about that. The question is, what are we doing about it? Teaching behavioral skills about how to influence others is only half the battle—the other half is emotional intelligence, which rests heavily on inner self-discovery. Why don’t B-schools teach that?

Sheep can be trained. People can be trained too, but they are still responsible agents. Sheep respond. People trust. Trusting employees speak up. Sheep don’t. Don’t confuse complacency with trust. You can’t make fearful people courageous by making nice.

Courage is an inside job. We all need to own our own oppression—not wait for a great MBA liberator to set us free. Let’s help humans be accountable for their own humanity, instead of assuming we just need to “manage” them.

Rational Business-Think: Myth or Rumor?

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Western culture in general, and American business in particular, worship at the altar of what gets called “rational” thinking.

Data-driven; deductive; clear logic; structured thinking; hypothesis-testing; statistically significant; scientifically proven; supported by studies—that kind of thing.

In business, we prize rational decision-making, which is generally taken to mean “show me the pro formas,” or “where’s the data to support that conclusion,” or “what’s the IRR or the NPV on the EBITDA?”

But the dirty little secret we all know is—that’s often not the way it works. Very often. (New York City once did a study on corporate headquarter moves out of the city: nearly every move ended up within 25 miles of the CEO’s home).

Sims Wyeth delightfully and provocatively catalogs in White Crow, Black Swan some of the reasons it ain’t necessarily so. A few tid-bits:

We all would agree, I think, that measuring is a good idea because it will enable us to choose the best doctor and the best hospital when we get sick. But it turns out that when data is available, people ignore it and instead make their decisions based on the stories their friends and families tell them–even if the stories contradict the data.

…As John Kenneth Galbraith said, “Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind or proving that there is no need to do so, almost everybody gets busy on the proof.”

…there is the confirmation bias, which is our tendency to reject information that contradicts our beliefs and accept information that confirms what we already believe.…There is the narrative fallacy, which is our weakness for compelling stories; the problem of silent evidence, which is our failure to account for what we don’t see; the ludic fallacy (don’t you love these fancy terms??) which is our willingness to oversimplify and take games and models (remember LTCM?) too seriously.

It’s not just that sometimes our “rational” thinking gets us wrong. The point is we have lost track of the idea that there is more than one way to think.

The term “rhetoric” is considered a pejorative term these days, as in “empty rhetoric.” It lacked that connotation from the times of Aristotle to Lincoln, when it spoke to the art of communication.

More than a few philosophers, and nearly all poets, are familiar with dialectical thinking—thesis, antithesis, synthesis—whose greatest virtue is the generation of insight. Yet it’s considered—literally—nonsensical by the “rational” rules of today.

To do a better job of defining “rational” thinking, we ought to include a whole raft of non-cognitive themes: paying attention to one’s own or others’ emotions, for example, is what “emotional intelligence” is about.

The opposite of “rational” as we have come to use it is not “irrational.” Very few people behave irrationally, if you mean by that doing things against one’s own interest. Fleeing a murderer with a knife—we probably wouldn’t call that “irrational.”

Yet if someone makes a business decision “straight from the gut,” we sneer at it because it’s not “rational.” (Unless Jack Welch writes a book with that title, in which case it becomes a best-seller. Rational?).

Decisions are not better for being “rational” in the narrow way we have come to use it. A lot of what passes for “rational” is just “rationalization.”

We need a business vocabulary for the coming relationship-driven world that encompasses a whole lot more in the word “rational” than what we have let it dribble down to.

(And I didn’t mention decision-making on Iraq even once).

Attitudinal Service

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The phrase “fake it ‘til you make it” expresses a simple wisdom about learning. If you don’t understand the “why,” sometimes you should “just do it,” and you’ll find it makes sense. "Motion precedes emotion" is another variant.

Like most simple statements, sometimes that’s good advice—and sometimes not. The trick is in knowing when.

When it comes to customer service—it’ll only get you so far.

The customer service world, like the rest of us, is drunk on the power of metrics. We’ve got all this data, from our CRM and POS sales, it’s tempting to constantly tweak things and find out just which programs yield the tiniest bit of improvement.

But a focus on metrics all too easily gets impersonal. Worse yet—much worse—it becomes all about short-term results for the company, and not about benefits for the consumer. Talking about "improvement" invariably means talking about profitability to the provider—not the consumer.

Really great, deep, rich customer service, I think, has to come from within. Here are two great examples.

Ed Brenegar talks about Hostmanship—the Art of Making People Welcome, by Jan Gunnarson and Olle Blohm. As Brenegar puts it:

What is distinctive about Hostmanship, as compared to most books on customer service, customer experience, word-of-mouth marketing or leadership, is that this is not primarily about strategies and tactics. It is about the attitude that we bring.

Exactly. He then goes on to quote Kierkegaard. (He had me at Soren).

As the book puts it:

Hostmanship is about giving. It’s about sharing a part of yourself and your knowledge. Never forgetting that people who have contacted you are an extension of yourself. It’s about understanding that, at that moment, you are an important part of her life. Not only because you have the answer to her question. You are also the person she has chosen to turn to.
Hostmanship is an art. The host is an artist.

If you think that stuff only flies in Scandinavia, let’s bring it closer to home. You probably heard about the problem with TurboTax filings the night taxes were due. TurboTax is an Intuit product—the people who bring you Quicken.

Intuit is a bit of a legend in the service industry, and as Michelle Golden tells it, they proved why yet again.

Intuit voluntarily refunded any TurboTax credit card charges from the time period in question, and offered to pay any penalties resulting from the delay. Perhaps more importantly, they were all over the problem—fast. As in immediately. Chalk up another for classmate Scott Cook.

This doesn’t come from a manual. It comes from values, beliefs, principles, commitments.
You will not find it in how-to manuals. You cannot fake it ‘til you make in this area, because not-faking it is the essence of the matter.

Much of what’s written about customer service these days is from the perspective of the provider’s P&L. It’s true that great service produces great profit. But you can destroy the whole thing by turning profit into the goal, rather than the outcome. Do that, and you end up with neither.

Great customer service is itself the outcome of principles. Of attitudes.

It’s an attitude thing.

Peter Jennings, Noam Chomsky, and the Piraha

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Peter Jennings, ABC TV’s recently departed news anchor, said (roughly), “I have never seen an issue on which everyone agreed. When I see a coin, I have to turn it over to see the other side.”

Dan Everett, a linguistics expert, spent 30 years with the Amazonian Pirahã people. The April 16, 2007 New Yorker story describes his gradual disenchantment with Noam Chomsky, the pied piper of linguistics.

Grossly simplified, Chomsky says the structure of language is innate in humans. He cites recursive speech, e.g. rather than saying “that man is tall,” and, “that man is walking,” we say “that tall man is walking.” Recursion is uniquely human, says Chomsky.

The Pirahã do not use recursive speech, says Everett. Nor do they refer to the past, nor count above about three. Their language lacks a perfect tense. Everett says they are remarkable for the degree to which they simply live in the present, accepting as real only that which they observe.

Everett says the Pirahã disprove Chomsky’s theory. Chomskyites beg to differ. Character assassination (disguised as academics) ensues.

(I will get back to Jennings.)

Other researchers visit the tribe to challenge Everett by proving recursion in the Pirahã. The data don’t seem to cooperate. That doesn’t deter the theorists—the data must be wrong.

Two other theorists accuse Everett of insulting the tribe by essentially calling them subhuman—stupid. After all, the logic goes, if they aren’t recursive—as Chomsky insists they must be, in order to be human—then they must be stupid. QED.

Everett insists they’re highly intelligent, one of the most savvy tribes in the region.

(See where Jennings is coming up?)

The author comically tries to explain insect repellent to a Pirahã; he mimics a buzzing fly landing on his arm, then slapping it. Everett translated. What? He hit himself? A plane lands on his arm?

Everett explains, and the main looks at the author with pitying contempt. “You told him bugs bothered you,” explained Everett. “But bugs are part of life. How could you be bothered by them?”

The Chomskyite explanation of people who don’t fit their theory is—they must be less than people. The Parahã, to be clear, are exactly the same: they show no interest whatsoever in the outside world, considering themselves superior. Those insect repellent fools? They must be less than people.

I once discussed a point with an Arican American woman co-worker. “You know,” I said, “it’s like that Rolling Stones song.”

“I don’t think I know it,” she replied.

“Sure you do,” I said, “it was a Top-40 song.”

She looked at me askance; “and just whose Top-40 would that happen to be?” she asked me.

It had never dawned on me that my pop-music experience wasn’t universal.

We praise a lot of traits in people: loyalty, fearlessness, conviction, compassion, integrity. In business, we praise intellectual rigor (though ironically our generally accepted business model for human motivation often resembles Skinner’s for rats). We value courage and entrepreneurial instincts, as well as leadership ability (whatever that means).

I’d like to give some props to humility. Let’s bow down to the fact that basically we don’t know diddly—particularly when we think we do. Let’s celebrate humility, which leads to honesty, and then perhaps to curiosity. Humility is the starting point that makes all things possible. Certainly that’s true for trust.

When you meet a man with the courage of his convictions, watch out.

Or, as Peter Jennings would have more generously put it, turn the coin over to look at the other side.

I Hate my Favorite Frequent Flyer Program

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My friend Bob told me the other day, “Delta Airlines is my preferred frequent flyer loyalty program, but I sure hate flying on Delta Airlines.”

There is something rotten in the state of Loyalty Programs. Notions like “customer-centric” and “loyalty” have gotten so far from their original intent that they have perverted the way we use language.

Worse yet—we don’t even notice it.

But let’s just try anyway.

When Fred Reichheld wrote The Loyalty Effect in the early 90s, the word loyalty tapped into a rich meaning—evocations of “semper fi,” or “’til death do us part.”

Beyond the intuitive appeal of treating people in a manner worthy of their loyalty, this book demonstrates the bottom-line benefits of such a leadership philosophy. It provides the bridge between the world of corporate ethics and the world of hard-core economics.

Well, that was then. The book described the paradoxical payoff of loyalty—if you do good, you end up doing very well. As long as you remember that doing well is the outcome, not the goal.

Fast forward to today, a scant 15 years later. First, from Wikipedia:

Loyalty programs are structured marketing efforts that reward, and therefore encourage, loyal buying behaviour – behaviour which is potentially of benefit to the firm.

Notice the shift—from behaving in ways that people reward, to rewarding people’s behavior.  The outcome has become the goal.  Behavior trumps intent.  Do unto others in order to get yours.

Here’s The Wise Marketer, an online loyalty research and news service:

Leading loyalty practitioners are now putting as much energy into deselecting their most unprofitable customers as they are putting into maximising the loyalty of their profitable ones. Even in the supermarket sector, US research has found, seven out of every ten customers cost more to serve than they provide in profits. Using loyalty data correctly allows you to avoid this trap.

The ads on the page reinforce the message: “how to increase retention and drive ROI.”

What is happening here is epidemic in business today: we are twisting the outcome into the goal; we are mistaking indicators for the things they were supposed to indicate.

We have gone from “loyalty is good” to “customer retention is an indicator” to “let’s tweak our customer retention rates—and see if we can’t get them up by next month.”

Pretty soon, there is no trace left of Reichheld’s “bridge between the world of corporate ethics and the world of hard-core economics.”

We have turned a profoundly other-directed, mutually beneficial, human relationship into yet one another opportunity for short-term self-aggrandizement.

Who are the culprits?

I nominate several, starting with all of us who put up with it.

One is the huge influence of behavioralism on business. We have come to believe truisms like “if you can’t measure it you can’t manage it” (flatly false on the face of it). The world of training buys into this heavily (“participants will master the behaviors of fill-in-the-blank”). Behavioralism renders intention irrelevant—destroying not only "loyalty" but most human relationship descriptors.

Another is focusing on transactions, not relationships. CEOs, salespeople and Wall Street are all guilty here. If everything is one-off, then the game is get as much as you can now. Whether or not you think that’s unethical—it’s economically stupid.

But the biggest is a continued insistence that business is solely about Me Me Me. I-bankers, strategists, and too many business and economics academics have twisted Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand into its opposite, thinking that a world of people behaving selfishly will magically produce virtue and prosperity for the whole. It won’t and it doesn’t. What it produces is a world where "customer focus" has come to mean what a vulture does.

My friend Bob spoke truth. In 15 years, we have gone from “treating people in a manner worthy of their loyalty,” to hating the company who buys us off—and calling it loyalty. Vocabulary assassination is bad enough; destroying the concept it refers to is far worse, for all concerned.

And irony of ironies: it doesn’t even work. From Forbes:

Reward points, discounts, free shipping and gifts—it’s all there for the taking, as the big players in the hypercompetitive retail industry fight to outdo each other to buy off the loyalty of customers blessed with more choices than ever. Many stores now fear that customers not formally rewarded for their patronage will walk out the door.

OK, this loyalty thing, we had a good run with it, OK, what’s next? How much can we make off of "friendship?" How about taking a shot at love—that oughta really juice up the old ROI!

Trust-Destroying Selling

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I had dinner tonight with Phil. Phil is CEO of a specialty printing company; he learned the business through Xerox, the class act of sales back in the day. Way back.

His company had to buy several pieces of moderately expensive printing equipment. They got pitches from three organizations. The salesmen from Brands A and B, the well-known brands, had known Phil and his company for some time. Brand C, a lesser-known quantity, was represented by a young woman.

Brands A and B offered prices around $140,000. The young lady at Brand C offered Phil re-manufactured equipment at a price of about $80,000.

“How do we know this is going to work and stay working?” asked one of Phil’s manufacturing people.

“Well,” she replied, some of the biggest players in your game are using it and will be happy to tell you how much they like it. Let me give you their phone numbers.”

“We’re going to want this in soon, and have it hit the ground running with no problems,” said Phil.

Replied the saleslady, “Phil, the sooner it’s in and working, the sooner my commission stream starts paying. You and I are on the same side of the table. The sooner you get happy, the better for both of us.”

Phil told me, “I’d pretty much resolved to go with Ms. C, but I wanted to give the other guys a chance to respond gracefully. I called each of them up.”

Brand A, when I told him we were going with Brand C’s remanufactured product line, said, in a huff, “Well—if I’d known we were going to be dealing in used stuff—”

“He didn’t need to say another word,” said Phil. “Not only did he lose this deal, he probably lost the next five I’ll have. I can’t count all the things he did wrong, starting with pissing me off. Let’s see: bad-mouthing the competition, not focusing on me, giving me attitude, implying I’d misled him—any one of those was enough to lose my business.”

Then Phil called salesman B, with the same news. “Aw, gee, Phil, you and I go way back, I thought we had a good relationship, shouldn’t that count for something…our people have spent an inordinate amount of time on this…”

“And by then,” said Phil, “I had blocked him out too. How many penalty flags on that play? Let’s see, we saw the ever popular ‘it’s about the salesman not the customer’ routine; he was telling me the relationship never meant anything but money anyway; he was begging worse than a dog at a picnic with his eyes on a sirloin; and he’s trying to guilt trip me. ‘Inordinate,’ indeed. Nope, he’s outta here.”

Phil explains it this way:”I’ll supply my own guilt, thank you very much. The guy I feel obligated to is the guy who answers all my questions, smiles and asks if I have any more. The minute someone says I owe them, I no longer do.”

That’s the paradox. If you want to sell, stop selling. That’s my little way of saying it.

What are your words for what Phil’s talking about?

Trust and the PR Profession

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Edelman PR is the world’s largest independent public relations firm, with over 2000 employees. Headed by Richard Edelman (whose father started the firm), they produce the Edelman Trust Barometer.

In May 2005, Edelman spoke about trust in the PR industry itself:

According to the Edelman Trust Barometer, PR people rank far down the list of credible spokespeople. In fact, just above athletes and entertainers and just below lawyers.

His advice to his own industry in that interview was to offer more truth-telling:

PR should be seen as a spur to true interaction, not a barrier. We need to eschew the Clintonesque spin machine in favor of a more modern approach of truth will out.

Trust is complex in PR. It is one of several businesses which must manage two sets of client relationships—basically brokering one to the other. The same is true in real estate, executive search, re-insurance brokerage, and speaker bureaus.

A few days ago, Edelman’s personal blog touched on the role of PR and one of its constituents—the press.

I asked McCarthy [managing editor of CNN International] about the proper role of a PR firm. He said, “A PR firm is a vital part of the newsgathering process. You provide background information and make connections to the company. Our job is to scrutinize and interpret the facts provided by a PR person.”
…I will paraphrase a quote from Alex Jones, dean of the Shorenstein Center at Harvard, who said that PR should be about credible advocacy, while journalism continues to be an independent voice offering accountability reporting of important events.
                              [italics mine]

“Credible advocates,” whose facts will be “scrutinized and interpreted.”  Hmmm.

This strikes me as a pretty low hurdle for a professional services industry seeking to become more trusted.

First, why the adjective “credible?” Does anyone really want a non-credible advocate? (Reminds me of Nixon’s “I am not a crook”).

Secondly, the only profession I can think of that embraces advocacy is the law.  Lawyers score low on trust because we don’t want them to be trusted—we want them to be advocates.  Low trust is the price we pay, and we’re fine with it.

But do journalists really want their agency to be an advocate for its clients?  To have to scrutinize and interpret what the agency brings to the journalist?  Let’s look at parallel professions.

What about sales—another area of persuasion?  Buyers of complex B2B products and services won’t put up with having to “scrutinize and interpret” what salespeople tell them.  A salesperson who described himself to a customer as a “credible advocate” for his company would be shown the door in many buying organizations, with words like, "I don’t need hustlers for your issues, I need someone intersted in solving my problems."

What about other dual-client industries? If you’re the client of an executive search firm, do you want to “scrutinize and interpret” its evaluation of candidates for you to hire?  No—you want them to talk straight to you—no interpretation required.  Do you want them to advocate for one candidate vs. another?  Not unless it’s motivated by the client’s needs. 

Clients don’t want advocates, credible or not; they want advisors they can trust.  If you’re pursuing your agenda and not mine, I won’t trust you.
Having two constituencies makes it more important, not less, to be trusted by both parties.  A PR firm does no one a favor—least of all itself—by behaving in ways that are less than fully trustworthy to each partner.

A journalist will trust a PR person who only brings high quality material, is honest and forthright, and can be relied on to focus on the needs of the journalist.

A client will come to trust a PR firm that is not afraid to speak the truth, to call out low quality or the need for fundamental change, that will not hype the sizzle without insisting on steak to back it up.

If journalists and clients both come to trust the PR firm, all three win. The best PR people gain the trust of their clientele on both sides: being credible is the least of the matter. It has to do with keeping the client’s interest at heart for the long term, and being honest and transparent at all times.

If the trustworthiness of the PR profession is to climb above that of lawyers, it should not emulate law firms; its reach needs to extend beyond being a “credible advocate” who must be “scrutinized and interpreted." 

How Could That Happen to Me?

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[Note: see my latest article on this site, Friends, Motives and Profits—Avoid Fear-based Selling]

There is being trusted, and there is trusting. To trust requires acceptance.

When my children were young, they would say, “How come Marshall got the big piece?” or, “why does Ashley always get to be first?” Followed by the conclusive, “It’s not fair.”

My feeble answers were part rationalization (“because she’s older…”), part problem-solving (“next time you’ll get…”), part fatalism (“hey, life’s not about fairness”). They prospered despite my advice.

Still, we all know that feeling. Some fine people waste their lives, one finite and irreplaceable day at a time, by an inability to get over it. “It” might be a relationship that ended years ago. A parent who didn’t give us what we wanted. A friend who slighted us. A boss who didn’t appreciate us. An inability to come to grips with our own levels of mediocrity.

How could this have happened to me?

I can’t point fingers—they point back to me times four. I can resent for hours a driver who cut me off. And I know better.

I know that resentment is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die. Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional. Other people don’t annoy me, I am annoyed. I and I alone own my feelings; and I can’t own anyone else’s. And still I ask, "why me?"

But my problems are trivial. Does the advice work on real pain?

NYTimes, April 10:

Minneapolis – For 14 years, Isaac Owusu’s faraway boys have tugged at his heart. They sent report cards from his hometown in Ghana and painstaking letters in fledgling English while he scrimped and saved to bring them here one day.
So when he became an American citizen and officials suggested taking a DNA test to prove his relationship to his four sons, he embraced the notion…

But the DNA showed that only one of the four boys — the oldest — was his biological child. For Isaac, a widower, the revelation has forced him to rethink nearly everything he had taken for granted about his life and his family.

It has left him struggling to accept that…his deceased wife had long been unfaithful…the children he loves are not his own…his long efforts to reunite his family in this country may have been in vain. The State Department let his oldest son, now 23, come but said the others — a 19-year-old and 17-year-old twins — could not come because they are not biologically related to him.

“I say to myself, ‘Why this one happen to me?’ ” he asked, his eyes wet with tears. “Oh, mighty God, why this one happen to me?”

Kinda puts my puny problems in their place.

Believing events to be divinely driven, Owusu suffers for his lack of understanding. Religion has two answers for him:

a. The soft version—faith: there are no coincidences, all is God’s purpose —your misery is in direct proportion to your lack of faith;

b. The hard version: God’s will is what it is, and the fact that you don’t know what it is means diddly. (Roughly what God told Job, on what I suspect was a particularly honest day).

“How could that happen to me?” is a profoundly useless question. It has no answer, beyond a trite rehearsal of the steps that got you here. It is a form of resentment; resentment of the universe, which doesn’t care. To resent is to be disaffected from reality, from what just is. And resentment’s handmaiden, self-pity, is a turnoff to others.

The generic answer is, get over it. Accept. Embrace what is. That doesn’t mean passivity in the face of injustice, nor does it mean others aren’t wrong—it just means get on the right side of reality.

That’s not hard to say to a kid. Not even to a friend. Harder, of course, to ourselves. Hugely harder for Mr. Owusu. But I think it’s true for all.

Even for another hard case, a Rutgers woman basketball player who feels, right now, irretrievably harmed by another’s despicable remarks. Ms. Rutgers too will ultimately find relief only within. Ditto the 9/11 survivors, and the spouses of those lost in Iraq.

But this isn’t all hard-ass. Do yourself a favor. Read an excerpt from Bone to Pick: Of Forgiveness, Reconciliation, Reparation and Revenge, by Ellis Cose. There are lessons for all of us in these stories of lives transformed by acceptance and forgiveness in the face of unspeakable pain.

To trust requires a small measure of this acceptance. If I trust you, you might betray me. But if I try to totally control you, I cut myself off from the reality of you. I come to live in resentment. And I usually fail in controlling others anyway.

Acceptance doesn’t guarantee trust: but it’s a helluva start.

Trust Tip 65: Refer Your Competitors

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Refer your competitors to your clients in the sales process.

Yes, I do mean it. This is not a sarcastic title, or a clever trick. But I’ll warn you: your motives will affect your outcome.

Step One—check your objective. Is it:

a. To get the sale, or
b. To do the right thing by the customer.

Now multiply by 10 times—the next ten similar sales opportunities.

If your objective is always “get the sale,” then well before number ten, everyone will know you’re in it for yourself, short-term. You’ll have a reputation. You’ll win about the same percentage as your market share—say, 30% for sake of discussion.

If your objective is to do the right thing by the customer, then well before number ten, everyone will know you’re in it long-term, to help them. You’ll have a different reputation. And (can you say “paradox”?), your own success rate will get better—say, 40% or higher.

Option b doesn’t mean you’re not in it for yourself—just that it’s not your primary objective, and you’re willing to trust a longer-term process.

Step Two—admit you’re not always the perfect choice for every customer. (If this feels hard, and your market share is less than 100%, consider the implications of believing you’re always the best: either your customers are very stupid, or you can’t sell a perfect product.)

Let’s review. Your objective is to help your customer (which also gets you better sales numbers), and you admit that your product isn’t always the best.

Step 3: Therefore: shouldn’t you offer your customer informed advice about other alternatives? Shouldn’t you refer your competitors as a possible alternative?

The best reason to do this is—because it’s the right thing. But there are ancillary reasons:

a. Being willing to refer a competitor is the most direct indicator of your having the customer’s interests at heart. If makes it look like you care (note: don’t try faking this).
b. In those rare cases where you convince someone against their better interests to use you instead of someone better suited for them, odds are that everything will unravel and you’ll regret it. Take one small loss and consider it an investment in good will.

Think this is suicidal? Try forwarding this blog to your existing clients, saying how crazy I am, and that you would never be so stupid as to point them to anyone but yourself, because…because…well, you try and explain it.

If you agree with me, and you are a buyer of goods or services, consider forwarding this blog to your suppliers, asking them to educate you regarding choices in their industry. And see how they respond.

The best ones have already done so. The next best will meet the test and give you some great info—be good to those suppliers, they just took a risk to help you.

And those who tell you there’s no need to review because they’re the best—well, you know what to do.

Do I follow my own advice? At least in this case, yes (exceptions: when they know they want me, know exactly why, and I agree).

Here are the seven names I mention most frequently to prospective clients in the sales process, depending on the particular client need:

a. David Maister www.davidmaister.com
b. Jeff Thull, www.primeresouce.com
c. Duke Corporate Education, www.dukece.com
d. Ford Harding, www.hardingco.com
e. BossaNova Consulting, www.bossanovaconsulting.com/
f. Rob Galford, www.cedinc.com/
g. Scott Parker, www.psfadvisors.com/

They are all excellent. Besides,to serve up creampuff dummy names would defeat the whole purpose.

How do you say the words? Try this:

“We both win if you make the best decision. Given my understanding of your situation, if you haven’t already done so, you should also be talking to X and Y. If you do so, it’ll help our discussions.”

Is it a trust thing? You bet.