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Self Help Con Jobs

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Would you like to be more trusting? Maybe you’d prefer to be more trusted?

Most of us would like to get better at both. But how does one get better—at anything?

Virginia Heffernan has done the heavy lifting for us in the NY Times Book Review section in Advice Squad, her just-slightly snarky look at the New York Times’s advice, how-to and miscellaneous best-seller list from March 9, 2008.

You’ll recognize every genre, if not every title.

For example, there’s the “buy up the Alabama rights for some 800-number fish lure that keeps showing up in obscure publication, then re-sell them via the internet to some other person looking to get rich quick” scheme.

There are the “serenity now” variations once satirized on Seinfeld.

There are variations on looking young, not looking old, great skin, less fat, you are what you eat, get skinny by cleaning your house.

I don’t know what you call Suze Ormon; like Dr. Ruth and Tony Robbins, she clearly knows her stuff, but it’s somehow more about the Suze show than the subject.

There’s a special circle of hell reserved for Deepak Chopra, who ages ago (another lifetime?) actually wrote intelligibly about things medical. Not any more.

But the quintessentially American number one best-selling self help book—for a long time running, I believe—is The Secret.

This book is the capsule story of all the other books—they all promise the One True Way, if you will just follow their advice.

It is also number one because it captures the true secret of a con job—bad logic applied to serious issues. Which results in some major tsouris.

What do I mean by bad logic? This.

Imagine all four variations of a syllogism:

  1. If you got B, you must have done A.
  2. If you do A, you’ll get B.
  3. If you don’t do A, you won’t get B.
  4. If you didn’t get B, it’s because you didn’t do A.

The trouble all begins with number 1:

“I never gave up the dream that I’d [make it in Hollywood, win American Idol, own the big house, win the SuperBowl, hit the lottery]. I never stopped believing I could do it. And today, here I stand—I did it!”

This is what logicians call a “necessary condition.” If you’re going to win the lottery, you have to buy a ticket. To win American Idol, you’re going to have to stay positive. To play in the NBA, you gotta have some big ambition.

The biggest problem comes with shifting to number 2—believing that a necessary condition implies a sufficient condition.

A necessary condition means that if B is going to happen, you will have to do A. A sufficient condition means that if you do A, then B will happen. The shift from a necessary to a sufficient condition is the central con job of The Secret—and of most cults. From “all winners believe” to “all believers win.”

Such a small shift. Such a Big Lie.

In the particular case of the The Secret, the Big Lie is compounded, because it’s not about believing in a diet or a magic pill; it’s about believing in belief itself. You gotta believe! Anything is possible if you only believe! This is the stuff of Oprah’s evil twin; of snake oil salesmen.

If dreaming big were a sufficient condition, every dreamer would win the lottery. If mere willpower were enough to win American Idol, the parade of early season misfits would be in the finals. Simon Cowell’s role is to remind us all that talent and hard work matter too. We love to hate him because we want to believe those self help books are enough—if you just dream hard enough!

But no—just because the winner dreamed, doesn’t mean dreaming makes you a winner. Hope is not a strategy. Strategies require more than dreaming. The inner city is full of kids whose life’s hope is to play in the NBA—far too many for the NBA to accommodate. And they have no strategy to back up the hope.

That’s the con job. But the evil of The Secret lies in versions 3 and 4—especially 4.

Version 3 says, all those poor fools out there who aren’t winning; it’s because they don’t believe. I, of course, know better. I know the power of belief.

Then the clincher, version 4. If you didn’t get wealth fame and happiness, it’s not because The Secret is a lie—it’s because you didn’t believe strongly enough in The Secret; in belief itself.

When Dorothy and Toto say “you have to believe,” we call it entertainment. But Madison Avenue sells the same Secret, as George Carlin pointed out so brilliantly: If you don’t buy our product, you will emit sinister genital odors and everyone will know it’s you and shun you and it all will be your fault, because you were warned. So Buy Now.

The Secret is a closed system. You cannot argue with someone who believes both that A is necessary and sufficient for B, and that the absence of B is necessary and sufficient to infer the absence of A. Work that one out. Like any closed system, every attack on it is rejected as illogical. That’s why they call it a closed system; an objection is defined as wrong.

For True Believers, it doesn’t matter what A is—it’s the experience of having an Answer for Everything that seems so seductive.

Some of us suffer more than others from an inability to believe, particularly in ourselves. A shot of energy, a bit of belief itself, can be a bracing and positive thing; when coupled with a strategy, even life-transforming.

But an entire industry selling people the belief they can influence lotteries and believe BMWs into the front driveway—no. Some of those end up as the ones we laugh and cringe at in early American Idol episodes. Others just slink off in shame when they come to. But most just buy another self-help book, desperately secure in the belief that belief will be enough—this time.

How do you get better at trusting and being trusted? Don’t peddle snake-oil. And don’t buy it either. Belief is necessary; it is not sufficient.

 

From Financial Relationships to Financial Transactions, Losing Trust on the Way

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The New York Times this Sunday has initiated an ambitious and comprehensive look at the financial crisis facing us. Gretchen Morgenson, a crack business writer, has not only her normal Sunday business page lead, but also the entire issue’s Main Section Front Page lead.

And rightly so. Count me among those who believe this is no ordinary recession; we’ll live to live again, but there has been huge financial misbehavior by all of us for a very long time; we’re going to have to pay the piper for some time to come.

Morgenson points out we doubled our mortgage debt in 7 years as a country; our savings rate—at 8% in 1968—is now 0.4%. And the biggest scorecard of all is the fall of the dollar, already precipitous, and likely to get worse.

One of the patterns that emerges is the conflict we have created in the world economy in the last two decades between efficiency and trust. It’s a major trust issue—one of social and political structure.

Here’s the idea.

The global financial system has gotten far more efficient by applying business process thinking “best practices.” Define processes so they can be outsourced to others, the thinking goes, who can then do those processes at a global level of scale, more cheaply.

That logic is what drives the outsourcing of payroll and benefits processing. It’s the same logic that drives mortgage lenders to sell loans to banks, and banks to package them to asset packagers.

It has in many ways worked: more capital became more available in more places to more people more quickly and at lower costs than had been the case 20 years ago.

Unfortunately, there was a side effectT—the substitution of short-term transactional fee income for longer term relational income sources (like interest).  And fee income has turned out to be the crack cocaine of the financial industry.

It isn’t just mortgages. It shows up in banks every time you get hit for $2 to withdraw $100 from an ATM not your own. It shows up in credit cards—in late fees and over-limit penalties, in huge rates for cash withdrawals. And of course if you refinance a mortgage, fees abound—enough to become the primary source of profitability for the refinancing institution.

Who cares about your damn loan when they can make money off of the act of taking out the loan, and more money out of selling it to someone else. Give ‘em a ten-year balloon loan at teaser rates. On Wall Street, the moral decline was captured with the phrase, “I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone—just do the deal.”  Gimme more crack—gimme the fee income, you can have the relationship and the loan.

So here’s the social trust issue.

One of the four Trust Principles (see my article “Trust: the Core Concepts” or my book Trust-based Selling) is the focus on relationships, not transactions; on the medium-to-long term, not just the short-term.

That idea is pretty simple and clear. Trust thrives in relationships, not in random encounters between strangers. Economic models that link entities—and people—allow trust to grow.

Economic models that structurally dissociate people—blind online bidding systems are an extreme case—are at best trust-neutral, and in many ways trust-destroying (in the case of blind online bidding, that is in fact the intent).

So we have a dilemma. The economics of outsourcing processes has indeed resulted in lower costs. It has also resulted in lower trust.

Can we have both? And if so, how?

I don’t have the full answer, of course. But I believe the answer is going to rely on two things:

  • The political will—in government and in business—to recognize that, in the long run and in the big picture, we are all inextricably linked, and we’d better behave as such. In other words, an ethos or common belief-set based not on competition, but on collaboration.
  • The insight that low cost alone does not drive value; that relationships, in fact, are the source of far greater value than the micro-process-here-now-self-aggrandizing instincts we have been propagating as “best practices.”

It ain’t going to be easy, though.

Top Ten Reasons Organizations Don’t Teach Trust

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This recently from Tom Hines of the Monitor Group.

"My question to you, Charlie, is simple, but something that I’ve been struggling with for some time now. If every CEO or other senior leader (or at least the great majority) seems to agree that success in selling is in some part attributable to trust based selling concepts, then why do they spend virtually all of their training $$ on sales process, closing techniques, etc. It seems like a dirty little secret that this is nothing but a waste of money."

"I have worked with literally hundreds of sales people over my career and no process, qualification questions or closing technique ever works without establishing trust as the foundation of any client relationship. So the question then is why don’t organizations prioritize and invest in helping their organization understand the dynamics of trust and use that as the foundation of any other program they try to implement? It seems to me that they spend a great deal of money on "quick fix" programs that do nothing to change behaviors and belief systems about the importance of trust and how it is the only way to improve performance."

Well, Tom, no surprise, you’re preaching to the choir. But I know you mean the question seriously too, and I too take it as a serious question.

Why is it that things are that way?

Here’s my Top Ten list for why organizations, especially sales organizations, don’t invest more in trust. 

10. Fear–of looking wussy, as in Real Men Don’t Play Trust Games.

9. Thinking that business is about competition. It’s not. It’s about commerce.

8. Fear—of someone taking advantage of us; hence do unto others before they do unto you.

7. Bad long-term logic. We are dominated by financial logic, internal rates of return and present-value discount rates. That belief outlaws any investment beyond about 25 years. The parent of a child operates on a longer timeframe, not to mention entire nations in Asia.

6. Inability to defer gratification.

5. A Hobbesian hangover. The continued belief, fostered by ideologue economists and politicians, that the world is an evil place—life is nasty, brutish and short–and therefore the best defense is a good offense. Even if the premise were true (I have no position on it), the conclusion certainly is not.

4. The cult of rationality. Belief that only “scientific” management works; forget passion, belief, relationships—and trust.

3. Over-emphasis on measurement. The belief that “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” Just think about that. False on the face of it.

2. The cult of short-termism. Here-now, bird-in-hand, payback time, fees-not-interest, outsource, monetize—it all adds up to transactions, not relationships. Not good for trust.

1. Fear—that someone will find out who you really are if you don’t manage your image. So tighten up, spin everything, and get out of Dodge before they can spot you for who you really are.

What’s your answer to Tom’s question?

Can You Tell the Truth About Being Self Interested?

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The other day I was teaching a seminar, and someone phrased the following question:

I understand your point that, in sales, we should pay attention to the other person, focus on their needs, subordinate our own ego, and so on. But I have a hard time squaring that with honesty. After all, I’m in business to make money. They know that as well as I do. Isn’t it disingenuous—even dishonest—for me to pretend I’m totally focused on them, and not on myself?

That’s a very relevant issue to lots of people, and very well stated.

The answer in many ways boils down to one word—timeframe.

If I’m in a romantic relationship for sex, I’d better plan on some dinners, flowers, conversations and companionship on the way there. (And vice versa, by the way).

If I’m going to rely on friendships, then I’d better be prepared to invest in them over time.

If I want to have high energy and good health, then I’d better be prepared to forego the chocolate cake cravings from time to time, and to exercise sometimes when I don’t feel like it.

In other words, the desire for immediate gratification is often the enemy of longer-term happiness. Sad but true. In one study (maybe a reader can help me remember where/when), five year-olds were analyzed according to their ability to defer gratification (“one cookie now, or two in an hour”). Their subsequent lives were then traced over decades. Those kids who chose more later were notably happier, more successful, more stable later in life.

So it is in sales.

If I insist on closing every deal; if I insist on metricizing every little aspect of my sales process and tying rewards to each part; if I am constantly evaluating the discounted present value of the next ten minutes of conversation so as to decide whether to qualify or flush the prospect—then I am not a deferred-gratification salesperson, I am that greedy kid saying “me want cookie now!”

And people react to us accordingly. People who expect sex too early in relationships tend not to get it. People who never invest in their friends lose them. People who can’t resist the extra piece of cake get fat.

Back to my student.

The apparent conflict between self-interest and customer orientation evaporates if we look at the right timeframe. If all I can see at any point in a sales conversation is the likelihood of closing, then I am a “me want cookie now” kind of salesperson.

But if I’m willing to invest in the relationship—to let go the incessant attachment to outcome, to enjoy the ride as well as the destination, to qualify leads occasionally as opposed to constantly, to drive my reward from the total package rather than the quarterly pieces, to live in the relationship not the transaction—then things get better.  In fact, all things get a lot better.

It’s a bit of a paradox: the best short-term results do NOT come from trying to manage the short-term, but from managing in the long term. Your own best sales results come not from trying to sell the other guy, but from helping him get what he wants.

Your own self-interest is truly served by serving the other. And that’s the honest truth–about which you can be honest.

The contradiction is only in how you phrase the problem. Phrase it in the longer term.

 

Why People Don’t Trust Trust

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In broad terms, what I do for a living is teach (mainly corporate) people to be trustworthy with their business partners, customers and clients.

One of the most frequent objections I get is, “But what you’re suggesting is naïve; it’s too risky, and people will take advantage of you.”
Let me explain why this is a non-sequitur at best, and flat wrong at worst. There are three mistaken assumptions in this claim:

1. Believing that trusting and being trusted are the same
2. Believing you can earn trust without risk
3. Believing that people’s primary instinct is selfishness.

Trust is not symmetrical. To be trusted by someone is not the same thing as trusting someone. When I recommend being trustworthy to my clients, I mean things like admitting when you’re wrong, not fudging your credentials, recommending competitors if they are better for the job, and generally speaking the truth about whatever is going on with you and the other person and the situation at hand.

I have never heard anyone justify lying. But I hear lots of people say they’d never recommend a competitor, or that they’d shade the truth to win a job, or that they’d never acknowledge a situation of discomfort, or call out a dysfunctional client situation. Which as far as I’m concerned means you’re not willing to tell the truth. Which is often only marginally distinct from telling a lie.
But that’s how people talk themselves into not being trusted—that is, by coming up with excuses for not telling very much truth. Which comes across to clients and partners as hiding something. Which makes them distrust you.

Most service providers over-rate credentials and a track record, and underrate the power of telling the truth—all of it. Honesty, transparency, truth-telling, full disclosure—these are the things that lay bare motives, and convince others that nothing is being hidden.

But to the one who would be trusted, these can seem risky steps to take. Admit we made a mistake? Heavens no! They might think we are incompetent; they might be upset; they might fire us; they might not pay the bill. Better to say nothing of it, try to fix things up behind the scenes, and hope they don’t notice it.  But they always notice it. And the coverup is always worse than the crime.

There is no trust without risk. Ronald Reagan’s line “trust but verify” is a rhetorical trick. Trust with verification isn’t trust–it’s more like random drug-testing, which is what happens absent trust.

The one who would be trusted is the one who takes small, initial up front risks—risks of embarrassment, rejection, inadequacy. The one who trusts is the one who generally takes the far bigger, longer-term risk—buying the product, signing the contract.

How silly, then, to risk ruining a large, long-term deal by avoiding a small, short-term deal—out of fear. Yet it happens all the time. We can’t tell them they have a problem in purchasing management—they might be offended. So we’ll just do nothing.

It’s ironic that the largest cause of unwillingness to be trustworthy via truth-telling is the belief that the other party—the one we’d like to trust us—will screw us given the chance.
It has nothing to do with whether people are “good” or “bad,” whether they are or are not out to get you. Those odds vary by industry, geography, and other conditions.

But in almost any population (all right, so maybe Wall Street might be an exception), the willingness to behave at a level of trustworthiness beyond the norm for that population will itself tend to raise the level of trusting as a response. Simply put, people respond to trustworthiness in a reciprocal manner.

If someone behaves in a more trustworthy manner than I am accustomed to—then I am more likely to trust them than I would someone else on average.

What’s so dumb about being trustworthy?

 

The Mathematics of Age and Wisdom

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Time goes faster as we get older.

This makes intuitive sense if you assume time has a subjective flavor, in addition to an objective meaning. A year at age 10 is a tenth of one’s live; at age 50, it’s only 2% of one’s life. The rate of passage of time, measured by our perception of change, indeed increases.

Now apply that concept to age and wisdom. How much wiser is a 60-year old person than a 20-year old person? Three times wiser?
I would argue at least a multiple of six. If not more. Here’s how.

Let’s define wisdom in a narrow, simple way: the ability to perceive patterns from the data of life. And I don’t mean book-data. Any young trader on Wall Street can cite statistics about past bear markets. But the old traders will tell you, until you’ve been through one, you’ll behave stupidly when presented with it the first time.

A 20-year old person has seen 20 years of life. A 60-year old person has seen 3 times that much. Without complicating the math, the oldster has got 3 times more direct experience—more data from which to mine patterns.

But add subjectivity. A 60-year old has not only his or her own life at close hand, but the prior 60 or so years take on a new light. They become more accessible.

Born in 1950, World War II seemed impossibly distant for me at age 10. After all, it had started more than a lifetime ago—for me. At age 40, I was shocked that college freshmen viewed the Vietnam War as similarly distant. Like all boomers—veterans especially—the passage of time has brought those two wars much closer together.

My son, who is now 19, met my grandmother, who lived to 100. She listened to Civil War stories, first-hand, at the feet of soldiers who fought it. That’s one degree of separation from the Civil War to a PS3 gamer.

Yet that feels less remarkable to me now than it used to. I can now envision the 1920s far more easily than previously; but the 1890s still feel quite beyond my grasp.

So here’s my mathematical rule of wisdom: you can mine the history of 2x your age for wisdom.

Thank god wisdom doesn’t depend much on memory. That seems to work in the other direction.

The Science of Management Revisited

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How far have we come in 100 years?

In 1911, Frederick W. Taylor published “The Principles of Scientific Management.” (read it directly at that link for free, thanks to the Google scanning initiative).

It makes remarkable reading today.  Taylor’s proposition was simple.  We need to stop just looking for talented people, and better train and organize normal people.   Management is a science—the science of efficiency.  It applies to all jobs, and all who use it benefit.

Workers themselves are incapable—“stupid” is his preferred word—of understanding the scientific principles that maximize their efficiency.  Ditto even for initiative.  The job of management is to define people’s jobs in extraordinary detail, and to provide initiative. 

“Workmen will not submit to this more rigid standardization and will not work extra hard, unless they receive extra pay for doing it… management must inform [the worker] at frequent intervals as to the progress he is making, so that hey may not unintentionally fall off in his pace…the workman alone even with full knowledge of the new methods and with the best of intentions could not attain these startling results.”

“The average workman must be able to measure what he has accomplished and clearly see his rewards at the end of each day if he is to do his best…cooperation or “profit-sharing”…have been at the best only mildly effective in stimulating men to work hard.  The nice time which they are sure to have today if they take things easily and go slowly proves more attractive than steady hard work with a possible reward to be shared with others six months later.”

Taylor is most famous for his remarkably detailed time and motion studies of activities like shoveling coal and transporting pig iron to a rail car.   It’s easy to read Taylor as quaint.  To the objection that measuring coal-shovelers and pig-iron handlers is irrelevant to advanced workers, Taylor responds with—time and motion studies of lathe-cutters. 

But in fact, Taylor is very much with us today.

A recent emailing from Harvard Business School Publishing headlines, “If You’re Not Measuring Marketing, You’re Not Marketing.” 
It advertises a CD-ROM on Measuring Marketing Performance that tells you “how to create a marketing dashboard that can reveal the true performance of the company’s marketing activities. The dashboard can be used to inform boards of directors and senior leaders as to how well their marketing efforts are supporting customers’ needs.” 

The only thing Taylor would argue with is whether the shovelers are intelligent enough to provide the data on shoveling with which they are to be measured.  

The ubiquity of “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” (see here, or here, or here),while transparently false and based on a misreading of Taylor, is testimony to the pervasiveness of his influence.
 
What we have taken—and kept—from Taylor is a passion for breaking things down into tiny tasks, measured in tiny units of time.  Technology and process engineering have enabled us to extend this philosophy to unprecedented levels.  We have come to believe that basically all management is a variation on workflow design—if we measure precisely enough, and mete out just the right carrots and sticks, we will produce a perpetual motion/money machine. 

It is easy to caricature Frederick Taylor, despite the ways in which we continue to emulate him.  But he was wise in ways we have conveniently forgotten.  The "management equals measurement" people treat measurement as both necessary and sufficient; Taylor only argued the former.

“The mechanism of management must not be mistaken for its essence, or underlying philosophy…when elements of this mechanism, such as time study, are used without being accompanied by the true philosophy of management, the results are in many cases disastrous….the really great problem involved in a change from the management of “initiative and incentive” to scientific management consists in a complete revolution in the mental attitude and the habits of all those engaged in the management, as well also the workman…this change…is a matter of from two to three years, and in some cases it requires from four to five years."

Plus ca change…

Why Modern Sales is so Anti Trust

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The Sandler Sales Institute offers one of many approaches to selling available to corporate sales organizations.

I don’t know their work personally, but they have a good reputation, as far as I know. And just two weeks ago, I heard a very solid testimonial about some of their work from a very savvy, and satisfied, client.

I say that as preamble because I have no reason to think they are worse than any other sales training approach in the market; in fact, my only first-hand data says they are better. Still. Nonetheless. Try this quote(pdf) on for size:

Sandler Rule: The professional never does anything by accident. You should never ask a question, make a statement, or behave in any way unless it is in your best selling interest.

The advice that follows is pretty good—listen more, let the customer talk—but it’s hard to get past that opening statement. Basically, it says, never do anything that won’t help close the sale for you.

That would rule out mentioning solutions that don’t rhyme with what you’re selling. It would rule out referring customers elsewhere. Or suggesting a customer can’t afford what you’re selling. Or that your product might be wrong for a particular customer.

Simply put—if your customer’s needs don’t match what you’re selling—don’t mention it. Sell it anyway. Don’t do, say, or think anything that might keep you from closing that transaction.

Think about the mindset implicit in this view. It says the seller’s interests are deeply, inextricably opposite those of the buyer. That buyer and seller are in competition, in a zero-sum game. That there can only be one winner in the customer-seller struggle—and we all know who that is supposed to be.

This is not an isolated quotation. Here’s another, from the website of a Sandler licensee.

Prospects are inherently motivated to get as much information about your company, your competitors, and the competitive alternatives (like doing nothing, or buying something that is completely different from your product/service). They want to see your complete proposal first…

Prospects LOVE proposals…Sales is the only profession where people are expected to give away valuable information prior to payment. The more technical the sale, the more information is expected prior to signing a deal.

Again, the assumed context is us against them. In this view, the customer’s job is to squeeze as much competitive information, and to gain as much competitive leverage from the seller as possible. The seller’s job is to withhold as much information, and to extract as high a price, as possible.

This is the ideology of the past. The world is moving toward more interdependence, not less. Suspicion is expensive—and there are greater and greater opportunities for suspicion in a connected world.

Trust is the counter-intuitive solution to suspicion. You can build trust in commercial relationships; contracts can either be defenses against evil perpetrators, or the occasion for in-depth discussions about expectations and transparency. One is expensive. One lowers costs.

In sales, the era of competing against your customer is over. We need something like Trust-based Selling™, based on a simple principle: if you consistently do what is good for your customers, you will end up creating more value than those who are solely motivated by self-aggrandizement.

And you will end up getting your fair share of that added value.

How Too Many Legal Contracts Are Costing Business

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What do work-for-hire contracts, email disclaimers and spam have in common? They are all getting ubiquitous, annoying—and ineffective.

Here’s what I mean.

Trend #1: Business is moving from a vertical management model to a horizontal purchasing model. Consider benefits administration: once a department reporting to the VP HR, now a purchased service, linked to the company by a commercial contract for services.

The Result: more contracts.

Trend #2: Communications and media—like books, records, movies and letters—have been fragmented, even atomized. In their place: email, twitter, web sites, links, sampling, and digitization. Far more opportunities for claims of intellectual property rights.

The Result: more contracts.

Contracts and Costs

Think of contracts as transaction costs. Unlike production costs, contracts add zero value. They are a tax on productivity—necessary for orderliness in a complex society, but a form of overhead nonetheless.

Here’s the problem. Costs of production go down with scale. Transaction costs, however, go up. Often exponentially.

The more commercial contracts, the more detailed the lawyers will want to make those contracts. The more fragmented the bits of sample music are, the more detailed must the IP contracts become to cover all eventualities.

The old response to risk was to create tighter contracts. But as the world becomes more complex, the ever-fertile legal mind will find more and more risk to be mitigated—and will unfortunately default to the only thing it knows—more and more complex contracts.

When quantity of contracts demanded is multiplied by some exponential complexity factor, you’ve got a serious economic issue. It’s hard to nail down the macro-economic costs of complexity, but they are very real. See, for example, Steven Covey’s Speed of Trust or Collaboration Rules by Philip Evans and Bob Wolf.

Still, you can get a visceral example of it by looking at email disclaimers. Spudart offers a tour of 50-plus samples—Great Moments in Email Disclaimers, so to speak—for your reading pleasure.

Or harken back to BusinessWeek’s legal advice to small business owners to use the fine print on sales receipts to protect companies from their customers.

And the Law Offices of Ernest Sasso gives you the downward spiral of logic that leads lawyers to attach such disclaimers to their own email; you can see the slippery slope by which every email by everyone to anyone should—in theory—have disclaimers attached.

It is, of course, ironic that disclaimers usually say "don’t read this if it wasn’t meant for you." Too bad they come at the end, after you’ve read the email.

More significant are increasing clauses in commercial contracts. Five years ago, I wasn’t being asked to certify that my subcontractors on a $50,000 consulting job had automobile insurance. I don’t recall being asked to indemnify huge clients against potential suits by third parties for theft of intellectual property. I don’t recall the ubiquity of IP suits I’m hearing about now.

Only Luddites object to increasing complexity. But only troglodytes insist on pushing the same old tools in changed circumstances, not noticing that the tools are making things worse, rather than better.

Interestingly, parties to contracts are beginning to push back in their own way—through the use of constructive hypocrisy. “Sorry about this, the lawyers are requiring it…you know, this won’t ever really come up…it’s just a technicality, if we ever need to address it we’ve always worked it out before…come on, this doesn’t really have to change things…”

Constructive hypocrisy is often quite preferable to actually trying to live by this contractual spam. Unfortunately, many people insist on actually meaning it. And enforcing it, if only for power plays. And it doesn’t take too many to force the rest to live by it.

Is there an alternative? You betcha. It’s called more trust.

If you think that’s fluffy, read about how one buyer bought an $800 million business in 20 minutes in this Wall Street Journal article.

The buyer? Warren Buffett.

 

Mitigating Emotional Risk

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Most service professionals share a distinguishing characteristic: they over-rate content mastery and under-rate personal connection. Professionals are less comfortable operating in the purely personal realm than they are in data-based, content-driven interactions. I have observed these patterns consistently throughout my career in professional services.

Nothing is more likely to cause an accountant, lawyer, actuary or consultant to break out sweating than the need to interact improvisationally one on one with a client without a clear agenda, in an area outside their zone of competence, with a potential sale on the line.

It feels, above all else, risky. Personally risky.

If you were to infer that professionals underrate personal skills because they are uncomfortable practicing them, I wouldn’t dissuade you. Here’s more evidence.

My online Trust Quotient self-assessment quiz has over 2500 entries so far. The quiz rates your own assessment of your credibility, reliability, intimacy, and self-orientation—the key components of the Trust Equation.

For professionals so far, the highest scores are for reliability; the lowest are for intimacy.

In other words: an under-rated and critical skill in professional services—the ability to form deep personal relationships—is, by participants’ own self-ratings, their area of greatest weakness.

In the seminar work I do with professionals, this is always evident. “Oh we couldn’t say that, that would be too direct. That might offend them. The client would be embarrassed if I did that. They might feel that’s unprofessional. I wouldn’t want them to think I was too emotional. That just isn’t done. That’s too risky.”

These people are professionals at mitigating risk—financial risk, professional risk, business process risk, sales risk, legal risk. Yet when it comes to mitigating emotional risk, they are often clueless.

There is no trust without risk. But pointing that out just makes professionals burrow even further into the hole of denial, claiming that their clients are robots who don’t really want their professionals to appear human.

What they need is a simple, formulaic tool for dealing with the perceived risk of increasing intimacy with other human beings. Hey, we could all use a little of that, right?

There is precisely such a tool, and I’m going to write about it in the next blog post. It’s called Name It and Claim It. It is a simple grammatical technique. It is a meta-tool, meaning it can be applied to whatever is causing you fear. It is easy to remember, and pretty easy to use.

There is no trust without risk. This tool mitigates emotional risk. Which means you can stop shutting down trust by no longer being excessively risk-averse.

Best of all, it works. Very well. Stay tuned for details, next post.