We live in a world of rules. Formal and informal. Explicit and implicit. Written and unwritten. Rules imposed from without and rules imposed from within. Legal rules. Social rules. Cultural rules. Religious rules. Organizational rules. Rules that go by other names: Codes. Bylaws. Guidelines. SOPs. Canons. Edicts. Commandments.

That’s a whole lot of stuff telling you how to live your life.

But rules are nothing more than other peoples’ best guesses, based on the past, at how we might all lead better lives in the future. None of them are connected with a deep understanding of what makes you you. Of what might bring you a sense of fulfillment. Of the unique gift you might make to the world.

Lost in all of these rules is what I consider the most important rule of all. Polonius said it well: “To thine own self be true.” Or… Be Yourself.

That’s equally true whether the “you” is an entire organization, a brand, or just you.

Much thanks to all who have encouraged me, inspired me, mentored me, cheered for me, taught me, hired me, endured me, challenged me, provoked me, or supported me.

To what comes next,

Adam

This is a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson. I have it inscribed on the inside of my notebook as a reminder to take risks. (Because of course I always do what it says in my notebook…)

It’s not about thrill seeking for me. It’s about growth. Because the opportunities to grow are almost always in the places that scare us. Growth requires pushing into an area that we don’t know. And not knowing scares the shit out of us. Because we might screw it up, get laughed at and have to confront the possibility that we’re not perfect.

(Hint: It helps if you really truly accept from the outset that you aren’t perfect… Once you’ve made peace with that, life gets a lot easier. Or at least a lot less stressful.)

So I remind myself a lot about the relationship between growth and fear. And this week I took a big step into the unknown. I left my job to go out on my own and start my own company—a consultancy dedicated to helping leaders shape organizations that are true to their unique purpose and designed to bring to the world what makes them brilliant. The company is called Rule No. 1.

I’ll share more about all of this over the coming days, weeks and months.

For now, wish me luck. Or at least growth. Here’s to taking the leap…

I ordered food from Seamless tonight. (Then I ate it. But that part’s not important to the point I’m making.) One part of the order wasn’t done right. I had requested a sushi roll inside out and they made it the regular way. I know, first world problems… Also not the point. Stay with me here.

A few hours later they sent me a text asking if the order was delivered properly. I was supposed to send a yes or no response back to them or opt out of these little surveys.

So I responded “no” because, well, that was the truth.

Guess what happened next.

Did they ask me for more detail on what was wrong with the order? No.

Did they apologize? No. Did they ask if they could contact me to learn more? No. Did they refund my money? No. Did they offer me a back rub? No.

Instead, they sent me another survey question, asking if the order was delivered on time.

Are you kidding?

Had they not bothered with the texts in the first place I would have been fine. I had forgotten about the one wrong item in my order. It was a non issue for me. But there’s an object lesson in here on how to engage customers.

The moment they sent me the second question they broke conversational norms. When you’re in a conversation and someone says something, you’re meant to respond in a way that demonstrates that you were listening and that you care about them. If instead, you just say the next thing you wanted to say anyway, then it isn’t a conversation. It’s just you broadcasting in their face.

Brands need to understand this. Deeply. The rules in business are not different than the rules in your personal life. Humans are humans. We want to be respected. We want to be cared about. We want to be heard. And you simply cannot recite your script in someone’s face. You have to actually engage them, listen to what they say and, you know, say words back to them that indicate you’re actually in the conversation with them.

“Compensation” is the word used to describe the money that employers pay their employees. And something about it just feels off to me. It seems to me this represents some beliefs about employment that are increasingly at odds with the work people do and why they do it.

Google “compensation” and the first definition you’ll find is “something, typically money, awarded to someone as a recompense for loss, injury, or suffering”. You’ll also find links to articles with headlines such as:

• “Russian nationalists suggest enormous lawsuit against Germany over WWII damages”
• “GM receives over 4100 injury claims for faulty ignitions”
• “The Tehran hostages’ endless siege: A quest for compensation and closure”

Surely I can’t be the only one who finds it sadly comical that our paychecks are in the same category as monies paid to the victims of Nazi aggression.

I shouldn’t be surprised. Basic economic theory holds that the money paid to us by our employers is all about them purchasing our labor. We would all rather be sitting on the couch drinking a beer and so, work is painful. Or at least annoying. We would rather not do it and therefore we need to be compensated for our loss.

I’ll admit, work throughout most of history has hewed to that way of thinking. And it still does for most people.

But you can see the glimmers of hope and evidence that in the future, work will much more often be about expressing our identity, advancing our ideals, self-actualizing and (dare I say it) having fun.

Work should be enjoyable. We should choose work that we believe in, that helps us make a difference, that enriches our lives.

We shouldn’t need to be compensated for it. It should be intrinsically rewarding.

In case my own employer is reading this, I don’t mean we should all work for free. I just mean that the basic assumption of compensation is essentially awful. It reinforces some premises about work that we would all be better off jettisoning. That work is somehow separate from and actually an intrusion on your real life. Basically, that work sucks.

Instead of “compensation”, perhaps we ought to think about “enrichment”. Money that employers pay us is being paid not because they have aggrieved us but simply to help enrich our lives. In that world view, work is a part of what we do as whole human beings. It fits into and enriches our life rather than taking from it. The work itself is an enrichment and the money we receive supplements that by allowing us to do all sorts of things outside of work—raise children, get involved in our communities, travel and, of course, drink great beer.

I have been blessed with the opportunity to work with some really wonderful clients. People I respect and adore, in companies whose foundational ideas are compelling to me and who are in a position to really do some good in the world if they fully act on what they stand for. Often my work involves helping them shape and clarify their core ideas (purpose, values, vision, mission, behaviors, etc.) and design cultures in which those ideas can be fully manifest.

Over the past few years I have noticed myself using the language of my clients’ values as if they were my own values. Referring to their values and behaviors in order to make a decision. Using them with my consulting teams to add a bit of poignancy to something we’d just done.

As a consultant, this gets interesting. Because I am not an employee of my client’s company. I am employed by another company. A pretty wonderful one. With its own values and foundational ideas that matter to me a lot.

This has led to some soul searching for me. How am I supposed to relate to the ideas and ideals of my clients? Admire them from afar? Internalize them? How should I think about the relationship between my clients’ values and the values of my own employer? What about my own?

All of this made me wonder whether we should be rethinking the relationship we have with our clients. I know that I feel a much deeper connection to my clients than simply being a professional service provider.

The era of professional consulting

Management consultancies are known and valued for the objective impartial advice we provide to our clients. This is central to our value proposition. Clients often come to us because we bring a breadth of perspective learned from across all of our clients and because we don’t “have skin in the game”.

This at-a-distant relationship seemed appropriate in an era when value was created through the application of best practices, and the qualities most differentiating were professionalism and integrity.

But we now live in an experience economy. Professionalism and integrity are now expected as table stakes and value is created through the design of brilliant experiences delivered through authentic human relationships.

The era of participant consulting

I believe consultancies can play a different role. We are at a moment when professions, industries and the nature of work are transforming. The known ideas, approaches and methods of achieving results are no longer working as they once did. The world needs leaders who can imagine a better future and rally people to take the bold and creative steps that will get them there.

These leaders can’t survive only on a diet of objective advice from impartial outsiders. They need partners who will work alongside them as they transform their organizations. They need people who will collaborate with them to author, visualize and design their future. And they need friends who feel emotionally invested in their success, who have deep empathy for the hard and lonely work of leading through the unknown, who will help them summon their courage when it gets tough and lift their spirits when they are exhausted.

To do this transformation work as a consultant requires skill, expertise, brilliance, and energy as it always did. But these are no longer enough. It also takes profound insight into our clients—their companies and themselves as people. We need to understand not just what we can learn from their annual report, from their strategy documents, from their market research. And not just what we can glean from interviews. We need to understand their jargon, their worldviews, their fears, dreams, aspirations. We need to be deeply aware of how they behave—how they actually get work done, and what it feels like to work as they do every day.

Consider the field of anthropology. Many anthropologists believed that the best way to understand human behavior was not to analyze it as an outsider. They believed that only by observing from within, as a member of a culture, could you draw out rich insights and profound understanding. They called this method “participant observation”.

Perhaps it’s time for “participant consulting”—an endeavor in which we engage with our clients not as disinterested impartial objective outsiders, but with a sense of kinship. As members of the family.

Perhaps it’s time to take it personally.

Our clients have to matter to us. Not just out of a sense of professionalism. Even more. We have to believe in what they stand for, value what they value, and feel motivated to manifest their behavioral ideals.

Many anthropologists who pursued the method of participant observation were accused of “going native”—of abandoning their scientific and scholarly standards as they came to identify personally with the cultures they were studying.

Whatever the merits of this critique of participant observation in social science, I would argue that impartiality is no longer a positive quality in consulting. If ever it was.

When I partner with a client, what does it mean if I do not come to feel a sense of kinship with them? What does it mean if their values don’t motivate me? What does it mean if I do not feel that their unique behaviors are worthy of emulating? If after weeks or months of working alongside a client I do not identify with their mission, how can I possibly expect their own employees to do so?

Much like anthropologists developed the method of participant observation because they believed that the best way to learn about a culture was by participating from the inside, I believe that consultants can only do their best work when they engage with passion, with empathy and, yes, with love, for their clients and what they stand for. When they really are members of the family in some meaningful way.

What I’m envisioning may or may not have implications for the business model and offerings of consultancies. Mostly, I’m thinking about the boundaries between “us” and “them”—whether such boundaries are really necessary, whether they should exist but be highly porous, where they should be placed and what this suggests for how consultants and clients ought to think about and relate to each other.

I know how I feel about this. When I’m in a great client relationship I don’t feel a hard boundary between me and them. It feels authentic to me. I feel that my interests and theirs are completely aligned. I enjoy being with them. I believe in what they do. I don’t feel any sense of “otherness”. I fully trust them and feel fully trusted by them. I don’t feel the need to “manage” the relationship any more than I do with a close personal friend.

And when all of this is happening, I feel most fulfilled and I do my best work.

I’m grateful to the clients that have given me such an invitation and welcomed me as members of their family.

If you’re thinking that when you’ve earned a certain title or have amassed a certain number of years of experience that all will become clear to you or that you’ll feel more comfortable having an opinion and speaking up, don’t.

When you have your boss’s job or your boss’s boss’s job…you are not going to feel like you have the answer. You are not going to feel like you know exactly what to do. And let me break it to you, your boss and your boss’s boss don’t either.

That’s because if it’s worth thinking about, there is no “answer”. It’s never going to be clear. There will always be uncertainty and risk. And you’ll always feel like you’re in over your head. At least a little.

The trick to this game is not about knowing or feeling comfortable. The trick is about being OK with that. And still pushing forward. Still forming and sharing a point of view. Still learning and advancing. And doing the best you can.

I hope that’s enough for you. Because that’s all you’ll ever get. And anyone telling you otherwise clearly doesn’t have the answer.

Jeff:

I’ve reached the end of my rope. I’m done with United.

You are literally the worst experience I have with any company. Any.

TSA is a more delightful experience than flying United.
The DMV is a more delightful experience than flying United.
Root canal is a more delightful experience than flying United.

These are not hyperboles. I mean these quite literally.

Your company is awful.

I have more than 430,000 miles on United. Most companies would consider me a good customer.

I would think you’d want to court me. To induce me to fly your airline more.

Instead, you are doing backflips to make flying United as miserable as possible. You are making it harder for me to bring bags on board. Even bags designed to be carry-on bags! I come 10 minutes too late to check a bag. Back in the good old days, you would gate check it. Instead, you make me take a later flight. To another airport. So now, instead of the red-eye followed by a nap, I have a red-eye followed by meetings. Guess how happy I’ll be tomorrow.

I have no idea what you’re thinking. Yes, I imagine McKinsey has run the numbers for you and this will goose your short-term numbers. But do you really believe that any company can long survive when it makes its customers miserable?

And on top of that, consider what you’re doing to your employees. They begged me to send you this email. Because like decent people, they hate having to make customers miserable. They hate looking across the desk and having to unreasonably say no because of some arbitrary policy you created. They hate having to make some woman cry. Which apparently they just did. To a woman flying business class who was also not permitted to get on her flight and gate check her bag. Apparently she was crying on the curb at SFO. Because of you.

It doesn’t take Nostradamus to figure out that you have a fundamentally unsustainable business model. One that puts your perceived sense of success in direct opposition to the interests of your customers. Sooner or later, that is guaranteed to fail.

With me, it is guaranteed to fail starting now. I have another reservation or two on your airline. After that, I will go out of my way to avoid United.

It’s just too damn painful.

Everyone will tell you they want to be free.

Most people are lying.

They want the benefits of freedom but don’t want to pay the costs.

I’m not making a political point here. I’m not talking about taxes. Or civic duty. Or anything like that.

I’m talking about what you want. What you really want. And what you’re prepared to do about it.

Freedom is a wonderful thing. It enables you to do things. To create. To achieve. To improve. But in order to do those things, you actually have to create, achieve, improve.

And therein lies the rub. Because getting it wrong hurts. Even the prospect of maybe getting it wrong hurts.

And so people run from the opportunity to create, achieve, improve. They run from responsibility. They run from accountability. They run from freedom. They don’t do this explicitly of course. Because nobody wants to admit they are abdicating the throne. They do it with excuses. With hints. With complaints about all of the things that get in their way.

Some are even more clever than that. They do it with suggestions for improvement. How the boss, the company, the system could do it better. This way they get to sound helpful. But really their framing is all wrong. Because they put the onus somewhere outside of themselves.

In doing so, they relinquish their freedom.

It’s quite tempting of course. If you’re not free, then it’s not your fault when it goes wrong.

But the reverse is true. If you’re not free, it’s not your success when it goes right.

Ultimately, this is the choice you have to make.

You can choose the path of freedom. This comes with the opportunity to have an impact on the world. And an almost certainty that you will fuck up along the way. And feel badly about it.

Or, you can choose to be a slave. To relinquish choice. To let mommy and daddy do it for you. To never know the pain of having chosen poorly. To never feel the pain of having screwed up. But also to never taste the thrill of success.

It’s your call.

You cannot control the weather. You cannot control physics, chemistry or biology. You cannot control the laws of human behavior. You cannot really control much of anything.

The one thing you might be able to control is your own attitude and behavior.

And when you do this, you have a critical choice to make. You can think of yourself as a victim, buffeted by a set of forces that are indifferent or malevolent, or you can see yourself as an agent—one that makes choices.  And then you do the best you can to act accordingly.

Too many people see themselves as victims. Of a harsh world. Of an evil company. Of a bad boss. Of a stupid process…

That worldview neither helps them nor helps the world. It is counterproductive.

Here is the harsh truth:  The world doesn’t give a shit about you. But it’s also not out to get you. It’s just there. And you have to decide how to react. It’s easy to blame it on the world. It’s easy to believe that you have no choice.

But it’s also lazy.

You do have a choice. Choice doesn’t mean easy. It doesn’t mean free of pain. It just means you get to choose. It may be a tough choice (actually, if it’s easy, is it really a choice?). You might not have all the information you need. You might not have enough time… But you get to choose. And then you get to live with the consequences.

You can take the easy way out. You can tell us a story about how you didn’t have a choice. Many people will even believe you. And then pat you on the head and tell you what a good boy or girl you are. If getting a pat on the head is your life’s dream, then that’s what you should do.

If having an impact and making a difference is your life’s dream then you need to start by accepting that there’s always a choice. And then using yours wisely.

I think there are at least three ways for a company to frame its relationship with the customer:

1. We transact with you: This means the company exchanges its goods and services for your money. Of course, like anything else, this can be done awfully or brilliantly. Brilliantly done means the good or service is relevant, of high quality, delightful…, that the price is fair, that the transaction process is convenient…
2. We serve you: This means that the company helps meet your needs, solve your problems, achieve your ambitions… This requires most of the elements of the transactional model – you have to serve something after all, but the orientation to the customer is different. The mindset is different. It’s one that places priority, even primacy, on the interests and needs of the customer.
3. We have a relationship with you: This means the company engages with you in a more holistic way and that this engagement changes over time in an organic way in response to shared experience. And the phrase “engages with you” is critical. It’s not something they do to you. Or on you. Or even for you. It’s something they do with you. Now, of course, in any relationship there will be moments where A is doing something for B. Or vice versa. But over the long-term a relationship is about mutual interests and needs and is co-created equally by all participants.

A few interesting observations about the above:

First, a service relationship is a relationship. But it is not holistic. It defines a priori the purpose and nature of the relationship, and the roles each party will play. A service relationship does not have a lot of room for organic growth. The company can get better at serving you but that’s all they can be or do.

Second, a true relationship morphs as each party learns about the other, as the world changes, as they share experiences and make choices together… It is much more complete than a service-only relationship. It is much more relevant. [Of course limited service-based relationships can grow over time into a more holistic relationship.]

Third, frames 1 and 3 above place the company and you on an equal footing. Frame 2 places the company in a servile position relative to you.

What got me thinking about all of this is an email I received from Carbonite – the web-based backup service. They reminded me that I hadn’t backed up my computer for a week and suggested I contact them with any questions. It was a very nice email. The reminder was helpful. They were serving me – identifying my need and reaching out to help me solve it. But they haven’t engaged me in a real relationship. Their communication is not fully relevant. It is not based on what’s going on for us today. It is not based on shared experience.

Why not? Because there has just been a massive storm – Hurricane Sandy. You’ve probably heard of it. It’s been on the news a bit. But it seems that Carbonite has not heard of it. They know I live in the northeast. They can probably tell based on my IP address and they can certainly tell based on the billing address of the credit card I used to pay them. So they know I live in the heart of the affected area. But they have not at all acknowledged that fact. This shows me that they are just not paying attention. They have not bothered to check to see whether my failure to back my computer up might be because I actually don’t have power.

What could they have done?

Easy. They could have sent an email saying that they’d noticed I hadn’t connected my computer to their servers in a while. They could have asked me whether I was OK, whether I had been affected by Sandy… They could have expressed a hope that all is well with me. That would have been enough. If they wanted, they could have gone further. They could have suggested ways I might select the few files that are critical to back up so that when I go to a place with free wifi I could backup just what is really needed. They could have suggested places I go to find power and wifi….

Bottom line: An email like the one I got from Carbonite is weird. It had some of the trappings of humanity but was blatantly missing what really makes humans tick, and certainly what makes human relationships possible – basic empathy or concern for another. When we get emails like that from companies, it becomes immediately apparent that they actually don’t care about us very much. That they want the money we give them but they don’t want to connect with us.