Tag: Seth Godin

The grown-up’s guide to rejection

The mantra that a good consultant “tells people what they need to know not what they want to hear” is a cliché, but it still sums up a basic truth about the consultant/client relationship.

There’s no point in you hiring me if you’re already convinced you know what needs to be done and just want me to tell you that you’re right.

There’s no satisfaction for me in buckling down to do what you want if I think it’s wrong.  If we can’t come to an agreement about the way forward, the grown-up response is for everyone to agree that the relationship won’t work and walk away from it.

I’ve never found being grown-up that easy, though.

I met a prospective client last week.  A small voluntary sector body, with big ambitions to change the world by… well … anyway, it was going to be great and all that was holding them back was the failure of the world to realise what a great thing it would be if …

Their problem was they couldn’t explain to me exactly what it was they wanted to do – other than repeating “we’re in the business of changing people’s lives”.  My problem was that I couldn’t stop asking awkward questions like, “how are you planning to do that?”   I  don’t think we could have worked together.  I liked them a lot – idealists and optimists are fantastic to be around –  but eventually you need some realism in there too or else nothing gets done.  They said they liked me too, but my attempts to bring the conversation round to practicalities wasn’t what they wanted to hear.  There’s a lesson in there for next time.

Despite knowing that it wouldn’t have worked,  I’m left with a sense of frustration that I couldn’t persuade them to harness their vision to my pragmatism and see what happened.  At which moment, in stepped Seth Godin, with exactly the blog post I needed:

“Don’t take it personally.”

This is tough advice. Am I supposed to take it like a chair? Sometimes it seems as though the only way to take it is personally. That customer who doesn’t like your product (your best work) or that running buddy who doesn’t want to run with you any longer…

Here’s the thing: it’s never personal. It’s never about you. How could it be? That person doesn’t truly know you, understand what you want or hear the voices in your head. All they know is themselves.

When someone moves on, when she walks away or even badmouths you or your work, it’s not personal about you. It’s personal about her. Her agenda, her decisions, her story.

Do your work, the best way you know how. Is there any other option?

Why don’t you…

The infallibly interesting Seth Godin has a post today about why he doesn’t watch TV any more and lists all of the things you can do instead, now that there’s so much more choice of things to do in your spare time.  I was struck by the fact that all but a couple of his “new” choices have existed for years – I admit that running a store on eBay or starting up an online community do depend on a degree of 21st century connectivity, but most of the others are just slight variations on things my mother used to tell me to do when I was loafing around the house as a teenager and she thought I should be doing something more productive.  (This might mean my mum is a visionary marketing guru who was  years ahead of her time, but I doubt it.)

I don’t watch a lot of TV when it’s broadcast now because I’m working/my kids monopolise the remote in the early evenings and there’s only so much Hannah Montana a grown woman can take (Phineas and Ferb is good, though)/I’d rather read a good book/I watch stuff I like on DVD when I can watch it in satisfyingly long chunks rather than rationed and with adverts an hour a week.  But most importantly because I don’t find most of what’s on that interesting.   Even when I worked in TV ten years ago it was clear that the really creative, bright young things were gravitating much more towards what might be possible online than what could be done in a TV studio.  So not only is TV suffering from an increase in competition for its audience’s time, for me at least, it’s also suffering from a lack of  really strong content to fight back with.  So, all together now, why don’t you just switch off your television set and go out and do something less boring instead?

Taking Care of Business

I’ve been listening to Jerry Springer being interviewed on 5Live  this morning (ah, the joys of working from home…) I was mentally tuning in and out of the interview as my attention was caught on other things, but what came through was his apparent disdain for the output of his own show.  He’d rather be back in politics or hosting a sports show “but that’s not what I’m hired for” (sorry Jerry, I may be paraphrasing, but that was the gist of it)

Now, my opinion of the Jerry Springer show and its  counterpart, Jeremy Kyle, can wait for another day when I feel  in need of  something to vent some rage on (there’s a clue in the link…).  What snagged my attention today was the idea that doing something you seem to despise is OK  if  it’s how you earn a living.  This whole issue has been bubbling round in my head for a while  and has cropped up in some unexpected places recently – the mighty Seth touched on it in his blog just a few days ago.   I’m particularly exercised by it now because I’m currently working for an organisation which has done some things I’ve disagreed with pretty vehemently in the past (I’m OK with the project I’m on at the moment, though).

I can’t be alone in wondering about the ethics of communicating on behalf of organisations I disagree with.  When I was temping years ago I told the agency I was working for that I didn’t want to be considered for a job they had with BAT;  and there are other organisations you can think of that you wouldn’t touch with a barge pole – anybody fancy being press officer for the BNP?      So how bad do organisations have to be before we feel the obligation to walk away?  And in these recessionary times, with alternative jobs pretty thin on the ground,  would the building society accept my righteous glow as part-payment on the mortgage?