Chapter 19
Our Vision of the Future
A Roadmap for Change
For nearly fifty years, from the end of World War II to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the threat of nuclear annihilation hung like a cloud over life in the United States. Kids were taught to “duck and cover” in elementary school, protestors demonstrated against the bomb, and nearly all foreign policy attention was focused on containing the nuclear threat posed by the Soviets.
Today that seems like a kinder, gentler time.
Today we're concerned with terrorism, climate change, global cyber-security threats, disease pandemics, income inequality, mass migrations, economic dislocations, unsustainable food systems, and overpopulation.
It's enough to make you want to turn off the news.
But why this rise in global threats? Why have the challenges facing the world seemingly grown over the last fifty years?
Some argue it's because of mismanagement on the part of political leaders. “It's the rise of the alarmist left!” “It's the reactionaries on the right!” Others talk about how the media has gotten too efficient at scouring the globe for bad news. “Three-headed child in Myanmar eats mother!”
Both of these might be true, but we also see the rise of complex, thorny problems as a natural outcome of an increasingly connected world. Technology in communication and transportation broadens and flattens markets, and that makes all of our problems instantly global in scope. You pull a string in Toledo, and something jerks in Tokyo.
Boys in the Ladipo Auto Parts Market in Lagos use handcarts to push boxes of Sangsin brake pads that have just arrived by way of Dubai from the plant in China, grooving to the sounds of Drake on their iPhones. A huaso leaves his ranch outside of Puerto Natales, enters a Chilean hardware store, and buys a panel of heatproof plasterboard for his fireplace made from South African vermiculite so he can keep warm at night while he fattens yearlings that will be sold as specialty grass-fed beef in London's Keevil and Keevil shop in Smithfield Market.
It's no wonder our problems feel exhausting. Simply unknotting the ball of string that is our global supply chain would keep a team of experts busy for a lifetime.
In many ways, the fact that we are so strongly cross-linked across geography is a good thing. Code, news, points of view, photos, foodstuffs, new business opportunities, Facebook posts, memes, podcasts, medical cures, religious insights, exercise techniques, math equations, textile patterns, subway car specifications, office space architectural details, EU regulations, bread recipes, and love songs all flash across the globe at the speed of light. But then so do diseases, hacking techniques, carbon-burning vehicles, capital accumulations, and people who wish us ill.
Here's the thing: the proliferation of technology-fueled challenges requires human beings to bring more expertise to the table. As the world gets broader and flatter, we have to get better at connecting with those who need our help.
Our view is that embedded in all this global intercourse and the parallel rise in expertise are the seeds of peace, prosperity, and learning. When we swap what works and what doesn't with colleagues from around the world, the circle of those we know and respect grows—what we define as local or personal gets larger, creating a new geography in which war becomes untenable. Trade, too, creates strong incentives to keep the peace, tempering the hot tempers of ideology.
A Life Worth Living
Is the good life one where we enjoy a glass of Bordeaux on our back deck, sail in the British Virgin Islands, and play a round of golf at St. Andrews? Or is it one spent tackling great challenges where our talents are harnessed to good effect? Perhaps the good life is one marked by achievement and contribution? These are tough questions that we all wrestle with at some point in our lives.
Author Jim Collins says that the answer to the question, “What should I do with my life?” sits at the intersection of three things: what you love to do, your gifts, and what you can get paid for.
We have always been fans of this formulation. It's what we tell our high school and college-aged kids when they ask us about what they should do when they grow up. You love climbing mountains and are good at it? Figure out how to get paid for it. Are you great at math in a way that lets you earn big money but leaves you angry and exhausted at the end of every day? Time to switch things up.
But how about a life worth living? What does that look like? To this we'd propose a corollary to the Collins formula: a life worth living is one that sits at the intersection of wrestling with a difficult problem, using your best talents, and doing work that is consequential.
A Life Worth Living
Whenever we are working hard on something that is tough to solve and we are using our talents to their utmost in service of a problem that makes a difference in this world, we feel good. The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi first came up with the word “flow” to describe the feeling we get when we disappear into a task. He argued this state of being fully immersed in your work is the wellspring of happiness.
The optimal state of inner experience is one in which there is order in consciousness. This happens when psychic energy—or attention—is invested in realistic goals, and when skills match the opportunities for action. The pursuit of a goal brings order in awareness because a person must concentrate attention on the task at hand and momentarily forget everything else.
—Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow
Irish playwright, George Bernard Shaw, offered a similar take:
No man who is occupied in doing a very difficult thing, and doing it very well, ever loses his self-respect.
We think this is what drew many of us to the world of consulting and professional services in the first place. We like using our intelligence, education, and experience to puzzle through thorny problems that make a difference. We like the feeling of doing great work and making a difference in the lives of our clients. Our work is more than a job; it provides meaning in our lives. For a lucky few, our work is a calling. We are drawn to our work for reasons beyond what is simply explained by a paycheck.
In reflecting back on his first days at the Boston Consulting Group, Russell Davis remembers how honored he felt. “The chance to work at BCG was the chance to work with the smartest people at some of the world's largest companies on their hardest problems.”
Important Work
You are an expert, and the world needs your expertise. Moreover, when you feel your expertise being put to work in service of important problems, it can be extremely satisfying. As Csikszentmihalyi writes, “enjoyment appears at the boundary between boredom and anxiety, when the challenges are just balanced with the person's capacity to act.”
The question that brought us to write this book is “What is the best way to do business development if you are a consultant or professional services provider?” To us, “business development” means “building a bridge between an expert and those they can most help.” It's the essential link between your insight and problems that need your experience and intelligence—where it can make a real difference.
For us, the world's problems make the challenge of helping smart people build a bridge to those they can help particularly urgent.
Three Imperatives for a Better Future
We began this book by saying that selling consulting and professional services is hard. It's different from selling something like a shoe or a laptop. Our services are sold on relationships, referrals, and reputation. More correctly, if we are viewing the problem from the perspective of how clients buy, we're hired based upon our relationships, referrals, and reputation. We pointed out a number of obstacles to us learning to become better at winning new clients. For example, we're taught to do the work but never taught how to sell the work.
We said the breakthrough for us was to abandon sales techniques borrowed from the car or software salespeople—that relentless thrash of generating leads, qualifying them, pitching, and closing. We said the secret was to stop thinking about the problem from the perspective of a salesperson whose dinner out on Saturday depends on making a quota but rather to tear a page from the world of design thinking and begin from the client's point of view—to begin from a fundamental empathy for those we most want to help.
Ultimately, we knew there had to be a better way. We hope this book has helped us get one step closer to this better way. But we know there's much work left to be done. We see the future needing progress on three important fronts:
- Imperative 1: You—making a personal commitment to learning the craft of business development
- Imperative 2: Organizations—making an organizational commitment to helping professionals learn the craft of business development in a thoughtful and ethical way
- Imperative 3: Universities—a substantive academic commitment to research, writing, and teaching on the topic of how clients buy
Imperative 1: You
As experts in our respective fields, we enjoy living on the edge of where knowledge ends and discovery begins. Indeed, the world looks to us to bring back what we find from our travels. It is our job to import innovation into those we serve. Let us begin to think about business development that way as well. What has worked as a way of selling materials and products is not a good fit with the burgeoning expert services economy. Yes, all business is local and personal, but the distances between trading hubs on the Silk Road are growing, and our definition of what constitutes local is expanding.
The knowledge of what works and what doesn't when we are trying to connect our expertise with those we can most help is changing all the time. Will marketing automation help or hurt our cause? Will teleconferences cut down on travel or expand markets and increase travel? Is advertising dead in a world in which the human brain is growing saturated by explosive increases in messaging? None of us really knows, which makes the field of business development an intellectual frontier.
And so this is an invitation to run toward that chaos and not away from it. Just as we are happy denizens of the edge in our professions, eagerly learning about the new and leading others as intellectual early adopters, so too we can be part of a small group that wants to learn more about how expertise connects with need. Surely the world needs this Silk Road to be wider and go to more places. Let us be the ones as individuals who embrace the challenge to create the new byways.
Imperative 2: The Organization
Second, organizations have largely left professionals on their own when it comes to their education in business development. We believe there needs to be a concerted effort by all firms—but particularly the larger elite firms—toward teaching the next generation of leaders how clients buy and how to connect with those they most wish to serve.
We have seen countless approaches to business development in the expert service industries. From our point of view, there is no one approach that is the right way. The problem is not the approach—it is the quality of the effort. We have to stop pretending that business development doesn't exist and start teaching our young professionals how to do it in effective and thoughtful ways.
Imperative 3: The University
Lastly, we believe that the time has come to study the topic of this book, how clients buy, in a meaningful way at the university level. A number of academic fields need to play a role in helping us better understand this important topic. Psychology can research the role of trust and respect in how we buy expert services. Economics can illuminate how clients decide between competing firms. Marketing can help us better understand the role of social media in how we establish a person or firm's brand reputation. Sociologists might help us understand how millennials behave differently than today's corporate leaders as it relates to hiring professionals. Will digital natives lean more heavily on online sources when making decisions, or does the need for human connection transcend one's generation?
We believe that universities will step up to study these topics; maybe not this year or next, but hopefully in the coming decades. As the saying goes, “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” We believe the student is ready. We know that academic institutions move at the speed of glue, but over time, change can occur. Our hope is that one day there will be extensive course offerings for university students to help them better understand the topic of how clients buy.
How Clients Buy
The people we help mostly don't do what we do.
If you are a trademark attorney, the general counsel in one of your client companies doesn't register trademarks. She manages you. You do the work. That's why she hired you.
If you design tract housing, the developer in Las Vegas for whom you work doesn't design houses. He manages you. That's why he hired you.
If you advise on how to drive innovation in consumer product companies, the head of innovation who is your client doesn't design innovation strategies, she manages you. It's why she hired you.
Increasingly, our clients are like movie producers, an enduring metaphor that author Tom Peters originally gave us. Their jobs are to bring together the money, the story idea, the director, the cinematographer, the on-screen talent, the money, the studio's approval, the scriptwriter, the composer, the money, the editor, the production designer, the art director, and (did we say this?) the money.
That's the way it is with our clients. They want to make something happen in their worlds. They frame the task in the context of their company's strategic plan, borrow a junior manager from accounting to serve as controller, hire outside help, marshal their team, and find a budget. Their job is to bring together all the moving pieces and orchestrate an outcome. When it works, progress has been wrought, and they are the heroes.
And that is your invitation: You play an essential role in the collaborative ecosystem that drives progress across organizations. You bring a unique set of previous experiences, hard-won insight, and domain expertise to the table that, when combined with a host of other resources, can produce movie magic. It is exciting to be part of a team that really effects change. It is why, if you do a good job, you are often asked to return like Tom Hanks to a Stephen Spielberg production.
But know this: your expertise will sit alone, shipwrecked and starving on a distant desert island, your toes digging despondently in the sharp coral sand, unless you stand up and start calling attention to the work you do, the problems you are committed to solving, the conversation you want to underwrite, and the clients you most want to serve.
That is how experts connect with those they can most help.