Truth or Consequences

Here’s my take on a post (“Lies”) that I just read on David Maister’s blog.  He and his co-author addressed a topic that has bugged me for years: professional service firms’ propensity for self-delusion.  For the moment, I’ll leave the “lying to clients” piece aside.  I’d like to address the “lying to ourselves” part that I have witnessed, in varying forms, within professional service firms’ marketing and business development programs, for my entire career. 

Charitably, one must acknowledge that many professionals who lead their firms – architects, IT consultants, lawyers, accountants, you name it – get into their professions because they love what they do.  They’re usually not wired (and usually not taught) to be “good” at any of the other aspects of running a competitively successful business.  So it’s not surprising that these practitioners don’t know what they’re talking about when they try to manage their businesses.  Not being skilled at something, and yet being thrust into the arena of having to undertake it, often results in stumbling, grasping, and ultimately, the inevitable misinterpretation of the truth.  Fine. Mistakes get made. Hopefully, they get fixed.

But I hear so many professional service firms say they are “doing great” in the marketplace, when in fact they have no evidence to prove it.  Then, when urged to learn “the truth,” they say, in effect, “No thanks; we’re already the best / doing it right / aware of what our clients need, blah blah blah.”  I could recount too many examples of this kind of self-delusion in action.

Does believing that a firm is effective in the marketplace make it true?  Some might say, “In some ways, yes!”  Sure, this kind of self-delusion could be a great motivator.  But it won’t help if these firms are motivating in the wrong direction, or blind to the fact that they are shooting themselves in the foot. No wonder professional service marketers and other enlightened firm leaders are pushing to learn more about how to best measure the effectiveness of their marketing strategies and tactics!   

In fact, it was this very issue that served as the foundation for my latest annual research project on professional services marketing, this time conducted in partnership with Larry Bodine Marketing.

I can’t wait to share the findings about how professional firms are working to increase their marketing and business development effectiveness.  After a survey that we conducted late last year, we had extremely rich responses from more than 375 professional firms around the world.  Our report should be available by the middle of February.

Comments

[David Maister]

Thanks for joining the discussion, Suzanne. You've honed in on the key topic: lying as self-delusion. I've been reading up on material on lying in preparation for expanding the original blog post by Julie Lindy and myself into a full article. (Things like Sissela Bok's famous book, and a great one by Charles Ford, MD) It turns out that self-delusion plays a major role in explaining lying of all kinds to all other people, and we all have the NEED to lie to ourselves at times. I'm learning a lot about this and enjoying it, but it is terrifying to think back (I'm 58) and ask "Have I ever misrepresented? Have I ever deluded myself?" Few of us are as pure as Ceasar's wife (spelling?), just as I hope few of us are consistently awful. Question for everyone: do we think professionals are in fact more self-delusional than others industries? Does our education make us more prone to it?