advice | CorporateIntel

When I started writing this blog more than thirteen years ago, I never intended for it to be an advice column. The tagline has always been “Ideas, Business, Stories.” Sometimes it’s not about business, sometimes I fail to shape a decent story, but I always try to center the content around ideas, which comes first for a reason. Nothing in these words other than keeping me in practice between books is more important to me than causing people to think harder and test those thoughts in ardent dialogue and discussion.

I’ll admit, too often I’ve delved into the realm of advice. I won’t apologize for that per se, because I’ve heard from many of you over the years struggling with similar challenges that extracted bits of this advice have led to course corrections, strategic realignment, saving a customer, or even circumventing the unneeded pain of a failed initiative without key learning. If the reading material was helpful, great. If not, perhaps at least I got you to reconsider the ordinary.

What is better than advice and where I’ve hoped to steer a lot of these words? That would come back to ideas, and that would be anchored in inspiration.

With advice, we often suggest what to do and when to do it.

With inspiration, we better suggest why something is worth rethinking and how perhaps to approach a framework for effective resolution.

Never was this clearer to me than in a candid panel discussion at my latest college reunion ostensibly about third acts in our lives. Understand this is a collection of oldsters whom I would be so bold as to characterize as not yet ancient. This group now has four decades of life and career under its belt post-college, with all the setbacks and curveballs we are certain everyone else is likely to encounter. In simply introducing this panel, the moderator found several of the participants rejecting the very premise of the panel in asking: Why does any life have to be structured in three acts? While that framework might (or might not) work at times for commercial storytelling, what relevance does it have to most human arcs, which are infinitely more nuanced?

Yes, it was that kind of discussion. The ideas that emerged were worth the nitpicking.

Key among those ideas for me, and quite a surprise at that, was the somewhat common theme that all the diverse participants shared in acknowledging most of the advice they received throughout their lives as well-meaning but demoralizing.

Wait, huh? If you know people genuinely care about you, or at least give them the benefit of that doubt, why would the advice offered too often hurt more than help?

Again, the commonality in response was striking: Advice considers the general case rather than the personalization of the specific case. Indeed, if the recommended advice worked for you in your set of decisions and you were happy with the outcome, that’s terrific. It’s more than terrific if you navigated a complex maze to get safely and successfully to where you wanted to be. What relevance is it likely to have for me? Much less than you think.

In these cases, the advice individuals received from people close to them centered on career, family, self-realization, medical and health problems, losing loved ones, even planning for retirement. The standard expressions of get an education, get a starter job, climb the ladder, pursue a family, invest wisely, and confront demons as they emerge all seemed too pat in hindsight. Get an education to you might not be the same as get an education to me. Find fulfilling employment, even gainful employment, again proved a landmine of difficult-to-connect dots.

The biggest problem seemed to be that rejecting advice could insult the advice-offerer, but more troubling, cause the advice-offerer to segue from advice to criticism. To the extent this set of unique, highly motivated fellow travelers at difficult junctures in their lives wished to hear criticism… well, you can imagine how that kind of rejection lands. Feedback opens the door to curiosity, which fuels the exploration of a theme and extends two-way dialogue. Even the tiniest implication of judgment can shut it down.

Instead of advice, the panel craved peer interaction, within and across disciplines, within and across life stages, to light a torch that could lead them through opaque corridors and dark tunnels. To some extent, this means active listening combined carefully with real-time conversation, avoiding the trap of prescriptive solution crafting. It is precisely the inspiration of those exchanges that people found most useful in designing and committing to better outcomes. It’s the difference between canned narrative touting relatively obvious answers and imaginative moments of shared realization. Advice was predisposed to be narrow. Inspiration was ceaselessly unlimited.

Still think we’re nitpicking? I don’t think so. I’ve written many times that in my own worldview, the course of our lives often comes down to four to six invisible forks in the road. As Yogi Berra liked to say, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” The problem with these invisible forks is just that — you don’t know you’re there when you are. We understand our relationships and careers in hindsight way better than we plan them forward. We can point to those stunningly revealed forks looking back. We can’t necessarily know that a decision we make today will affect our lives for decades to come.

If you are potentially at one of those invisible forks, and you start to explain it to someone, the advice they offer you (“Why, yes, you have to take that job”) is as likely to be wrong as right. Throwing darts would probably get you better results because at least the dartboard is unbiased. On the other hand, if the dialogue we enjoy at those potential forks causes us to think differently and make a decision we are comfortable living with right or wrong, the interaction is likely to be memorable and long-term laudable. It’s the difference between practical direction, which is somewhat hierarchical, and empathy, which is bonding.

All of this is to say if any of my advice in these passages has been useful, I am happy I didn’t blow it. If it has been thin and irrelevant, or worse, demotivating, I do apologize. On the other hand, if any of the ideas here have lifted your spirits to encourage better decision-making, I am humbled. My goal is not to articulate what I think you ought to do. My goal is for you to feel great about your choices and decisions. If I have stretched your notion of possibility along the way, then the words did the job I intended.

To my aging classmates, thank you again for the inspiration. You got me to rethink my own sense of purpose in a manner only you could achieve. I’ll try to repay the favor going forward with the precious time ahead we can still share.

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Image: Pixabay

Be cautious with the advice you seek. Be more cautious with the advice you offer.

I enjoy and appreciate seeking business input from all kinds of people on all kinds of topics, but lately, I’m noticing that much of what people offer is too off the cuff. I usually know a problematic opinion is coming my way when I spend several minutes framing the complexity of a souring issue, and the assessment I receive is preceded by this phrase:

“Why don’t you just…”

That warning prelude is often followed by a very simple response in a sentence or fragment encompassing very few words. Some examples of confounding suggestions:

“Why don’t you just reduce your overhead?”

“Why don’t you just hire someone else?”

“Why don’t you just find a new supplier?”

“Why don’t you just change the value proposition to your customer?”

“Why don’t you just worry less about your brand?”

All of these phrases were spoken in earnest, in a neutral tone without any particular agenda or adversarial intention. I said my thing and they said theirs.

There’s another warning sign that preceded these suggestions—the words were delivered quite quickly, the “Why” being initiated almost instantly on the period ending my lead-in sentence.

There is a word to describe this kind of give and take. It would best be described as “conversation.”

It could also be described as “bar talk.”

There’s nothing wrong with conversation or bar talk, as long as we realize that’s what it is. Banter is entertainment, not problem-solving. Words that pass the time are not thoughtful solutions. In matters of consequence, I find chit-chat troubling traveling in both directions.

The easiest response to a “Why don’t you just…” suggestion is probably the obvious: “Uh, yeah, we thought about that and ruled it out… months ago.”

A less polite response might be: “Buddy, can you take this discussion a bit more seriously?” If you are in a bar in the midst of bar talk with someone who has been drinking a few hours, be careful in selecting that response, or at least judicious in the tone you use to convey it.

The lack of thoughtfulness in idea-sharing may come down to a matter of confidence and overconfidence. I applaud you for having a quick response to my nagging torment. It is possible I missed the obvious in the fog, but when I hear my problems so easily solved, what I really hear is someone who might not have failed enough. We all fail and to some extent learn from failure, but where is the empathy in our counsel when it comes to someone else’s dilemma, where we are less likely to lose anything if we are wrong?

Some call that having skin in the game. There is nothing that will slow down your response rate quicker than putting your own money or success at risk. You may be confident in making an investment, but when it starts to flounder, overconfidence should have already left the building.

Opinions can be interesting, but when they fail to embrace consequences, they can undermine trust in relationships.

When I am sharing a problem with you, I am not simply venting. I am seeking an improved outcome. If you want to help me, try getting me to rethink the problem in areas I might be stuck. Try some of these approaches on me and you’re likely to catch me listening more intently:

“What is the data telling you about changes in circumstance?”

“When you made that choice, what were the key factors that led to your initial decision?”

“Are your competitors in the same boat, or is this unique to your company?”

“Is the situation temporary and likely to reverse with more usual market conditions, or have the market conditions fundamentally changed?”

“What other advice have you received on the topic, and how was it helpful or damaging?”

If I share a problem with you, I don’t expect you to have the solution. Unless I have gotten ridiculously lucky, you probably can’t solve my problem. Yet if we work through a set of abstracts together, it is possible you might cause me to look at the problem differently and start me on the path to identifying a new solution. Dialogue like that in times of trouble has infinitely more value than a spitball suggestion.

Ego gets in our way when we think the winning outcome of a discussion is to have the right answer. That kind of overconfidence is unrealistic at best and reckless at worst.

Our roles in listening to each other are about being helpful, about unlocking hidden secrets in our judgment and navigating safely around treacherous obstacles. Slam dunks may win bragging rights, but in my many decades on the job, I’ve never heard one that changed the landscape in real-time.

Our words have consequences. Noble advice requires discipline and credibility. If what you prefer is bar talk, let me know and I’ll tell you why I think the Dodgers lost the last two World Series. I can’t imagine anyone in Dodgers management asking my opinion on that. Why would they seek an opinion that didn’t matter?

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Image: Pixabay