Rules Of Engagement, Revisited

I have had the opportunity in the past few weeks to realize that the ‘rules of engagement’ that I have laid down for myself are really not guidelines: they are in many cases actually iron clad rules that should not be deviated from.

1. If you are in the business of providing advice, you want to hook up with people that want to listen to — and respond to — the advice you give. Otherwise, what’s the purpose of the relationship? I don’t want to mooch: I want to contribute, not simply to rubberstamp the status quo.

   In my situation, if I give advice to a client — change this, add this feature, drop this — and they tell me that they have decided not to implement the changes, what should I do? If I were a full-time partner/founder, obviously I wouldn’t expect to ‘get my way’ on every single issue, and the same is true when participating at as a consultant, to some extent. However, as an advisor/designer, if the founders reject most or all of your advice, what should your response be?

   If you think the advice is critical to the company’s success, and they reject it, then — according to your lights — they will fail. Most companies will fail, anyway. To succeed, nearly everything has to line up. And if features X, Y, and Z are essential — in your opinion — and the company says we are going to market without them, thanks very much, I think you have to quit. After all, this advice is the sole reason you are around. You aren’t a generalist: you are providing the advice that they don’t have — in principle — internally.

   If you recommend twenty things and they agree to sixteen, well… depending on what they are, they may be on the right track. But if you think that their decisions are wrong, and they will fail, you should fire them.

   On one hand, if the management — or a subsequent management team — decides to rethink strategy, they can always try to reconnect.

   On the other hand, if you are wrong, and they are moving ahead with a plan you don’t agree with, why remain? You don’t agree, and even if they are successful, it will not be from your contributions but in spite of them.

   There is a hypothetical middle ground, where your advice causes management to think hard about their plans, and even thought they opt to do something other than what you recommend, your help has been positive. But I think this is more the province of informal advisors, and not retained ones.

2. Always set up an initial full day of consultation with a client, involving all the members of the management team, so that all involved can see how the relationship might work, so that all involved can review the situation and plans for the future, and that an action plan for working together can be set worked out.

   Two times in the past few months I have agreed to move forward with an engagement without a full initial day, or without all the members of the management team in attendance. Mistakes in both cases:

   1. A full day of meetings with two of the three principals, as well as a designer and me, leading to a fairly good understanding of what we we wanted to accomplish over the following six to eight weeks of design as well as a solid idea about design basics, or so I thought. Three weeks into the design, the ‘marketing partner’ intrudes into the process, derailing almost everything.

      Now, weeks later, we are back on kilter, but… a lesson I won’t forget again.
      
      

   2. After a several hour meeting with a SF startup team (all of them, this time) working on the launch of a social web app, it seemed like we were converging quickly on some issues. The CEO had suggested it wouldn’t be necessary to spend a full day together, opting to apply my time to research and recommendations. I was asked to undertake a comprehensive technical analysis and recommendations based on the beta, and I went off and did so. I responded with a proposal to extensively redesign the product before launching, and suggested that launching as-is was likely to lead to so-so results at best. It turned out that the management team was unprepared and unwilling to hear that news, which I would have discovered, I believe, if we have just spent a bit more time — and at least one meal — together.

      The polite fiction is that they now want to have me come back in a few months from now, and review where the company is at that point, instead of moving ahead with a serious redesign. I think that is deadly.

      My view is that I don’t want to spend time working with someone I don’t think will be successful, anyway. There are many many companies out there, and most will fail. And many will fail because it is easier to barrel ahead with decisions you have made that it is to listen to negative feedback.
      
      

So, I have relearned two fundamental rules:

1. spend at least a full day with all the principals before taking aboard a new client, and head off strategic vision problems at the start.
   
   
2. If your clients don’t take the majority of your advice, you should walk away. If you are right, they will fail (and why spend your time there); they they are right, they owe none of their success to you.

[Update: I realize the next morning after writing this post that my tone makes this sound a bit like a zero-sum game, where someone is right and someone else is wrong. It is clearly more nuanced than that. However, the basic ideas still hold.]