Transitioning In Your Business? Here’s The Worst Advice Ever!

Transitioning bad advice is similar to the suggestion that everyone is entitled to an opinion, a most bizarre notion. Au contraire.

Number 5:  The customer is always right. Not only is this untrue from a strictly literal interpretation; it was born and remains one of the all-time (top five, at any rate) most ludicrous concepts in the history of Neanderthal folk wisdom. The customer–divine in his or her purity of commercial engagement–has about a fifty/fifty chance of being right about anything and less chance than that of being correct about anything important.

But wait, yes, I understand that the advice is actually intended as hyperbole so that the service provider will bend over backwards to give the customer exactly what is desired but even that interpretation takes it on faith that the customer typically behaves in his or her own best interest. The customer believes that the McLaren Elva he wishes to purchase ought to be delivered to his front door after being dipped in neon green paint and that you ought to somehow just trust him for the money because after all a man of his supreme taste and panache is certainly good for it and I mean come on you do want this sale, don’t you? 

This bad advice is similar to the suggestion that everyone is entitled to an opinion, a most bizarre notion. Au contraire. Everyone is entitled to an informed opinion. And a customer is only right if he knows what he is talking about. 

If you want to look at this bad advice in a somewhat less disjointed and cancerous way, you might interpret it to mean that the salesperson or service provider or waiter or airline pilot or whomever ought to be open to the idea that the customer may not inherently and invariably be mistaken. If a passenger somehow makes his way into the airplane’s cockpit and observes that as far as he knows the skyline of Manhattan does not much resemble the arid wasteland of Salt Lake City, well, then it behooves the pilot to at least consult with his navigation system, but to simply turn that plane around based on nothing more than the passenger’s say-so is sheer madness.

People do occasionally move up in organizations, but dues and one’s willingness to pay them has little to do with it. 

• Find out what the company’s biggest problem is and solve it. That’ll help get you noticed in all the right ways.
• Support your immediate superior. No one likes a snitch and a back-stabber won’t make it beyond the first interview.
• Ask for more challenging work. 
• Say great things about yourself.
• Admit your mistakes and fix them.
• Forget about pleasing everyone. Some of the people you might be trying to please are customers and, as we have I believe already established, they may not necessarily know what’s right anyhow.

Transitioning successfully in business means understanding old ideas do not work nowadays . . .

Number 3:  If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself. It is hard to know where to begin with this one, so I will instead share a simple and true story. Years ago I had a boss, a fellow that others previously in my position had warned me was a bit of a hard case. I filed that information away for a rainy day and made my own assessment.

He was a bit of a hard case, but darned likable for all that. One day he began asking me to write memoranda under his signature, memos that would go onto become policy. He would tell me the gist of what he wanted. I would take notes. In a few minutes I would take the draft to his desk where he would blue-pencil it to death. I would go back to my desk, rewrite the memo, return it to his desk, suffer more pencil strokes, on and on for what often felt like hours. After many revisions, at long last the pre-policy memo would be to his liking. He would sign it, hand me the original and ask me to make several copies. 

After weeks of this particular dance, I asked him if he felt this exercise was worth the trouble. He pushed himself back from his desk like a man finishing a satisfying Thanksgiving dinner, smiled up at me and said, “It would be a lot easier if I just wrote these memos myself. Is that what you are saying?”

I admitted it was.

He laughed as if I were the most naive person in the world. “And if I did it all myself, would you ever learn how to do them? The first one you wrote had more things wrong than right. Now half the time I don’t actually need to bother reading them. So, yes, it would have been easier then, but this has saved me hundreds of future hours.”

He may have been a hard case, but he knew what he was doing, which is not something that can be said for the person who advised me. . .

Number 2:  It’s all about who you know. Naw. Not at all. Oh, sure, if you know the CEO because that person is your father, it must be admitted that nepotism might serve you well. Personally, I have found it to be more to the point that “It is all about who knows you.” Make a good name for yourself. Don’t sing your own praises at the expense of the choir, but don’t hide your light under a barrel, either. When you do something spectacular, make sure you are visible for sharing the creditNuber 1:

And now the all-time worst advice about transitioning in your business, is:

Number 1: If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. No. Incorrect. Wrong. Inaccurate. Mistake. Big Mistake.

If it sounds too good to be true, then take a moment to reevaluate your idea of what is possible. Someone offers to sell you a loaf of bread for fifty cents at a time when the going rate is five dollars a pack. Hmmm. Could that loaf be contaminated? Are slices missing? Is the taste off-putting? 

Or. . . is it possible that the store needs room on the shelves for some new bread that is overcrowding the warehouse and they need room back there for the frozen ice cream that is melting on the truck right this very second because you–the all-knowing never wrong in your whole life customer cannot make up your mind whether to accept the wheat in a bag deal of a lifetime because years earlier some genius told you that your own judgment of what is possible outstrips that of people who actually know what they are doing. 

I am not suggesting that you should buy a pig in a poke–wow, the cliches do pile up after a while, don’t they? But I am nicely suggesting that rejecting a terrific offer just because some jerk told you that good is bad is what you might call a mistake. I believe the best approach to a great offer is this:

• Be cautious, but be optimistic.
• Count the cost, but explore new ways of doing things.
• Measure risk, but be bold.
• Watch your step, but by all means, start down the path.

Please. I am begging you. Please do not allow someone else’s cynical nature discourage you from evaluating, digging for more data, and seizing a great opportunity on those far too rare moments when they land in front of you.