©2007-2010 Sigrid Caroline Schroder. All Rights Reserved.
Guidance for Attorneys
Who Need to Learn Their Client’s Business
(Even When Their Clients Think They Already Understand)
Business Guidance for Understanding
Product – Business Model – Business Plan – Prior History
Industry Sector – Competitive Profile- Regulatory Framework – Risk
Getting Your Clients to Think It Through
At the crux of this generation's economic calamity is the unwillingness to think past the desired goal. Whether a function of an age of instant gratification or the popular elimination of rigors of logic in favor of marketing and hype, business teams have been weakened by mythologies of winning strategies, power of positive thinking and the hype of sales systems. Eschewing voices of prudence, dismissing identification of risk as pathologies of gloom, doom and defeat, they walk brazenly and self-blinded into traps and disaster. They shrug off advance warning citing competent counsel in the wings to "document around it" or to file suit in the event. The reality is that they are tall thin managers, siloed and specialized like counsel and all too many would rather bully and buffalo than think things through–or admit the wider thinkers who can guide the necessary analysis. What do you do? You have to understand that the confidence, the ambition, and the defiance of exogenous reality is underlain by fear. Fear of not getting the bonus, not scoring the win, certainly, but the essential fear is the fear of being told "no." You have to talk them around the fear, through the reality of certain facts, processes and consequences so that they and you can concentrate on what is really to be done.
These managers have stalled somewhere around their 16th year. They have never learned that acknowledging risk does not equate with giving up. Their thought process is immature. They would rather flit in excitement, bully in arrogance and move forward in folly than simply sit down, assess the risks with those who work beyond the silo, and then cost-benefit balance the risks. They don't want their enthusiasm dimmed by the laws and facts of the physical world, the relationships and behavior of the natural world, and the complications of pesky regulation, law and insurance. They really do want to be brilliant center stage in the sun and to get the closing bonus. In an age which venerates spending as representation of wealth, it is not surprising that teams would be quick to idealize the path to a lucrative goal, a state known as "having dollar figures in their eyes." From dotcom to biotech, from weather trading to derivatives, from the eternity of the China miracle to white nights riches in Russia, through every sector and region, business has been there too long.
In all these years of hearing managers, founders, true believers and, worst, C-Team climbers fend off questions, insights, doubts and actual red flags and fog horns of disaster ahead, I have realized that the process of achieving reality thinking is laborious and very individual. The process is the more challenging the thinner the executive, the more dependent on outside expertise the executive has been allowed to be. The CXO who has come up through a narrow regime of a single specialized silo is the worst: arrogant, narrow and all too often inclined to bully rather than lead. Moreover, reaching reality with any CXO is never sufficient; one has to reach the entire team. Unless one reaches the entire team, the necessary will not get done. The CXO will be coaxed in a critical moment, schisms will appear or passive-aggressive noncompliance will ensure that the metaphorical O-rings are not re-engineered. The project will still blow up, even as it achieves the stratosphere.
To be effective in reaching the entire team, you have to figure out who is who. Some team members are rationalists and are pressured only by the need not to dim the Sales/Marketing enthusiasm (hype) with sticky floor facts. They can be faced with facts and set about to solve the problems and balance the risks and benefits. Others are blind cheerleaders who, apprised of the factors to be considered, will subdue the hype while the team works and then can reignite the enthusiasm at the same fevered pitch. Yet others are not able to compute distinctions and have to be led through the facts, risk, consequences and alternatives; once given alternatives, they are able to pick and choose on the basis of a screen for success: dollar values, physical consequences and legal penalties. The most obdurate may need to balance dollar figures with prison terms. (As in this decade's Enron/Tyco business cocktail query: What would you do for $5 million dollars (both misconduct and prison term, presumably).) And then there is the worst case: the arrogant hitherto successful narrow bully who will need to be bludgeoned with pertinent fact, factors, truth and consequences. (Do not go alone.)
Once you do have them at the table, acknowledging risk, acknowledging fact, you can get down to further research and consideration leading with the rationalists, bolstered by the cheer leaders. It is key to offer constant avenues of new opportunity and benefits of solutions to the risks even as you plod a prudent course to minimizing risk and maximizing value. You yourself maximize value if you have breadth of knowledge beyond mere exposure so that you can do critical thinking where they cannot or they have been conditioned to "will not." Beware of counsel or accountant who blandly reassures, cynically knowing the firm will get the litigation when the inevitable complications and even disaster befall the team. Redirect the team to ounderstand that to say ""that never happens" is merely a substitute for thinking or a blind for ignorance. Help them choose the best path, the one not airbrushed and photoshopped but the legitimately prudent path to the greatest and most likely success not on the edge of an inconvenient abyss. And no derivatives until they are 21.
© 2009 Sigrid Caroline Schroder
