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Their bedside manner has to be as great as an excellent nurse. Obviously, we’ve got to do all the technical stuff, and we have to be perpetual students, but we have to be helpful to our clients.
used every point of his 390 IQ — or whatever it was — to solve problems. But he was a fabulous listener. Excellence in listening should be Core Value Number One.
This intermediation is overrated. Those who fear disintermediation and outsourcing should, in fact, be afraid of irrelevance. Outsourcing is just another way of saying, “You have become irrelevant to your internal customers.” For example, I’m an old guy. I’ve been writing books for 40 years. I went gaga over Twitter about four or five years ago. It’s the same subject matter that I’ve used before, but it allows me to take it to a very different place. It is a way for me to be more helpful about the stuff I’m good at.
Richard Branson wrote a management book. The first section in that book, which is 120 pages, is about listening. He said something like, “Among the eight top traits of our leaders, seven of them are directly related to listening.”
I would beat the crap out of people at a CPA conference who thought they were a bunch of damned accountants. They are a bunch of professionals helping their internal or external clients make their businesses more successful. Period. That’s what you’re doing. If I’m a CPA, yeah, I can do the numbers for that 11-person business, and I can save you a lot of time, and you don’t have the time to learn the software. That’s not the point. I can help you think about your relationships with your customers. I can help you think about your relationship with your spouse and 14-year-old kid. Being helpful is the point. BS: It’s so interesting that we spend so much of our time today talking about technology. The stuff you’re talking about really boils down to being more human. TP: Yes. I coined a term — “extreme humanization.” I really want to focus on this with CPAs or any professional. Be helpful. Do not limit your definition of what you are. A CPA is not somebody with technical skills. They are a business professional who can help people run their hospital, or their non-profit, or their retail operation better. McKinsey has run into its problems, but why the hell shouldn’t a three-person CPA firm be the McKinsey of their community? BS: What kind of advice would you give someone who is graduating from college or about to enter the workforce? What’s the single best piece of advice you would give them considering the environment they’re about to enter? TP: When you go into a client situation, keep your mouth shut. Ask questions. If you graduated with a 4.0 grade point average, make sure they don’t know that. It’s about learning, learning, learning. When I went to work for McKinsey, my first project manager might have been the smartest person I’d ever met. He had a Ph.D. in particle physics, for God’s sake. He also sang in a folk band, so he’s very special, but he was the master of asking stupid questions. He wasn’t embarrassed to do so. He was the best I had ever seen in terms of learning the client’s organization. Then, of course, he
CPAs have a problem, just like lawyers, engineers, and doctors. They have been trained in technical excellence. The average doctor interrupts the patient after 18 seconds because, ‘Oh, I’ve seen one of those things before.’” I know what accountants are like and I know what engineers, like myself, are like. We are always willing to share the solution before anybody has defined the problem. BS: You make some great points there about listening and asking the right questions. A lot of times, the right question can reveal as much as any kind of brainstorming. TP: Absolutely. The reality is — and this annoys me about schools of accountancy, or engineering, or law, or medicine — you can learn a lot by asking great questions. I got on the question kick a few years ago, and the first incredibly sophisticated thing I did was to go to Amazon and type in, “Books about asking questions.” I ended up with about 40 books. I’m sure that 27 of them are useless, but the point is this: This is a discipline that can be learned as much as neurosurgery or accounting can be learned. The only thing I would add is, learn to ask dumb questions — the questions that require the person on the other end to explain to you how we do things around here. BS: That sets the foundation for everything. TP: I would argue that the number one thing that puts a project behind is lousy cross-functional communication. The accountants don’t talk to the purchasing people, who don’t talk to the engineers. The silver bullet is a five-letter word called L-U-N-C-H. I am going to measure my employees by the number of lunches they have with people in other functions. My argument is this: Accountants think that everybody in the purchasing department are idiots, and purchasing people think everybody in the accounting department are idiots. Let’s invite each other to lunch. I’ll bet that during that lunch, we will discover that we both have eighthgrade daughters in the same school. You will continue to be a professional accountant who is proud of your work, and I will continue to be a professional purchasing officer who is proud of my work. But the world will never be the same. I might still get furious at the things that you make me do that slow me down, but the
“I would argue that the number one thing that puts a project behind is lousy cross-functional communication. The accountants don’t talk to the purchasing people, who don’t talk to the engineers. The silver bullet is a five-letter word called L-U-N-C-H. I am going to measure my employees by the number of lunches they have with people in other functions.” - TOM PETERS 8
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