lunging at the screen door and the patient tells you, “Oh, I forgot to
tell you about the dog.” What does it say about the patient’s rela-
tionship with you? I would ask for a tour of the house, which might
be a disaster area—or so compulsively clean you could eat off the
floor. You’d see how kids kept their rooms, what they put on
the walls. For five minutes they would act like they do in therapy, but
after that they would revert to their real selves and lapse into their
normal relationships. The children would be eating standing up, the
husband and wife would stop talking to each other, and so on.
Not all therapists do this, because a home visit can take three
or four hours. Therapists don’t know how to bill for it or if they can
bill for this kind of time. Furthermore, from a personal point of view,
visiting a patient outside your office makes you vulnerable. What
does it say if you drive up in a BMW or in an old wreck? What
if you’re a few minutes late? How will you react to an embarrassing
situation?The dynamics my father describes closely resemble those of
client relationships in a business setting. The insights you gain from
taking the time to make, metaphorically, a “home visit” to your
client’s world, the difficulty of charging for the time you spend, the
personal vulnerability you feel—most of us have experienced these
with our clients.
Years ago, when the advertising great David Ogilvy won the
prestigious Rolls-Royce account, such a “home visit” resulted in an
extraordinary idea for his client. At the time, most of Ogilvy’s col-
leagues wanted to hole up in a conference room and brainstorm
approaches for the advertising campaign they had been contracted
to develop. Ogilvy, however, went out and spent weeks interview-
ing Rolls-Royce managers and engineers. He drove their cars. He
absorbed dozens of engineering reports and technical manuals.
Finally, in an obscure technical specifications sheet, he read that
“the ticking of the dashboard clock is the loudest sound the driver
can hear at 60 miles per hour.” Ogilvy had found his idea: What to
an engineer seemed like a mere statement of fact became for this
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