Ask
Often clients cannot properly articulate the ideas they seek, but
you still have to ask. Most of the time, our interactions with clients
are focused on either selling to them or talking at them. Several
times a year, sit down and ask good, thought-provoking questions,
such as “What’s been keeping you up at night?” “What’s the most
intractable problem you face right now?” “If your market suddenly
stopped growing, what would you do?”
Influencing Clients to Accept Your Ideas:
Finding the Hidden CreasesPhysical labor is often a fundamental part of Zen training. During
his studies with a famous Zen archery master in Hawaii, Kenneth
Kushner found himself engaged in the arduous task of moving large
rocks to make way for a new footpath. A psychotherapist by
training, Kushner found it nearly impossible to dislodge the heavy
boulders, and he was quickly exhausted. In his book One Arrow,
One Life,he writes about an important lesson he learned from his
Zen teacher:
Tanouye Roshi watched me with considerable amusement. He
explained I was trying to impose my will on the rocks; I was trying
to make them go where I wanted them to go. “You have to learn to
push the rock where it wants to go,” he explained to me. He
explained further that if I could do that, I could coax the rocks to
where I wanted them to go. He then showed me that because the
rocks are unevenly shaped, there is usually one direction in which,
if pushed, the rock is easier to unbalance and flip over. He told me
that I must learn how to utilize the direction in which the rock
“wanted” to go in order to move it where I wanted it to go.... He
continued to demonstrate how by repeating the process of pushing
the rock in its favored direction and occasionally spinning the rock
so as to reorient the direction it “wanted” to go, it was quite easy to
move it where I wanted it to go.^4226 LEADINGORGANIZATIONALLEARNING