Influencing clients to accept your ideas, I believe, is very simi-
lar to moving boulders. All of your clients will have in mind a
direction that they wish to take, and you will naturally try to per-
suade them to follow your direction. A client’s favored direction
could be thought of as a “hidden crease”—he or she will be predis-
posed to moving that way, just as a piece of paper will easily fold
again where it has been previously creased. The Zen approach to
life is to find the hidden creases in every activity—the “naturally
correct” way of doing things, as Kushner says.
You don’t have to become a Zen Buddhist to influence clients,
but this principle is relevant to client relationships. The best strat-
egy with clients, in other words, is not to bludgeon them into tak-
ing your advice and accepting your ideas but rather to understand
where they want to go and then influence their trajectory 10 or 20
degrees at a time. As Ben Franklin said, “If you would persuade, you
must appeal to interest rather than intellect.”^5
How do you put yourself into a position in which clients will
listen to your ideas? First of all, they have to trust you. This is an
obvious point, but the problem is that most professionals misun-
derstand the essential nature of trust. They mistake professional
credibility—“These data and technical details are accurate and
true”—for broad-based trust, which is very different.
There are five key elements to trust:
1.Integrity.In this post-Enron world, clients are especially con-
cerned with the integrity of the professionals and firms with
whom they have dealings. Integrity encompasses ethics and
values, consistency, reliability, and discretion.
2.Competence.I might trust a babysitter to take of my children
for an evening but not to take them on a three-day river-
rafting trip in Utah. Your clients’ trust in you will go up or
down depending on their perception of what you’re actually
competent to do.
3.Client- versus self-orientation.Clients are always wondering, “Are
you suggesting this because it’s in your interest or my interest?”DEVELOPINGNEWIDEAS FORYOURCLIENTS 227