dip

The room was slowly filling up with the employees. One after the other, they took their seats and didn’t look too pleased: the speech I was about to give had interrupted the longed-for transition from their dinner to a well-deserved drink at the bar! So this left me with the task to ensure that those snaring away during my talk would not animate the others to follow suit.

Those who are often standing in front of audiences just coming from a lunch or dinner, know how difficult it is to keep them awake. That’s why event organizers tend to book entertaining and lively acts to overcome the ‘dip’ after the lunch or dinner break. This is to prevent attendees from falling asleep or leaving the show altogether to join the others for a beer.
Which raises the question of whether my talk was intended to be ‘entertaining’ or needed as a valid source of information and important learning. The fact that everyone stayed and only a few fell asleep led me to conclude it was the latter. Because what kept the audience awake was not (only) my style of presenting, but foremost the irritation that the topic of my speech – and the statement it made – caused with them: it was about themselves and about their future.

Afterward, many, some less, others more, were doubting whether they could follow up on the call I made in the speech in their own jobs: to focus all they do on the human. No, not only on those humans they see in the mirror every morning, or during the day at the office, but on those humans who want to use what they (the employees) produce, even against payment, on the customers!  If they didn’t do this properly, they would all lose their jobs! And with this statement, I had the entire audience fully awake again.

You would assume that bankers and insurance brokers would also know when their customers have a ‘dip’ and what their customers really need. But it repeatedly astonishes me how lopsided their approach actually is: it’s restricted to the factual side of their trade, the rational side of the business, measurable items, and calculated considerations.
To consider a contrary approach, using trust-based considerations, the abstract sides of the trade, the emotional side of the business, and non-tangible items like feelings do not seem to be part of traditional business practices. Although it is commonly known that one ‘gets’ the customer best by developing ’emotional’ knowledge that leads to better solutions, the tendency remains to stick to rational knowledge and think rationally. All these employees seem to be captured in industrial thinking, a thinking that is hard to escape from, like from a ‘dip’ after lunch.

Struck by the impact of the statement, one employee in the audience wanted an example of how this ‘other’ thinking could influence the banking business: could I make a proposal? Well, I could, based on my own experience. My proposal was as follows: “A bank only thinks of itself when it offers me a business account: it offers me what they can do, and not what I need. It hopes that this is the same, but it isn’t. What I need, for instance, as an independent consultant, is to have all eyes on what I can do really well: on my core business. Things that are not my core business are banking, accounting, finances, tax declarations, legal issues, insurance, and so on.  And what takes away my precious time and disturbs me from focusing on my core business most of the time? Exactly those issues!”

Why did my bank not take this up for me? It could have done the accounting (is all online), could have sent the invoices and paid the taxes (mostly online), booked and filed my expenses (I use their credit card anyway), done the tax declaration on time (also done online), and done a legal check on my contracts (part of their core business). For all of these activities (which predominantly can be done fully automated), I would have granted them 5% of my turnover – talking about business…!

So, where was the bank? Don’t say they were taking a nap because of an afternoon dip!