This Electric Life: Bearing Bad News
“That’s the thing. Danny wants to be liked, and that gets tricky.”
She was speaking about a man who had just been drowned in a huge pot of gazpacho. Midsomer Murders, Season Three, brilliant!
The scene reminded me of something that one of my high-school professors once said. Fr. Hal Stanger told me “If you want to be liked by everyone, you’re going to be an unhappy little cowboy.” Tricky advice, for a consultant. Got me thinking about some of the bad news I’ve had to deliver lately …
“No one reads your welcome message.”
“Everyone has small classes, professors who know your name, opportunities for leadership, and a strong alumni network.”
“I don’t think the library belongs on the homepage.”
“That’s a tagline, not a brand.”
“That’s a wonderful idea … and totally out of scope.”
“Senior cabinet shouldn’t be choosing the design direction for the site.”
“Your timeline is optimistic to the point of impossible.”
“People don’t understand or care about how your division is structured organizationally.”
“This is a process, not a project—the work doesn’t end when the site launches.”
“Migration hurts.”
I often joke with our clients about how part of our fees are purely hazard pay, but there’s a ring of truth to that. The hardest work oftentimes isn’t the design or content or testing or programming—it’s successfully swaying people’s opinions in a different direction, helping them not to make bad decisions out of good intentions, and setting reasonable expectations not only for our work, but for what people will expect of the internal team that will have to support what we put into place together.
P.S. Off to sunny L.A. for a few days of R and R. Have a terrific week!
It’s really hard to train good clients, isn’t it?
Posted on March 9, 2009 by Lori
A good lesson, even for those of us who try to serve as in-house consultants to our colleges and universities. Too many of those quotes in your post hit close to home. ;)
Posted on March 10, 2009 by Andrew Careaga
Hey there, Lori—almost as hard as breaking in new consultants! And Andrew, glad you liked the entry. There were a couple of quotes that were just too close to post. :)
Posted on March 10, 2009 by Voltaire Santos Miran